Metaphysics of Freedom (continued from page one) My own view is that the first of these responses is sufficient to disarm the nontheological version of fatalism, since this does rest wholly on fallacies of the sort mentioned. But theological fatalism and causal determinism do not rest on any fallacies of inference.  Are the latter then amenable to the se- cond and third responses above? I don’t believe that they are. Obviously I cannot, in this brief space, provide an adequate defense of these judgments, which conflict with those of many distinguished phil- osophers.  What I would like to do instead is draw attention to a further strategy for responding to the arguments for fatalism and determinism, and note some of its implications.  While PAP does undoubt- edly receive powerful support from our moral intui- tions, it is also important to notice that we have pre- theoretical intuitions that run counter to PAP.  These can be brought to the surface via a thought-experi- ment developed by the American philosophers Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer. Frankfurt and Fischer tell a story in which one person (call him ‘Jones’) kills another person (call him ‘Smith’) under circumstances in which the most stringent criteria for Jones’s moral responsibility are satisfied.  (Imagine that Jones’s killing Smith satisfies your favorite criteria for moral responsibility, whatever they might be.)  They then add one more detail to the story: a device has been implanted in Jones’s brain which, once Jones begins deliberating whether to kill Smith, is programmed to monitor the course of Jones’s deliberations and to force Jones to decide to kill Smith the moment the device detects that Jones is about to decide not to kill Smith.   (These are the only conditions under which the device is set to interfere with Jones; so long as Jones’s train of thought is headed toward murder, the device does nothing but monitor his progress.) As it happens, Jones does decide entirely on his own to kill Smith, and the device is never activated; but of course, given the device’s presence in the situation, if Jones had not decided on his own to kill Smith, the device would have forced him to make this decision.   Either way, Jones will decide to kill Smith.  Does that mean that we should regard Jones as morally blameless for killing Smith?  Of course not--he is responsible for his decision, which he reached on his own.  Jones acted under ideal conditions for free agency; he can’t blame the device, which made no contribution to events; indeed, everything happened just as it would have happened if the device had never existed.  But Jones had no alternatives available to him:  there was no future for him in which he did not kill Smith.  So PAP must be false after all. The challenge such cases pose for PAP has generated an enormous body of literature over the last thirty years.  In a dialectic with which philosophers are all too familiar, resourceful defenders of PAP have raised various objections to the critics’ argument, the critics in turn have clarified the argument in response to these objections, and so on.  My sympathies are with the critics, but the issues raised in the course of the debate are too complex to negotiate here.  Wherever one’s sympathies lie, however, there can be little doubt that philosophical treatment of the free will question has been transformed by this debate, leading to a renewed focus on what actually happens when someone acts in a free and morally responsible way in contrast to the traditional emphasis on alternative scenarios that didn’t happen. It should be of special interest to Catholic metaphy- sicians that the modern attack on PAP led by Frankfurt and Fischer was anticipated by St. Augustine in his own treatment of the argument for theological fatalism.  Augustine agreed with the fatalists that whatever God foreknows must (necesse) take place, but he also insisted that “God’s foreknowledge of future events does not compel (cogit) them to happen,” neither is God “the cause (auctor) of all that He foreknows” (Lib. arb. III.4).  We are free agents when it is we (not God) who are the auctores of those actions for which we are morally responsible; the availability of alternative possibilities (which Augustine agrees is eliminated by divine foreknowledge) is irrelevant. The reason it is irrelevant, as Augustine explains in De civitate Dei, is that “a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin” (V.10).   Though the action is necessary, and cannot be otherwise, it is still brought about by the agent; what makes it necessary, namely God’s infallible foreknow- ledge, plays no role in bringing about the action.   This is essentially the same moral that Frankfurt and Fischer draw from their thought-experiment.  It is not enough that the fatalist or determinist show that the future is “closed” (via the operation of divine foreknowledge or Black’s device).  To overturn our conception of ourselves as free and morally responsible agents, it must also be shown that we are not the auctores of our own actions, and neither divine foreknowledge nor Black’s device has any tendency to show this. While it is true that the “ignorance and difficulty” which humans inherit from the Fall, the radical dependence of all reality on God, and the all- pervasive operation of divine grace make it doubtful whether Augustine’s mature position leaves much room for free will, Augustine’s solution in De libero arbitrio to the problem of divine foreknowledge is nevertheless usable by those with considerably more optimistic views of human agency.  He does not, for example, evade the problem by reconfiguring free will so that it is compatible with causal determinism (à la Hume); indeed, he begins his treatment of the problem in III.1 by contrasting the Fall of Adam with the fall of a stone, where the principal difference (the difference that makes a difference so far as the moral responsibility of Adam and the stone are concerned) is that the stone’s fall, unlike Adam’s fall, is the product of external conditions and natural necessity.   That Augustine assumes causal determinism to be incompatible with free agency is clear from his para- digmatic example of a causally undetermined will in De civitate Dei XII.6: The bad will is the cause of the bad action, but nothing is the efficient cause of the bad will. . . .  For if two men, alike in physical and moral constitution, see the same corporal beauty, and one of them is excited by the sight to desire an illicit enjoyment while the other steadfastly maintains a modest restraint of his will, what do we suppose brings it about, that there is an evil will in the one and not in the other? . . .   The same beauty was equally obvious to the eyes of both; the same secret temptation pressed on both with equal violence.  However minutely we examine the case, therefore, we can discern nothing which caused the will of the one to be evil. One thing that can be said about the indeterministic agent in Augustine’s example is that he is the auctor of his own action; there is nothing outside him to which he can point and say, “Don’t hold me responsible for what I did, that made me do it.”   Causal determinism does threaten this picture; divine foreknowledge (like Black’s device) does not, even though it is just as effective as causal determinism in eliminating the agent’s alternatives. In sum, there are cogent arguments, to be found both in contemporary philosophy and also in the Christian tradition, for doubting whether the availability to an agent of alternative possibilities really has the impor- tance assigned to it by PAP.  My concluding suggestion is that the metaphysics of the human auctor, rather than the metaphysics of the open future, is what demands attention in the new millenium as philosophers seek a more adequate understanding of the phenomenon of moral agency.

Super Bowl as Religious Festival (continued from page one) The specifically American character of the mythology has to do with the violent nature of the game. Not only does it dramatize the myth of creation, it also plays out the myth of American origins with its violent invasion of regions and their settlement. To a certain extent, football is a contemporary enactment of the American frontier spirit. Amidst the ritual of the forceful quest, there is the extended “time out” of half time, a time of turning from the aggressions of the game to the fantasies of the spirit. During the half-time show, the second dominant American cultural myth is manifest. It revolves around the theme of innocence. The peculiarly American quality about this myth is that even in our nation’s history of subjugation, a sense of manifest destiny was often associated with extending the nation’s boundaries. Indeed, the idea that a divine mandate had authorized the people to move into a place to which they had no claim, other than getting there and staying there, indicates that the people did not think they bore final responsibility for the displacement of natives or infringement on their hunting space. In other words, the assignment to God of the responsibil- ity for territorial expansion was an attempt to maintain the illusion of blamelessness among those who forcibly took alien lands. In this year’s Super Bowl, the theme of righteousness was acted out in a three-ring circus which featured 2,100 performers from Walt Disney Productions. Although acts took place in the outer rings, which were colored blue, attention was focused on the largest center ring, which was white. In this area, most of the performers wore white or pastel shades of yellow. The visual effect was an overwhelming sensation of cleanliness and purity. And the extravaganza’s music reinforced the impressions of the “whiteness” of it all; the harmonies sunk by the Disney troupe were simple and syrupy, a kind of white sound with less harmonic complexity than that of most Muzak renditions. The overall effect was one of feigned innocence and the naïve hope often exemplified for Americans by Walt Disney’s vision. Finally, the transition from this scenario was accomplished by the explosion, of fireworks along the perimeter of the field. The fantasy and violence of exploding Roman candles shifted the scene back to the play of the American frontier, simultaneously reviving intimations of the festival’s patriotic character. Fireworks are the hallmark of the Fourth of July, and evoke the national anthem lyrics’ imagery -- “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” As a sporting event, the Super Bowl represents the season’s culmination of a major American game. As a popular spectacle, it encourages endorsement by politicians and incorporates elements of nationalism. And as a cultural festival, it commands vast allegiance while dramatizing and reinforcing the religious myths of national innocence and apotheosis.