This essay examines the philosophical debate between Baron D'Holbach's determinism and Corliss Lamont's defense of free will, drawing on their chapters in the anthology The Quest for Truth. The paper contrasts D'Holbach's argument that human decisions arise from unconscious animal instincts and causal forces with Lamont's affective, empiricist claim that the felt sensation of choice confirms genuine freedom of the will. It further explores how each position bears on theology, political theory, democratic rights, and legal debates over retributive punishment — ultimately noting D'Holbach's nuanced distinction between determinism and fatalism and his surprising concession that political institutions may still function best by treating individuals as though they are free.
The nature of human free will remains one of the most persistently debated questions in philosophy. The durability of this debate is evident in the introductory philosophy anthology The Quest for Truth, which pits the Enlightenment-era defender of determinism, Baron D'Holbach, against the twentieth-century philosopher of Humanism, Corliss Lamont. Despite the centuries that divide them, the two thinkers engage in a dialogue that continues to carry profound policy implications. The free will debate touches upon everything from the Christian conception of the soul and salvation, to political science's conceptualizations of human rights, to the current legal debate over retributive punishment — most specifically capital punishment.
Corliss Lamont, in his essay "Freedom of the Will and Human Responsibility," argues that because most human beings possess a felt sensation that, at moments of what he terms significant choice, they are genuinely deliberating, human beings may thus be said to have free will. Lamont argues from an affective, or sensory, perspective rooted in the empiricist tradition. As noted in the anthology's introduction by editor Louis P. Pojman, a human being can apparently — in his or her own mind — decide to act against very strong desires. For instance, a human being seems to choose not to drink poisoned water. Even if an individual is extremely thirsty, that person has the strong affective sensation of making a genuine choice, because he or she is rejecting, both physically and intellectually, the water before them. Something, in other words, must be overriding the animal, biological impulse to drink — and that something, Lamont contends, is the free human will.
Baron D'Holbach, however, would argue that whether the thirsty person drinks or not, the motive and cause of the decision is the same: the human animal's unwilled instinct of self-preservation. The choice to drink or not to drink is determined by whichever course of action the thirsty individual believes will best prolong his or her life. The sensation of free will, D'Holbach contends, is really grounded in an unwilled, animal drive to stay alive. Although it may feel — deceptively — like genuine deliberation, what Lamont describes poetically as standing at a fork in the road, the reasons a human being chooses one path over another are not truly conscious. They are rooted in subconscious, cognitive areas of the brain that lie beyond the reach of conscious, intellectual, or emotional will. As D'Holbach might ask: is it evidence of a lion's free will that it follows an antelope down one path rather than another?
"Intellect as post-hoc rationalization of animal drives"
"Lamont's rights-based defense of free will"
"Why determinism does not equal passivity or fatalism"
"Determinism's paradoxical support for political freedom"
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