Alfred Jules Ayer: Ordinary And Constrained Actions

Ayer: Ordinary and Constrained Actions Alfred Jules Ayer is one of the many philosophers throughout history who have attempted to analyze the concept of free will. He believed that free will is prominent within humans and that it is compatible with determinism. This compatibility stems from the idea that free will should be relative to constraint rather than causation, which free will is more often considered relative to. Ayer successfully defends his claims about free will by first breaking down the issue of free will, then defining his idea of constraint. He further argues that there is a difference between ordinary caused action and constrained action. This ideology, that there is a distinction between ordinary and constrained, is the main …show more content…
If determinism is true, then persons cannot be held morally responsible for their actions as they did not have any choice in them. Another common belief is that of indeterminism, which is the idea that perhaps not all actions are based on previous states of affairs or events. If this is true, then actions not based on previous states of affairs or events are uncaused and therefore are purely by chance. Thus, persons who commit an action by chance cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. In both situations, deterministic and indeterministic, free will plays no part and therefore anyone who commits an act should not be held morally responsible. This contradicts the common practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions. To combat this problem, Ayer bought into the idea of determinism, but he argued that determinism does not rule out free will. Accordingly, the question of free will in Ayers case is the following: where does free will enter the picture if all actions are invariably correlated to previous states of affairs or