Philosophy Dispatches
Thoughts on human nature
by David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D.
Free Will 101: Part One
Introducing the free will problem
Does free will exist?
The question of whether free will exists has been of interest to
philosophers for more than two millenia. Over the last few years, the
free will question has also grabbed the attention of psychologists and
neuroscientists. There’s been a spate of articles claiming that science
has demonstrated that free will is nothing but an illusion, or,
conversely, that neurobiology lends support to the claim that we are
free, morally responsible agents.
Either of these views might turn out to be correct. But in philosophy
(as well as in science) it is important to be right for the right reasons,
and this is precisely where many of these treatments of the free will
problem fall down. To anyone versed in the relevant philosophical
literature, these scientific discussions of the free will problem are
often achingly naïve.
This is unnecessary. Scientists don’t have to be philosophically
unsophisticated. Indeed, the better a scientist’s grasp of philosophical
theories and methods, the more likely she is to do good science,
because she will be sensitive to the subtle conceptual issues and
uninterrogated assumptions that play a role in her empirical work.
In this and in my next few blog postings, I’m going to set out the socalled free-will problem and consider the main options for addressing
it. Think of it as Free Will 101—a very basic introductory course for
anyone interested in the controversy about freedom of the will and
who wants to make an informed assessment of scientists’ claims and
counter—claims about it.
The free will problem is usually set out as a question about whether
freedom is possible in a deterministic universe (later on we’ll see that
this is something of an oversimplification).
Here’s the idea. Leaving aside the special case of quantum events
(we’ll consider these later on), it looks like everything that happens
has a cause. Things don’t just happen for no reason—something
always makes them happen. We all rely on this assumption in our
practical dealings with the world. For instance, when you slip your key
into the ignition of your car and turn it, you have every reason to be
confident that this action will cause your car to start, and if you car
doesn’t start, you have every reason to assume that its failure to start
has a cause as well (for instance, that the battery went dead, and that
this was caused by your having left your headlights on all night).
The thesis that everything that happens is caused by previous events
is known as determinism. Let’s consider some of its implications….
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
If determinism is true, then every event is part a vast causal
web. Think of events as falling dominos in a long line of
dominos stretching far back into the past and disappearing over
the horizon of the future.
If every event is caused by prior events, this must include the
events that go on in people’s minds. The choices that we make
are events, so they, too, must be caused by prior events, which
were themselves caused by prior events, and so on, right back
to the Big Bang.
Cause—effect relations conform to the laws of physics. So, an
infinitely powerful intelligence (an intelligence with a complete
knowledge of the laws of physics and a complete knowledge of
the physical properties of every object in the universe) could
predict the entire future of the universe, including every choice
that every person will ever make, with 100% accuracy.
Notice that I said “an infinitely powerful intelligence.”
Determinism doesn't imply that everything that will happen is, in
practice, predictable. It's a thesis about how things are rather
than what we can know about them.
If determinism is true, then if God were to rewind time to some
arbitrarily chosen moment and then push the “play” button,
events would unfold in exactly the same way that they did the
first time around, right down to the tiniest detail. One way to
express this idea is to say that if determinism is true, then there
is only one physically possible future.
That’s roughly the deterministic picture of the universe. Would
freedom be possible in such a universe? And if freedom exists, does
this mean that our choices somehow escape the deterministic web?
We’ll begin to explore these questions in my next blog posting.
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In the last posting, I pointed out that the free will problem is usually
framed as the question of whether freedom is possible in a
deterministic universe. One reply to this question (as we’ll see, it’s not
the only one) is to say that if the universe is deterministic, then free
will doesn’t exist. This view is known as incompatibilism.
Most philosophically uneducated people (including many
psychologists) are incompatibilists. To most people, it seems like nobrainer that if your choices are caused by prior events, then those
choices just can’t be free.
Of course, philosophers who endorse incompatibilism give reasons
why they hold this position. The standard sort of argument runs along
the following lines:
To have free will, a person has got to have real options – that is, for
any choice that a person freely makes, it’s got to have been
possible for them to have chosen differently.
If the universe is deterministic, then everything that happens is
caused by prior events. Because of this, there are no real
options. It’s impossible for anyone to have chosen differently
than they in fact did.
Therefore, if the universe is deterministic then nobody has free will.
Let me this out with a concrete example. Suppose that you are
offered a choice between two flavors of ice cream – chocolate and
vanilla – and you choose chocolate. Incompatibilists claim that this
was a free choice only if in exactly the same circumstances you could
have chosen vanilla instead – only if your decision was genuinely up
for grabs. They further claim that if determinism is true, then you
simply couldn’t have opted for vanilla; so, if the universe is
deterministic, your decision to have chocolate ice cream wasn’t really
a free one.
It’s important to spell out a couple of aspects of incompatibilism that
are easy to miss, but are important for understanding it.
The first of these is that incompatibilists don’t have to accept that the
universe is deterministic. All that they are committed to is the view
that IF the universe is deterministic, THEN freedom doesn’t exist. As
a matter of fact, some incompatibilists believe that the universe is
fully deterministic while others reject this claim. We’ll examine the
details of these two positions a little further down the road.
The second thing to notice is that incompatibilists don’t draw the
conclusion that if the universe is not deterministic, then freedom does
exist, for the simple reason that this would a logical fallacy. Let me
explain why….
Logic is concerned with the relationship between premises and the
conclusions that they are supposed to underwrite. Philosophers use
the term valid for arguments in which the truth of the premises
guarantees the truth of the conclusion (notice that this isn’t the same
as the meaning of ‘valid’ in vernacular speech). It’s the structure of an
argument that makes it valid (or invalid). Consider this silly little
argument:
If Pete is a porcupine, then Pete is a mammal.
Pete is a porcupine.
Therefore, Pete is a mammal.
You can see straight away that this is a valid argument: if its premises
are true then its conclusion has got to be true. Now contrast it with a
blatantly invalid argument.
Pete is a porcupine, then Pete is a mammal.
The sky is blue.
Therefore, Pete is a mammal.
In this case, the premises don’t get us to the conclusion. The
argument is invalid, and invalid arguments are fallacious.
Now, getting back to our main topic, suppose that Imogen the
incompatibilist reasoned like this:
6.
If the universe is deterministic, then freedom doesn’t exist.
7.
The universe isn’t deterministic.
8.
Therefore, freedom exists.
Imogen would be committing a fallacy, because the conclusion of her
argument doesn’t follow from its premises. If you’ve never studied
logic this may not be obvious to you, so I’ll make it clear by using a
different example with the same structure. Imagine someone using
the following pattern of reasoning to convince you that they have a
pet beagle:
1.
If my pet is a cat, then it isn’t a beagle.
2.
My pet isn’t a cat.
3.
Therefore, my pet is a beagle.
Would you be convinced by this argument? Of course not! That
would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Obviously, it doesn’t make sense for a
person to say that if her pet isn’t a cat then it must be a beagle. But
some people try to recruit quantum physics on behalf of free will in
the following way, without realizing that it’s just as crazy:
If the universe is deterministic, then free will doesn’t exist.
Quantum physics proves that the universe isn’t
deterministic. Subatomic particles behave indeterministically.
3.
Therefore, quantum physics proves that free will exists.
It’s every bit as wacky to say that if the universe is indeterministic
then free will exists as it is to say that if my pet isn’t a cat then it must
be a beagle.
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That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment.’
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Is it possible for free will to exist in a deterministic universe? Can
freedom exist in a universe in which everything that happens,
including everything that happens in every human mind, is caused by
prior events in accord with exceptionless and inviolable laws of
nature?
That’s the way that philosophers have traditionally set out the free will
problem. As I explained in my last posting, many philosophers (and
virtually everyone who is not philosophically educated) answer this
question with a resounding “No!” People who hold this view are
called incompatibilists, because they believe that determinism is
incompatible with freedom.
There are two kinds of incompatibilism. For now, I’m only going to
discuss one of them. It’s called hard determinism.
A person who is a hard determinist accepts the premise that if the
universe is deterministic then there’s no free will, and also accepts
that the universe is deterministic. This leads her to the conclusion that
free will is, at best, an illusion. In other words, she reasons as follows:
The idea is that for your choice to be genuinely free, it’s got to be up
to you. It’s got to be possible for you, the chooser, to select one
course of action amongst alternatives. But hard determinists say,
“Look, if everything that happens is the result of iron-clad laws, then
any choice that you make is just one more domino falling in that long
row of dominos stretching back to the beginning of time. Although
you may believe that might have chosen differently at any given point,
that’s just an illusion. None of your choices, or anyone else’s, are
free.”
Another way to put the same point is to say that, contrary to
appearances, nobody ever really chooses anything at all. They just
seem to make choices (later in this series we’ll see that what’s at
stake here is how we should conceive of choice).
The doctrine of hard determinism has a way of freaking people out. It
makes people uncomfortable. There are a couple of reasons for this.
One has to do with the time-honored notion of human autonomy. If
hard determinism is true, doesn’t that mean that we’re caused to do
everything that we do? Doesn’t it mean that we are nothing more than
puppets of the forces of nature?
The short answer is, “No, it doesn’t.”
To explain why, I need to take a very brief detour through the
philosophy of cause and effect. Imagine that right now a brick is
hurled through the air, strikes a window, and shatters it. Now, answer
the following question: What caused the window to shatter?
If you answered by saying “The brick,” as most people do, you
wouldn’t be quite right. When the brick was lying around outside,
minding its own business, it didn’t cause anything to shatter. It was
the brick striking the window that caused the window to shatter—or,
more precisely, it was the brick’s striking the window that caused the
window’s shattering. Now, this might sound like a word game, but it
isn’t. There’s a world of difference between a brick and a brick’s
striking a window.
This distinction is important for how we think about causes and
effects in general. It shows us that causes and effects are events, not
objects. Causation occurs when something happens that makes
something else happen. Only happenings (events) can be causes
and only happenings (events) can be effects.
Think carefully about this and you’ll understand why it’s inaccurate to
say that hard determinism implies that prior events cause us to do
what we do. Saying “Prior events caused me to make a certain
choice” conjures up an image of nature holding a gun to one’s head.
But prior events can’t, strictly speaking, cause a person to do
anything at all. All that they can do is cause events in people’s minds.
So, from a hard determinist perspective, it’s wrong to say that prior
events caused me to choose x. That would be to say that prior events
coerce me into making a certain choice. But it’s perfectly OK to say
that prior events caused my choosing x. Causation isn’t the same
thing as coercion!
Another concern about hard determinism has to do with the issue of
responsibility for one’s own behavior. We need to start by getting
clear about what’s meant by “responsibility.”
If someone says that a tornado was responsible for destroying their
home, this is just a fancy way of saying that the tornado caused the
destruction of their home. This causal notion of responsibility is totally
different from what we mean when we say that a person was
responsible for an automobile accident because she was texting
while driving. In cases like this, we mean that the person behaved in
a blameworthy way. To be morally responsible, a person has to be
the sort of being that is worthy of praise of blame. Tornados,
porcupines, and babies are not morally responsible, but cognitively
mature, psychologically intact adults are.
Probing a little more deeply, we can ask what it is that makes a
person a morally responsible agent. One very attractive answer is
that people are morally responsible for their behavior only if they are
able to rationally choose between alternatives. This entails that we
are morally responsible only if there are alternatives open to us. But
hard determinists insist that there aren’t any options—nobody could
have chosen anything other than what they chose, just as no domino
in a row of falling dominos has any choice about whether it’s going to
fall.
So, hard determinists tend to regard moral responsibility as an
illusion. In reality, nobody has options, and nobody is deserving of
praise or blame. As the philosopher Bruce Waller (who, by the way, is
not a hard determinist) put the point in his recent book Against Moral
Responsibility:
"Just deserts and moral responsibility require a godlike power—the
existential power of choosing ourselves, the godlike power of making
ourselves from scratch, the divine capacity to be an uncaused
cause—that we do not have. Moral responsibility is an atavistic relic
of a belief system we (as naturalists) have rejected, for good reason."
(p. 40)
The hard-determinist take-home message is a hard one to swallow.
Free will is a fairy-tale and nobody is morally responsible for their
behavior. Suck it up.