The Problem of Free Will
Articulating one of the perennial puzzles in philosophy
The problem of free will is among the knottiest and most vexing of the perennial problems in philosophy. It also bears directly upon matters of great practical importance, insofar as whether we have it (and what it amounts to) bears upon issues in ethics, theology, interpersonal relationships, political theory, criminal justice, and more.
The problem of free will has also been of considerable personal significance to me. In my early twenties, I was extremely preoccupied with it (on an existential, as well as intellectual, level), and this preoccupation was an important part of what drove me to attend graduate school (for better or worse). Because of this, I have many - probably too many - thoughts pertaining to it.
All I’ll aim to do here is articulate the problem of free will, at some length. I will do this by, first, clarifying the concept itself. Then I’ll present two arguments for the conclusion that free will is impossible. Though I will gesture at strategies for resisting this conclusion, I will not positively defend any of them (that, perhaps, will be the aim of some future post).
1. What is free will?
Free will, as I understand it, is a capacity. At minimum, it is the capacity to make choices for which one bears some kind of personal responsibility. More substantively, we can say that some agent, S, possess free will just in case:
(a) S makes choices,
(b) when S makes choices, there are alternative possibilities open to S,
and
(c) S is responsible for S’s choices in such a manner as to be an appropriate target of praise and blame, punishment and reward, and the various reactive attitudes (e.g., gratitude, resentment, etc.), which characterize human social life.1
I think this is roughly the commonsense notion of free will — the view implicitly held by ordinary people (the folk, or the vulgar, as philosophers once liked to say…).
Having clarified the capacity under discussion, the question is: Do we have it?
2. The Dilemma of Determinism
Determinism is the view according to which, at any given moment in time, there is only one possible future, given the past and the laws of nature.2 If determinism is true, then there are never actual (as opposed to merely hypothetical, or counterfactual) alternative possibilities, and we are not morally responsible for any of our choices, given that the way in which we are when making them is causally fixed by factors far beyond our control. So, read straightforwardly, conditions (b) and (c) above cannot be satisfied on determinism.
It is widely thought that if determinism is false, then there is room for free will. It is certainly true that if determinism is false, then this opens up the possibility that at least some of our choices are not causally necessitated.
However, indeterminacy poses its own challenges to free will. For it seems constitutive of something’s counting as a choice made by someone, S, that it must have been brought about by S. But, arguably, a choice that is undetermined cannot properly be said to have been brought about by the agent who made it. Indeed, it arguably cannot be said to have been brought about by anything at all, so that an “undetermined choice” would be a kind of misnomer, picking out an event that was not under the control of any agent.
Given that, necessarily, determinism or its negation must be true, we can construct the Dilemma of Determinism as follows:
(1) Either: determinism is true, or it is false.
(2) If determinism is true, then free will is impossible (given that if determinism is true, then we never choose between actual alternatives and are not responsible for our choices).
(3) If indeterminism is true, then free will is impossible (given that we cannot be responsible for undetermined choices, since such choices cannot be under our control).
(4) Therefore, free will is impossible.*
This argument is certainly formally valid (i.e., its premises entail it conclusion), and (1) is logically necessary.
Compatibilists insist that (2) is false on the grounds that free acts are simply those which flow from an agent’s will in the right sort of way; whether they do so in a causally determined manner is, according to compatibilists, irrelevant. There are innumerable compatibilist theories, but they’re united in holding that the ability to literally do otherwise, as we could have only in an indeterministic universe, is not a necessary condition for free will.
Metaphysical libertarians (not to be confused with political libertarians!) deny (3), insisting that not all undetermined events are random. When an undetermined event involves an agent acting for a reason, they’ll say, the event can count as an act for which the agent bears responsibility. Personally, I’ve always struggled to see how this could be so, but given that minds far greater than mine have endorsed metaphysical libertarianism, I allow for the possibility that I am simply missing something (and I will say that I have warmed to libertarianism somewhat in the past year or so).
Because the Dilemma of Determinism contains premises which informed experts will deny, it is not terribly dialectically effective, even if it is useful for the purpose of framing the free will debate.
3. The Basic Argument
There is a route to free will skepticism that bypasses the fraught discussion of determinism and indeterminism by way of an old argument that has been articulated most clearly, and defended most forcefully, in recent years by my former Ph.D. supervisor, Galen Strawson.3 While Strawson’s full argument, which can be found in “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility” and Freedom and Belief (1994) is, of necessity, long and technical, the core insight driving it is quite straightforward.
Strawson notes, first, that to be morally responsible for what we do, we must be responsible for the way that we are, mentally, in certain fundamental respects, so that we are in this way ultimately responsible for what we do (i.e., Strawson thinks that moral responsibility is secured by ultimate responsibility).
Second, he points out that no one is ultimately responsible for the way in which they are in any respect, given that the way in which we are at a given time t is, necessarily, fixed by factors over which we have no control at t. We could be ultimately responsible for the way that we are only if we could create ourselves – if we could be causa sui. But it seems that nothing could be a causa sui, for such an entity would, by definition, have to exist and not exist at the same time.
Strawson has set out an abbreviated version of the Basic Argument in as follows.
“(1) You do what you do – in the circumstances in which you find yourself – because of the way you then are.
(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are – at least in certain mental respects.
(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.”
In defense of (3), Strawson offers the following argument.
“(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.
(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).
(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change
yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.”4
Now, it might be thought, given Strawson’s invocation of early experiences and genetic inheritance, that his argument is a problem only if naturalism is true. On a common way of cashing out the notoriously hard-to-define view, naturalism holds that reality consists only of those entities and properties posited by the natural sciences.
However, Strawson’s basic point is that it is impossible to “get behind ourselves”, as it were, in order to create ourselves; this is a conceptual point that holds even if naturalism is false and we are not material beings, but immaterial minds, or souls. Just as we are unable to bring about the natural facts that make us who we are if naturalism is true, so we are unable to bring it about that we possess the immaterial mind or soul that we do if some form of non-naturalism, or supernaturalism, is true.
Strawson’s argument does not entail that compatibilists (and libertarians, if libertarian freedom is in fact coherent) do not describe real and potentially significant varieties of freedom. The Basic Argument entails only that such accounts fail to secure ultimate responsibility. And insofar as the intuitive, or commonsense, variety of free will is bound to the concept of ultimate moral responsibility, the Basic Argument entails that free will, as experienced and (at least implicitly construed) by the average person is impossible.
It is almost impossible to deny that The Basic Argument proves the impossibility of something. Whether you think it proves the impossibility of free will will depend upon whether you agree with Strawson that free will is bound to the self-creation-entail notion of ultimate moral responsibility, as he conceives it (i.e., as requiring self-creation). A common way of resisting the argument is by insisting that free will is tied to a more limited form of responsibility.
Conclusion
The conclusion of both The Dilemma of Determinism and the Basic Argument is the same: Free will, conceived as a capacity, the possession of which confers ultimate responsibility for at least some of one’s choices, is impossible. This conclusion, if true, would have important practical and moral ramifications and, therefore, matters a great deal. Most significantly, if ultimate moral responsibility is impossible, then it follows that our moral, legal, political, and interpersonal practices need to be reformed insofar as they contain retributivist elements which cannot be justified solely on the basis of their instrumental value. For if no one is ultimately responsible for what they do, then there is nothing intrinsically valuable in anyone’s suffering.
I should mention two things which clearly do not follow from the “no free will view”. First, it does not follow from free will skepticism that ethical nihilism – the view according to which nothing matters objectively, and there are no moral facts – is true. It would, to my mind, be a bizarre view of moral facts indeed that understood them to hold only if free will is possible. Inflicting suffering for fun is sure wrong regardless of the capacities we humans do, or do not, possess.
Moreover, it does not follow from free will skepticism that Fatalism, the view according to which the same future will unfold regardless of what we do, is true. Free will skeptics do not claim that our acts are causally inefficacious, or that the future would not unfold differently if we acted differently, but only that we are not free in the sense of being ultimately in control of whatever it is that we in fact end up doing.
It is, perhaps, open to one to affirm the reality of free will on the grounds that its reality is obvious and fundamental (perhaps a prerequisite to rational deliberation itself), even if an illuminating account of it is elusive. Indeed, now strikes me as the most promising line for the free will realist: Assume free will as part of the commonsense view of the world, rather than seeking to establish it from a condition of skepticism or uncertainty about its existence. I will consider this approach in a future post (if I’m free to do so).
References
Strawson, Galen. 1986/2010. Freedom and Belief. Oxford: New York.
Strawson, Galen. 1994. “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility”. Philosophical Studies, An International Journal For Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition. Vol. 75, No. 1/2: pp. 5-24.
Strawson, Galen. July 22, 2010. "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will". The New York Times Opinionator Blog. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/.
Strawson, P.F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 48, pp. 1–25.
For the hallmark paper on the reactive attitudes and how they might relate to the free will problem, see Strawson (1962).
For my own part, I think it matters a great deal whether irreducible agents figure in the causal story, but I will leave this subtlety for another time.
See Strawson (2010).
I’m a libertarian free will believer. The idea is simple and does necessitate indeterminism: at any given time there is a plurality of futures the could come into existence in the next moment. If the necessary and sufficient reason why one future comes into existence and not another is irreducible (or at least partially irreducible) to the intrinsic causal power of the agent to collapse one possible future into a present from a repertoire of possibilities then the will is free. Freedom as determinator. Now, this cannot be “randomness” as, hypothetically, the will would act the exact same way in the same circumstances were they to exist again. That is to say a choice is neither determined nor random, but chosen; a revelation of what Being does in a particular circumstance. (Similar to the idea of Middle Knowledge in Theology.) I think this is actually our intuitive notion of what happens when we make a choice. Strawson’s argument is just wrong when he says we do what we do because we are who we are. Better to understand it: we are who we are because we do what we do. But there’s a tight feedback loop for sure. And this brings us to the central paradox of freedom: the more your choices are determined the more you are free and responsible for them. That is to say, the more you experience subjective determination (based on your values, dispositions etc.) and feel unaffected from external constraints, the more free you “feel” even though you’re very determined (from the point of view of the will itself) by one’s “internal pressures” which are just as extrinsic to the will itself as is any external force. This is why it’s important to remember that you are responsible for who you are, as at any given moment you are probably “mostly determined” by either internal or external constraints. Still, Consciousness is participation in causal power to determine outcomes from repertoires of metaphysically possible possibilities. Consciousness is freedom and causal power itself.
I've read this essay three times. Some parts I like and can grasp. Others elude me. I've read the book by Sam Harris on Free Will. Gave up halfway. Furthermore, I've listened to his podcasts on the subject. Gave up halfway. Every time I walk into some kind of rubber wall where my brain loses track of the arguments presented. Maybe it's the tone of voice (the certainty) that makes me lose the train of thought. Perhaps it's me, my minimal brain. I've been studying this subject for 1,5 years now because of dramatic events in my life and read a lot. There are very few people who can explain subjects like consciousness and free will in terms that a layman can grasp. I am reminded of Jeremy Irons in the movie Margin Call: "Please, speak as you might to a young child…or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that got me here, I can assure you of that." A request, perhaps: try steelmanning the case FOR free will.