On not confusing necessity with compulsion: a reply to Paul Helm. (response to Paul Helm, Religious Studies, vol. 30, p. 457, December 30, 1994)

I am most grateful to Paul Helm for his considered response to my paper on Calvin, Bernard and the freedom of the will (Religious Studies 30, December 1994, 457-465), and for the opportunity to reply which the editors have so kindly granted me. This enables me to develop further some of the distinctions made by Calvin and Bernard and which obviously were not sufficiently clarified in my initial paper. In this reply I will concentrate on Calvin's distinction between necessity and compulsion and on the kinds of freedom of which these respectively deprive us. Let me start with compulsion which according to Calvin is the denial of our liberum arbitrium.

In my paper I tried to show that for Calvin, as for Bernard, the term liberum arbitrium refers to the ability of personal agents to choose between alternative courses of action. This kind of freedom to choose is a defining characteristic of our status as persons, which in the words of Calvin, 'so inheres in man by nature that it cannot possible be taken away' (Institutes 2.2.5). This much Helm seems to admit when he states that Calvin 'of course does not deny' 'the fact that there is a choice between alternative possibilities ... and that such choice is an inseparable feature of human nature' (p. 461). The important point to note, however, is that this kind of freedom is libertarian in the sense that it contradicts every kind of determinism which denies the irrevocable ability of personal agents to act differently from the way in which they in fact choose to act. 'Whatever will be will be' is only true in a tautological sense, but not in the substantial sense which denies the counter-factual claim that it could in fact have been different. In this sense our liberum arbitrium is freedom from compulsion: Our actions proceed from our choices between alternative possibilities, and are never the result of any internal or external compulsion which would deprive us of all alternatives except the one which we are compelled to follow.

Although this kind of liberum …