The Hobbes–Bramhall Debate
Necessity and free will
Venue: Private debate in Paris (1645) before the Marquis of Newcastle; published as separate tracts and combined exchanges from 1654 onward.
A clean-cut English exchange between mechanistic determinism and Arminian libertarian theology.
In Paris in 1645, exiled royalists Thomas Hobbes and Bishop John Bramhall debated free will before their patron the Marquis of Newcastle. Each subsequently wrote up his position; through the 1650s the exchange was published in successively expanded volumes. Hobbes argued for thoroughgoing causal necessity: deliberation is just the alternation of competing appetites, choice is the last appetite in deliberation, and freedom consists in the absence of external impediment to acting on one's will — not in the will's being uncaused. Bramhall, an Anglican-Arminian, defended libertarian free will as required by moral responsibility, divine justice, and Catholic-Anglican tradition. The exchange is the cleanest pre-Hume formulation of compatibilist vs libertarian positions in English, and a direct ancestor of every subsequent Anglo-American free-will debate.
Historical Context
Both men were in exile after the English Civil War; Hobbes had recently published *Elements of Law* and was drafting *Leviathan*; Bramhall would eventually become Archbishop of Armagh.
Parties
Everything that happens has a sufficient antecedent cause; deliberation is a causal sequence of appetites; "free will" is meaningless. Liberty is absence of external impediment to acting on what one wills, regardless of how the willing was caused.
Key arguments
- Universal causation: every event has a sufficient cause; deliberations and choices are not exceptions.
- Definition of liberty: the absence of external impediment. A man is free to do what he wills, but the will itself is causally determined.
- Responsibility requires that an act flow from one's own will, not that the will be uncaused. Punishment is justified deterrence regardless of metaphysical libertarian freedom.
- Theological: God's omniscience and providence entail necessity, in the form of antecedent causation.
Allied schools
Genuine free will is a power of indifference over alternatives, required by moral and theological coherence; Hobbes's compatibilism is a verbal trick that drops the substantive sense of freedom.
Key arguments
- Moral responsibility, blame, and praise require real alternative possibilities; without them, justice and prudence collapse.
- Hobbes's "liberty as absence of impediment" is a redefinition that abandons what the libertarian tradition meant by free will.
- Divine justice in damnation requires that sinners could have done otherwise; Hobbesian necessity makes God the author of sin.
- Christian and patristic tradition supports libertarian free will; Hobbes is innovating against it.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Agency: are choices causally upstream or downstream of antecedent state?
Time
Time · Freedom: whether the future is metaphysically open or fully determined by past plus laws.
Verdict in retrospect
No contemporary resolution. The debate set the template for Hume's compatibilism, Frankfurt cases, and the entire modern free-will literature. Hobbes's position is the closer ancestor of contemporary compatibilist naturalism; Bramhall's of contemporary libertarian agent-causation theories.
Related Debates
Sharing parties or aligned schools.
Related Experiments
Experiments that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this debate.
Other Personas Aligned With This Debate
Ranked by declared-influence weight in the schools either party is allied with. The named parties themselves are excluded — they're already listed above.
Works Most Aligned With This Debate
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Related Films
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Related Contemporary Dilemmas
Dilemmas that engage the same dimensions as this debate.
Further reading
- Hobbes & Bramhall, *Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity*, ed. Chappell (1999)
- Jackson, *Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity* (2007)