In New York in 1987 the Belgian lingerie designer Fernando Sanchez—who had designed Madonna’s outfit for her “Like a Virgin” music video—hosted a lavish dinner party. At one point, sounds of a commotion from the bedroom reached the living room—it was Mike Tyson aggressively flirting with a visibly and auditorily uncomfortable Naomi Campbell.

All of a sudden, a 77-year old, frail looking professor in a tweed jacket stepped between them to intervene. Tyson barked, “Do you know who I am? I’m the boxing heavy weight champion of the world!”

“And do you know who I am?” the professor responded, as Campbell slipped away. “I am the Wykeham Professor of Logic at St. Mary’s College of Winchester in Oxford. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.”

The professor was A.J. Ayer. His interaction with Tyson was reported in the New York Post’s Page Six society feature.

Ayer’s widely anthologized essay, “Freedom and Necessity,” is assigned in intro to philosophy classes as a cogent example of compatibilism. Ayer asks what the implied definition of free will inherent in libertarianism is. What would it take, by libertarianism’s lights, for an action to be free? Through a kind of reverse engineering, we can see that libertarianism implicitly holds that to be free, an action must be uncaused. In other words, if to be caused is to be unfree, then to be free is to be uncaused. But this, Ayer insists, is an erroneous definition of freedom of the will. Instead, while agreeing that all actions are caused, Ayer’s compatibilism says that free actions will be those actions caused in the “right way,” for example, by my own desire or by reasons for my action that I can endorse. What matter is not whether or not my action was caused—everything is caused—what matters is whether the way my action was caused counts as “constraining” on my action. Causes I endorse, like my character or desires I desire to have, make for free action while causes I do not endorse like an addiction-generated desire I wish I didn’t have make for unfree actions.

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