Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will

David Hodgson, who died recently, was a Supreme Court judge who also made important contributions to philosophy. It is a tribute to his power of concentration that he was able to write such a masterly technical book on his commute to and from work. His basic contention is that the nature of human rationality and consciousness endows us with free will so that our thoughts and actions are not determined by the laws of nature or mathematics. This position has important implications for his work as a judge and for the philosophy of the relationship between responsibility and punishment. He sets his argument out systematically in a series of chapters examining foundational beliefs, truth and rationality, plausible reasoning, consciousness and decision-making, neuroscience and conscious choice, value judgements and responsibility and retribution. He builds his case cumulatively, summarising key propositions at the end of each chapter, which makes the argument simple to follow. He deals extensively with complex issues in philosophy and neuroscience, while rejecting a simplistic and deterministic interpretation. The nature of value judgements is key to his argument, and he articulates a number of natural moral imperatives that underpin both law and human behaviour. These are reasonable generalisations that people from different cultures could recognise and readily accept, including doing no harm, acting justly and honestly, fulfilling commitments and acting in a life-affirming way. The book is a robust statement that forms a fitting tribute to a lifetime of philosophical endeavour and is accessible to non-technical readers well as professional philosophers.