Freedom and Self-Creation

“Rogers wishes to introduce into the free will debate a new (old) position, Anselmian libertarianism.”

“As she reads Anselm, created agents such as human beings and angels must be capable of at least a limited form of self-creation and this requires creaturely aseity: God cannot be the direct creator of (all) their choices, but (some of) their choices must flow strictly from themselves alone, in latin “a se”.”

“Anselm develops this conception of free will as a condition for moral responsibility in his dialogue De casu diaboli, where he argues that if God were simply to give Satan the will which constituted his sin, then God would be responsible for that sin. In order to make Satan a responsible self-creator, God therefore gave Satan two inconsistent “wills” or “affections”, thereby producing in Satan a “torn condition” and an opportunity (perhaps even the necessity) for making a choice.”

“In other words, Rogers establishes that Anselm subscribes to the widely shared intuition that moral responsibility, and perhaps free will, requires alternate possibilities or open options.”

“Anselm’s notion of self-creating a se choice is associated with a form of agent causation rather than event causation. According to Rogers, Anselm denies that the choice is a “thing” with ontological status, and this enables him to stick to a parsimonious version of agent causation, one which does not posit any new sort of causality beyond the one implied by God’s creative action and whatever effects result from that action.”

“Further, she argues that even if not all choices are a se choices, and some of our choices are determined by our own character, we can be held accountable for character-determined choices, if the status of our character can be traced back to earlier a se choices. This is a version of the so-called Tracing View.”

“Rogers then turns to discussing compatibilist challenges in chapters 5 and 6, dealing first with Alfred Mele’s critique of theories that make free will or truly autonomous agency depend entirely on internal or structural psychological conditions (more on this below). She then discusses Harry Frankfurt’s famous critique of the principle of alternate possibilities. Neither succeeds in defeating Anselmian libertarian intuitions.”

“I fear that Anselm scholars and free will enthusiasts will find Rogers’ discussion unsatisfactory for reasons which, although various, ultimately converge on one and the same point. In developing the Anselmian libertarian position Rogers constantly mentions Anselm and his works, but since she only very rarely and only very casually engages with Anselm’s actual texts, the details of her Anselm reading, and therefore Anselm’s own views, are never made clear enough to admit fully of either exegetical or philosophical evaluation.”