UDC

123.1:34

DOI

10.37482/2687-1505-V201

Authors

Pavel A. Mishagin
Reshetnev Siberian State University of Science and Technology;
prosp. im. gazety “Krasnoyarskiy rabochiy” 31, Krasnoyarsk, 660004, Russian Federation;
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7799-905X e-mail: mishagin@sibsau.ru

Abstract

The author addresses the problem of free will as a prerequisite for the moral, and, consequently, legal responsibility of a person as a legal entity and concentrates on its formulation in analytic philosophy. The latter proceeds from the contradiction between a person’s free will and the determinism of objective processes. The peculiarity of this formulation of the problem of free will stems from the characteristic features of analytic philosophy: its anti-historicism, anti-metaphysics, scientism, logicism, naturalism of common sense, and value neutrality. Considering the grounds on which a person can be deemed free, we come to the conclusion that these grounds are extremely problematic in the light of both competing analytic theories, i.e. compatibilism and incompatibilism. While the former, in the spirit of D. Hume, is forced to look for means to describe a person’s free actions as necessary elements in the chain of a regular sequence of events, the latter faces the problem of substantiating indeterminism, clarifying its types and the level of implementation of unconditioned processes that make the action free. The development of an analytical understanding of free will leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the latter is a condition for including an individual into the crime–punishment chain of legal determination. In other words, a person must be free to get in the zone of action of a certain type of causal dependence. The logicism of the analytical type of philosophizing makes such conclusions unacceptable, which further problematizes free will. The author comes to the conclusion that the analytical approach to the problem of free will immanently contains its denial or formalization and is, therefore, alien to the traditional socio-legal discourse based on the assumption of unshakable, a priori grounds for a legal person’s free will. In the final part of the article, the author explains why the analytical formulation is inapplicable to the problem of freedom for social philosophy of the value type, but relevant for reflective social philosophy.

Keywords

freedom, necessity, accident, determinism, indeterminism, compatibilism, incompatibilism, freedom in the socio-legal discourse

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