Free Will: Do We Have It? This book explains the problem of free will and contains a brief summary of the essential arguments in Ayer's "Freedom and Necessity" and Chisholm's "Human Freedom and the Self". Dr. Gina Calderone Table of contents Free Will: Do we have it? What makes you the person you are? Are your decisions causally determined? Indeterminism and Chance Freedom and Moral Responsibility Compatibilism and Libertarianism Ayer's Compatibilism To be free is to be unconstrained Chisholm's Libertarianism To be free is to be an uncaused cause Free Will: Do we have it? Like many great philosophical problems, this one starts with something we take to be obviously true: that we have free will in the ordinary sense that, sometimes, we do something, but we could have done something else. This idea, however, seems to be in tension with another idea that we also think is obviously true: namely, that our decisions and actions are in the causal order of things. To say that our decisions and actions are in the causal order of things, we mean simply that what one decides to do is determined to a large degree by the sort of person that one is, which is determined to a large degree by one's past, including facts about one's genetic makeup and experiences. The tension can be seen when we think of a particular decision and try to explain why that decision was made as opposed to some other apparent option. Take, for example, your decision to read this book instead of taking the quiz cold and hoping for the best. Reading the book, you may have reasoned, insures that you will get a good grade on the quiz, and you want a good grade on the quiz. Your beliefs, desires, values, etc., have steered you in this direction.
What makes you the person you are? So you're the sort of person that wants good grades and knows how best to get them, but why are you this sort of person in the first place? Arguably, there are two kinds of facts that bear on the answer: your genes and your past experiences. Some of who you are is surely determined by your genetic endowment--facts about your temperament, for example, and perhaps your natural talents, if there is such a thing. It doesn't matter how much, or what, is determined by genes, for the rest is, at least to some degree, determined by your experiences: experiences influenced by your parents, your teachers, your preachers, your friends, your enemies, the television shows you watched, etc. These things made you the sort of person that, under these circumstances, was going to read the book rather than skip it. But now the tension is staring is in the face: if you were bound to make this decision, given who you are, in what sense could you have done other than what you did do? Are your decisions causally determined? Determinism is the view that the past causally determines the future. That is, given past events, the next thing that happens is inevitable. Since our actions are events in the world, it would seem that if determinism is true, then it is not the case that we can do other than what we actually do, which means we do not have free will. In other words, if our actions are inevitable, given our pasts, then how can it be true that we might have done otherwise? It's important to see that determinism is not itself a claim about free will. It is a claim about how the world is, one that must be settled by scientists, not philosophers. The above is an argument that if determinism is true, then we are not free. You might think that determinism must be false, in which case we are free. But indeterminism is a problem for free will as well. Indeterminism and Chance Indeterminism is the view that past events do not fully determine what will happen next. Indeterminism must be true if causal "laws"
are merely statistical laws: that is, if laws make some outcome probable without guaranteeing one particular outcome. If the world is indeterministic, does this leave room for free will? It would seem not, since all that is left to explain what does happen next, if it is improbable, is the element of chance. And if chance determines our "free" acts, they do not seem to be acts of will. Consider decisions and actions made in a world that is indeterministic. You have this decision to make, say, between eating a cupcake or a carrot. It seems like a free choice. On the one hand, you consider eating the cupcake because you know it will taste good, but you think you better eat the carrot because you know the cupcake is bad for you. You are very concerned about your health since diabetes runs in your family, and the cupcake is red velvet which you don't really like anyway, so you decide you will eat the carrot. But then, suddenly, there you are, eating the cupcake instead. How can you explain this? It cannot be explained in terms of your beliefs and desires, because these determined that you would eat the carrot. The only thing left is chance. But if chance explains why you did what you did, it cannot be truly an act of free will, since it isn't even an act of will. After all, you had willed to eat the carrot, not the cupcake. Again, it is important to see that indeterminism is not a claim about free will. Here we merely have an argument to the conclusion that if indeterminism is true, we are not free. Freedom and Moral Responsibility So far we have an argument that can be summarized as follows: 1. If determinism is true, we are not free. 2. If indeterminism is true, we are not free. 3. Either determinism is true, or indeterminism is true. 4. Thus, we are not free. Premise 3 must be true because of the way determinism and indeterminism are defined: one of these must be true. And the argument is important, because if it is sound, and we are not free, it is hard to make sense of our notion of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is the idea that a person should be blamed (and perhaps punished) for doing the wrong thing, or praised (and perhaps rewarded) for doing the right thing. But this only seems to make sense if one can truly choose to do other than what one does. And if we are not free, then we cannot do otherwise, so how can a
person be blamed for doing the "wrong" thing or praised for doing the "right" thing? So holding onto moral responsibility makes the effort to refute the argument above worthwhile. But where is it vulnerable? Compatibilism and Libertarianism In spite of the apparent incompatibility between determinism and human freedom, some philosophers argue that premise 1 is false: determinism and free will are compatible after all. The trick for the compatibilist is to explain how we can be free when our actions are inevitable given who we have become. This is indeed a very difficult argument to make and it involves giving us a notion of "freedom" that is perhaps weaker than we would like. The other option is to deny premise 2. This is the tack of the Libertarian. The Libertarian argues that we are free so determinism must be false. The trick for the Libertarian is then to explain how our actions can be free, and not simply random, when indeterminism is true. This is also a difficult position to defend, and one that offers a notion of "agent causation" that sits uncomfortably with the natural world, to say the least. Ayer's Compatibilism Please read "Freedom and Necessity" by Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989). A.J. Ayer represents Compatibilism: the idea that determinism and the doctrine of human freedom are compatible; and both are true. Ayer argues that our commitment to moral responsibility commits us to determinism as well, because if determinism is false, ones actions are also subject to chance. But if one s free actions are due to chance, they are not clearly within one s control, so how can we hold people morally responsible for what they do? But, given that determinism means that given the past, the future is inevitable, the compatibilist must say something about what human freedom is such that one s actions are inevitable and yet, free. This seems on the face of it to be contradictory. Ayer s strategy is to begin with what he takes to be clearly unfree actions, consider what makes them unfree, and cash out the free ones as the fully caused actions that are free of those features.
To be free is to be unconstrained When one is forced, or coerced, or compelled, or constrained, to do something, we say that his action was not of his free will. When, for example, you hand over all of your money to someone who holds a gun to your head, we say that your action, driven by your overriding concern to stay alive, was not free. Similarly, when you are in the grip of a compulsion (kleptomania, for example), or when someone has obtained a habitual ascendancy over you (a cult leader, for example), you are not free. Thus, Ayer suggests that our freedom consists in just those acts of will that are not subject to these constraints. In other words, your actions, though entirely caused by your past, may be unconstrained, in which case they are free. So the general compatibilist strategy is to define human freedom in terms of the possibility of doing other than what you do, which is itself understood as follows: had you chosen to do otherwise, you would have. Actions that are constrained do not meet this condition, for there is a real sense in which your constrained actions are not governed by your will. Exercise: explain why the kleptomaniac's theft is constrained while the ordinary thief's is not. Chisholm's Libertarianism Please read "Human Freedom and the Self" by Roderick Chisholm (1916-1999). Roderick Chisholm, a Libertarian, argues that Compatibilism is mistaken. More precisely, he argues that if freedom means that had you chosen to otherwise, you would have done otherwise, it must be possible to sometimes choose to do otherwise, but it isn t. Given the compatibilist s commitment to determinism, it is never true that you can choose to do otherwise, for your choices are fully determined by your past, which is what it is. In other words, freedom is not compatible with determinism. If we are truly free, argues Chisholm, determinism must be false.
So Chisholm s task is to show how human freedom is possible in an indeterministic world, where the so-called free acts are not simply random events (a matter of chance). His strategy is to draw a distinction between transeunt and immanent causation the former when one event causes another event, and the latter when an agent causes an event. An agent is a person, or more precisely, the will of a person to act on the basis of her beliefs and desires and character, or not. It s the real possibility of acting outside what you have been programmed to do by your past that makes you free. Free beings are, as Chisholm puts it, uncaused causes. To be free is to be an uncaused cause Note that we started with this apparent conflict between two commitments we have about ourselves: that we are free, in the sense that sometimes we do something but we could have done otherwise; and the idea that we are in the causal order of things, in the sense that we are products of our genes and upbringings, and our deliberate actions spring from who we are. But if determinism is true, we are at best only hypothetically free: given determinism, choosing to do otherwise would mean that you were a slightly different person, which could only be so if the past had gone differently, which could only be true if we were now talking about an entirely different world. If instead you believe that you are free in the categorical sense given your past and who you are, your next action is not inevitable we must, as Chisholm puts it, make some rather "farreaching assumptions about the self". The Libertarian accepts a robust notion of freedom, but only at the expense of being fully in the causal order of things. According to Chisholm, the will must be uncaused and yet capable of causing things to happen. But what does the will do when it wills, if the will is uncaused? Exercise: explain Chisholm s response to the objection that there is no difference, according to Libertarianism, between an agent making some action A happen, and A just happening.