The Paradox of Free Will

The Paradox of Free Will

Free Will If some unimpeachable source God, say were to tell me that I didn t have free will, I d have to regard that piece of information as proof that I didn t understand the World at all. Peter van Inwagen Free will is the ability to choose between two or more available options. We want to believe in free will for many reasons. Among them are: (1) We experience free will. (2) We think free will is important for our lives to have meaning. (3) We think free will is how we become the people we become. (4) We only hold people morally responsible for the actions they do freely.

Free Will Often debates about whether or not we have free will take the form of debates about whether or not free will is compatible with various other theses. For instance, is free will compatible with: Fatalism: Most of your actions and everything that happens in the world is directly controlled by something other than you (such as God, the fates, the stars, etc.) While some have wanted to defend this compatibility, it is incredibly difficult. How can you be free with respect to doing action A if something else causes you to do action A? The paradox we will be focused instead asks about the compatibility of free will with a much weaker thesis, determinism

Determinism: At any time, the way the world is at that time and the laws of nature determine a unique way the world will be in the future. This is the type of determinism common to every physics problem. Given a cylinder on a board at a certain angle, there is one unique distance the cylinder will roll. The initial conditions plus the laws of physics determine a unique outcome of a particular problem (and we think that this is the case even if the outcome is too complex for us to calculate) Similarly, one might think that the big bang had a unique future which brought you about in a certain way, and that given your genetics and the environment you will interact with, every decision you have made and will ever make follows from physical laws. Your choosing to not go to Notre Dame seems to be just as inconsistent with scientific laws as the cylinder rolling in a different direction. Thus, we start to see a paradox; we believe in determinism for physics, but we don t see how free will could be compatible with determinism.

Determinism: At any time, the way the world is at that time and the laws of nature determine a unique way the world will be in the future. Free Will: A person is free with respect to action A if they are able to do A and they are able to not do A Luckily for us, this is merely one premise in the overarching paradox of free will: 1. Free will is incompatible with determinism.(compatibilism denies) 2. Free will is incompatible with indeterminism.(libertarianism denies) 3. Either determinism or indeterminism is true. 4. Therfore there is no free will (1, 2, 3) 5. If we do not have free will we are not morally responsible for our actions. 6. We are morally responsible for our actions. 7. Therefore we have free will (5, 6) (Hard Determinism denies)

Free will is incompatible with determinism. The compatibilist, who says that free will and determinsim are compatible, can respond to this thesis by pointing out that, has two main things to say in response First, they point out that there are multiple futures which are physically possible, even if not physically possible given where we are at in the world. Second, they say that had a person wanted to do something else, they would have done something else. If you got accepted to ND and USC, you were free with respect to which school to attend precisely because you did what you wanted; had you wanted to go to USC, you would have gone to USC. What more can you want? The problem with this response is that you are no more free with respect to what you want than with respect to your decision. This can be illustrated with the Consequence Agument:

The Consequence Argument 1. Given a person P, an action A, and a time t, P does A freely at t only if, at t, P was able to do something other than A. 2. If determinism is true, then necessarily for any time t 0, the way the world is at t 0 and the laws of nature imply necessitate the way the world will be at any time t 1 such that t 1 is later than t 0. 3. For any agent A, there is a time t 0 before any of A s actions such that A is not able to affect the way the world is at t 0 (e.g. we cannot affect the way the world is 10,000 years before we are born) 4. For any agent A, A is not able to change the laws of nature (e.g. we cannot perform miracles) 5. If one is not able to affect P, and not able to affect the fact that P implies Q, then one is not able to affect Q. 6. Therefore, if determinism is true, if P does A, P was never able to change the fact that P does A. (2, 3, 4, 5) 7. Therefore, if determinism is true, there is no action done freely (1, 6)

Free will is incompatible with indeterminism. Suppose determinism is false. Suppose further that your junior year of high school, there were possible futures in which you went to USC and ones in which you went to ND. If your desires at that point made it so that you would never choose USC, then the future in which you go to USC is actually incompatible with that moment, so we can suppose that at least some percentage of the time you would have chosen to go to USC. Suppose the begrudging God of the philosophers agreed to reset the universe to that exact moment 1000 times, there would be some non-0 number of the times you went to USC, and some non-0 number of the times you went to ND. But you are in fact at ND, so why did you choose ND over USC?

Free will is incompatible with indeterminism. Why did you choose ND over USC? If sometimes you choose ND and sometimes you choose USC, the choice seems random. That is, it seems random which of the 1000 iterations of your choice you would be in. But random choices are not free ones, so you would not be free given indeterminism.

The Randomness Argument 1. If indeterminism is true, then there are futures A and B compatible with the present. 2. If you being the way you are and having the reasons you have determines that you choose A over B, then your choice of A is not free. 3. If you being the way you are and having the reasons you have does not determine choosing A over B, then the choice of A over B is random. 4. Random choices are not free. 5. Therefore, if indeterminism is true, you do not make free choices.

The Paradox of Free Will 1. Free will is incompatible with determinism. (from the Consequence Argument) 2. Free will is incompatible with indeterminism. (from the Randomness Argument) 3. Either determinism or indeterminism is true. 4. Therfore there is no free will (1, 2, 3) 5. If we do not have free will we are not morally responsible for our actions. 6. We are morally responsible for our actions. 7. Therefore we have free will (5, 6)