On Halloween night, a man in a white
mask goes door-to-door killing everyone in his sight with a large kitchen
knife. He is arrested and brought in to trial. On a scale from 1 to 10 (1=not
at all responsible, 5=somewhat responsible, 10=fully responsible), how
responsible would you consider the man to be for his actions in light of the
three following scenarios:
a) The
man was possessed by evil spirits
b) The
man was psychopathic with a severe self-control deficit
c) The
man planned everything and knew that his actions were immoral
If you think that the man wasn’t
responsible in (a), but near fully responsible in (c), on what basis did you
come to such judgments? Common sense says that the man who planned everything
is responsible because he made the decision to kill all of
those people whereas the man under possession did not. We consider ourselves to
be responsible for those actions under our control. We do not blame small
children or non-human animals for their actions because they are lack certain
mental capacities (e.g reflective reasoning) and/or knowledge (e.g. moral
norms) that allow for reason-guided action. It seems then that moral
responsibility depends on whether or not we can freely act or make decisions,
otherwise known as free will.
A view held by many scientists (and
some prominent philosophers) rejects this common sense picture. Free
will skepticism (FWS) entails that 1) no one has free will and that 2)
no one is responsible for anything. If we are not morally responsible for our
actions, then the correct answer for (a-c) should be a (1). The man who planned
everything and knew his actions were immoral was no more responsible than the
man who had all of his actions manipulated by evil spirits.
FWS has radical implications for our
moral, legal, and social practices. Unlike certain abstract philosophical
questions (e.g. whether numbers exist), the free will debate is of real world
significance. In this post, I will assess the plausibility of free will
skepticism and defend compatibilist theories of free will—which I take to
preserve many of our moral, legal, social practices—from recent attacks. Before
I get into the details, I’d first like to state that the free will debate is
deeply interconnected with many other philosophical topics (e.g. the nature of
causation, philosophy of action, the mind-body problem, and laws of nature) for
which there are no easy or obvious answers. In taking a side in the free will
debate, one must tacitly accept views regarding all of these other topics.
Likewise, the free will debate itself comprises a number of different questions:
· What
is free will?
· Is
free will compatible with determinism?
· Is
free will required for moral responsibility?
· What
is moral responsibility?
· What
follows if we don’t have free will and/or moral responsibility?
Free will can be conceived of in more
than one way. There is first, the libertarian conception of
free will, which states that free will gives us ultimate control of our actions
or the unconditional ability to do otherwise. Possession of libertarian free
will entails that if we were to rewind the clock right before the moment of
some action (e.g. eat cereal for breakfast)—*fixing all of the past conditions
(e.g. mental states, prior events, etc.)*—we would be able to do otherwise
(e.g. eat eggs for breakfast). This conception of free will often goes hand in
hand with dualism—the view which states that the mind and body are
independent—as well as theism (1). Under a theistic reading, free will can be
thought of as a god given power, giving humans ultimate responsibility for
their actions. Many scientists and philosophers doubt that we have this
kind of free will. Without this kind of free will, it is thought that
humans are just like billiard balls, with each action the result of a long
chain reaction of past events constrained (or determined) by the
laws of nature. But there is also the compatibilist conception
of free will, an alternative that’s been around since Ancient Greece (2).
Compatibilism states that we can have
free will even if the universe, and our actions, are the result of past events
and the laws of nature. In a nutshell, compatibilism is the view that we can be
morally responsible even if we lack immaterial souls or magical causal powers.
Hume thought of free will as the ability to make decisions without any external
constraints (e.g. having a gun up to your head) (3). Eddy Nahmias, a
contemporary compatibilist, conceives of free will as a set of psychological
capacities (4). Such capacities include: self-control, future planning, and
rational deliberation. The extent to which an agent has free will depends on
whether there are any internal (e.g. mental illness) or external (e.g. gun to
head) pressures working against these capacities. On this view, free will is
not an all-or-nothing feature, but rather, a matter of degree.
Many have challenged compatibilist
theories on the grounds that their proponents are changing the subject. Free
will skeptics claim that most people (i.e. non-philosophers) have the
libertarian conception in mind, and that therefore, it is then misleading to
say that we have free will, but of a different kind.
Sam Harris gives a nice way to illustrate this objection.
“Imagine that we live in a world where
more or less everyone believes in the lost kingdom of Atlantis. You and your
fellow compatibilists come along and offer comfort: Atlantis is real, you say.
It is, in fact, the island of Sicily. You then go on to argue that Sicily answers
to most of the claims people through the ages have made about Atlantis. Of
course, not every popular notion survives this translation, because some
beliefs about Atlantis are quite crazy, but those that really matter—or should
matter, on your account—are easily mapped onto what is, in fact, the largest
island in the Mediterranean. Your work is done, and now you insist that we
spend the rest of our time and energy investigating the wonders of Sicily” (5).
For Harris’s analogy to work, one must
assume that everyone more or less believes in the libertarian conception of
free will. This is an empirical question, one that, at best, remains unsettled
(6). But let’s assume for the sake of argument that most people do have the
libertarian conception in mind. Does it follow that we should then conclude
that free will does not exist? Another option would be to state that the folk
are simply wrong about the nature of free will. We wouldn’t want to say that
energy doesn’t exist simply because the folk conception of ‘energy’ is
erroneous. What’s relevant is whether the concept maps onto something in the
world, not how many people happen to misunderstand it. There are further,
pragmatic, reasons for siding with the compatibilists.
It would be absurd, if not impossible
to give up talk of moral responsibility altogether. As human beings, we have
emotional reactions to certain kinds of behavior (7). We feel indignation
towards those who do us wrong and we feel gratitude towards those who help us.
If no one is morally responsible, then no one deserves blame or praise. It
would thus be irrational to experience such reactive emotions and we would be
rationally compelled to try and eliminate them from the human experience. Unless
we come to the point where drugs and genetic modification can rid us of such
emotions, I think they are here to stay.
In summary, there are roughly three
positions one may take up in the free will debate. One can be a libertarian, a
skeptic, or a compatibilist. I have argued that compatibilism is the most
appealing option, on the grounds that it preserves our common sense intuitions
about moral responsibility (which may be part of our human nature), but this is
far from a knock-down case for the view. There is much more to say about all
three of these views. In the future posts, I will dive much deeper into many of the questions raised here. I will focus mainly on the debate between free will skeptics and compatibilists and ultimately argue that compatibilism is the more plausible view to hold.
Works cited:
(1) Not
all libertarian views are religiously motivated. For example, the philosopher
Robert Kane defends a naturalistic theory of libertarian free will. See his
1998 book, “The significance of free will”, for an articulation and defense of
his view.
(2) Scholars
have argued that ancient Stoics, such as Chrysippus, advanced compatibilist
theories. Sharples, R. W. (1983). Alexander of Aphrodisias on fate: Text,
translation, and commentary. Duckworth.
(3) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-freewill/
(6) Murray, D., & Nahmias, E. (2014). Explaining away incompatibilist
intuitions.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(2),
434-467.
(7) The philosopher Peter Strawson has written extensively about the
relevance of emotions to the free will debate. See his classic text Freedom
and resentment (1963).
Further reading:
Recommended films with connections to
the free will debate:
The Adjustment Bureau
Minority Report
A Clockwork Orange
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