Free Will

Laura Ekstrom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this comprehensive new study of human free agency, Laura Waddell Ekstrom critically surveys contemporary philosophical literature and provides a novel account of the conditions for free action. Ekstrom argues that incompatibilism concerning free will and causal determinism is true and thus the right account of the nature of free action must be indeterminist in nature. She examines a variety of libertarian approaches, ultimately defending an account relying on indeterministic causation among events and appealing to agent causation only in a reducible sense. Written in an engaging style and incorporating recent scholarship, this study is critical reading for scholars and students interested in the topics of motivation, causation, responsibility, and freedom. In broadly covering the important positions of others along with its exposition of the author's own view, Free Will provides both a significant scholarly contribution and a valuable text for courses in metaphysics and action theory.

Chapter One
The Problem of Human Freedom

The problem of free will is one of the most subtle and fascinating of all philosophical problems. Its complexity is not worn on its face. Rather, like finally untangling the varied aspects of a profound personality in an intimate relationship, appreciation comes only with directed effort through time. Occasionally someone, usually an introductory student, will pronounce the matter simply solved: "What's so hard about free will? Either we have it, or we don't. What's there to talk about?" Reflection on certain facts frequently induces appropriate humility.

The issue of free will has concerned scholars through the centuries, including such significant philosophical talents as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, and Sartre, among others. That the problem continues to generate volumes of print in both academic monographs and contemporary scholarly journals, with the lack of an emerging consensus, attests to the fact that we have neither resolved the issue nor finished plumbing its intricate depths. The contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick remarks:

Over the years I have spent more time thinking about the problem of free will—it felt like banging my head against it—than about any other philosophical topic except perhaps the foundation of ethics. Fresh ideas would come frequently, soon afterwards to curdle . . . this [the problem of free will is the] most frustrating and unyielding of problems.¹

What makes the problem so unyielding? Even this question has no simple answer. A number of strands comprising "the problem of free will" must, first, be disjoined. That is, as a number of philosophers have pointed out, the problem of free will is not one problem but many.² The empirical question—Do any of us ever act freely?— is but one concern, although the driving one. Its resolution for us depends upon our answer to the distinct question of whether or not we have good reason to believe that we do at times enjoy freedom in our activities. And both the existence problem and the epistemological problem are logically parasitic on the question of what constitutes a free act, in other words, on the theoretical matter of establishing what it is (or would be) to act freely, or of one's own tree will.

Think for a minute about this latter question. Often the immediate thought is of the relative lack or availability of political freedoms. So the term 'free will' may bring to mind the observation, for instance, that many women in our day and part of the world are free to leave the home and work for compensation outside of the home. In past generations, in many places, this is something that women were not so free to do. The example concerns something that most women are now socially and politically allowed to do.

But the question of tree will is not a question of what persons are socially, politically, or legally allowed to do. Philosophers interested in the topic of free will are concerned with a deeper question. Of course, there are certain actions that we all are politically and legally free to do (such as, if one is an American citizen over the age of eighteen, vote and marry a person of the opposite sex) and others that none of us are politically or legally free to do (such as murder another person or, at the time of this writing, marry a person of the same sex). And there are actions that some of us are legally, politically, or socially allowed to do (such as convene a special session of Congress or call to order a courtroom) that others of us are not. If none of us is legally free to murder another person, then what does it mean to say that someone murdered another of his own free will? In what sense, if any, did Moses, for example, commit a free act in murdering an Egyptian man?

While the example of a woman's ability to earn wages for work outside the home is more pertinent to the topic of political freedom than to the topic of freedom of the will, it is nonetheless instructive for seeing both the beginnings of an account of free will and the difficulty of refining it. For we said that her freedom in that case is a matter of what the political world, or her social and legal circumstances, allow her to do. The deeper question of interest to free will theorists is whether or not, in leaving the home to work as she is politically free to do, a woman acts freely in the sense of being fully self-directed in her action. And another way of expressing this question is this: Does the way the world is—including its past events, its current natural (and perhaps supernatural) circumstances, and its physical laws—allow for us to act freely in a deep sense, such that our actions are truly attributable to our selves rather than to something external to us, such as social conditioning, genetic and neurophysiological programming, brainwashing, or some other external coercive force? Do reigning metaphysical conditions allow us to be the masters of our own fates, the captains of our own ships, the directors of our lives' directions? In short, is what we think and do and say ultimately up to us?

Analyzing what it is for an act to be "up to oneself" is no elementary task, as it requires an account both of who we are as agents—or what it is to be a genuine self—and of the nature of the requisite control over action. Securing legal and political freedoms is important to our establishing control of some kind over certain areas of our lives. But political, social, and legal freedoms do not exhaust the kinds of freedom that are of genuine concern. Many such freedoms may exist in a particular society, while there remains from a philosophical point of view the possibility that no one in that society ever acts sufficiently of his or her own accord, and not as the result of heteronomous factors, to count as acting freely, or with free will. The use of the term 'free will', then, signifies that our topic is the metaphysics of freedom: the issue of how much control over our own actions, and so over our own lives, the extrapolitical world— the natural (and perhaps also the supernatural) world—affords us.

Skepticism Regarding Free Will

Some philosophers question whether the term 'free will' can be given an accurate analysis at all, as they doubt that there is a coherent concept of it. Richard Double, for instance, argues in two provocative recent books, The Non-Reality of Free Will (1991) and Metaphilosophy and Free Will (1996), that free will cannot exist, as the term 'free will' fails objectively to refer. The second of Double's books extends the argumentation of the first to emphasize the dependence of philosophical theories, in particular theories concerning the nature of free will, on metaphilosophical factors, such as views concerning what philosophy in general is for (conversational enjoyment, for instance, or making us better persons). These metalevel stances, according to Double, are only non-truth-valued subjective facts about us, incapable of being proved objectively better or worse than any others. Not only, then, is there no coherent concept of free will or free action, but the deep relevance of meta-level factors to a person's judgment of the plausibility of various accounts of free action, on Double's view, makes "argumentation about free will wildly relativistic" and talk about free will only "so much verbiage, a kind of A. J. Ayer-like boohing and hurrahing."³

But one need not be so pessimistic as Double about the possibility of reasoned, meaningful, and persuasive argumentation about the nature of free action, nor need one accept the proposition that views about the goal of free will theorizing are mere non-truth-valued subjective stances unsusceptible to rational evaluation. For in fact any view, meta-level or not, motivated by desire or not, is liable to assessment with regard to justifiedness and plausibility.⁴ Thus the appropriate response to another's views concerning the nature of free will is not a shrug of detached amusement. Instead, it is possible and appropriate to enter into reasoned dialogue with the potential for the change of our own or the other's account on the basis of theoretical considerations.

A Fundamental Source of Difficulty

I noted above that the notion of acting of one's own free will may be explicated roughly as being allowed by the world to act in a way that is fully self-directed. Indeed, it is a deep-rooted and pervasive aspect of our sense of ourselves as persons that we are capable of being self-directed in our affairs. The task in free will theorizing, then, is to illuminate this important part of our self-conception.

But if this is right—if the goal in elaborating a free will theory is to explicate a salient aspect of our self-conception—then a fundamental difficulty is that various aspects of our conception of ourselves push us in different theoretical directions. We are impressed and persuaded by success in psychological, neurophysiological, and genetic studies to view much (or all) of our selves and our behavior as physically set. We observe in the natural world that events have causes, and that those causal events themselves have causes, and so we naturally come to view the world as lawlike, regular, and, should we know enough about the circumstances and the natural laws, wholly predictable. Possible indeterminacy at the quantum level notwithstanding, usual events at the macrophysical level display regular deterministic order. Yet, our internal lives, and in general the unfolding of the sequence of events comprising our lives, seem wholly unpredictable, and not merely from lack of information. There seems to be some genuine randomness in the direction our lives take, or at least some room for agency not accounted for in a purely deterministic picture.

Thus, should we begin in characterizing ourselves with our most sober scientific outlook on the behavior of persons? Or, rather, should we reflect on our own first-person perspectives of ourselves as free agents, leaving aside temporarily the matter of the reconciliation of our self-image with a scientific viewpoint? In other words, should we start with an internal perspective or an external one?⁵ What takes precedence in settling our self-conception?

Hence, rather than stemming from differences in conception of what engaging in philosophy is all about—whether in theorizing we are merely verbally entertaining ourselves or trying to better the world or aiming to say the truth about some aspect of reality—the difficulty in characterizing the nature of free will, it seems to me, derives primarily from the apparently conflicting data concerning the nature of our selves. In giving a theory of free will, the goal is clear: to provide an account recognizable as capturing certain prominent intuitions about ourselves and other persons as self-directed agents. But the problem is how exactly to do this.

C. A. Campbell once remarked that "to 'account for' a 'free' act is a contradiction in terms," for, he thought, "free will is ex hypothesi the sort of thing of which the request for an explanation is absurd."⁶ Certainly, though, we want to do better in giving a free will theory than this. It is difficult indeed to see how an act can be intelligible rather than random, genuinely attributable to a self acting for reasons of his or her own, if the act has no explanation whatsoever. Regarding the multidimensional problem of free will, which Susan Wolf calls "arguably the most difficult problem in philosophy,"⁷ we may conclude at the outset only this: An answer easily arrived at is almost certainly an answer supported by thinking that is of insufficient depth.

The Significance of Free Will

While the difficulty of the problem of free will takes some time to uncover, its significance, on the other hand, is for most of us readily apparent. Generally we care whether or not we have free will, and we care what it would be to have it, even if we can exactly characterize neither our inchoate conception of it nor our sense of why it matters. Occasionally one hears of a philosopher who claims to have "absolutely no interest in the problem of free will." This sentiment is, frankly, difficult to understand. (A low level of general mental curiosity is likely not the right diagnosis.) Perhaps the proponent of the sentiment views the issue of free will as excessively anthropomorphic. The question, after all, is one about our powers, our abilities as persons in the face of certain prospective foes of our agency. Yet the same could be said of a number of the classic philosophical problems of perennial interest: the possibility of epistemically justifying our beliefs, the nature and function of our rights claims, the nature of our (and other sentient creatures') mental states. Set theory and inquiry into the nature of objectivity may be instances of more abstract intellectual pursuits, but they are for many individuals, precisely in virtue of that fact, significantly less pressing than the matter of self-direction.

Self-direction is, in fact, evidently something we strive valiantly to attain and protect. The early North American colonists, Southerners during the U.S. Civil War, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Soviet Georgians are among those who have fought for the ability to be self-determining, in a political sense, in their affairs. And illustrations of the importance of individual self-direction pervade literature. Though Vronsky suffers politically for refusing the post at Tashkent, he is satisfyingly sell-determined in resigning and, instead, traveling with Anna Karenina. Likewise, although your parents may not fully endorse your choice of career, it is, after all, your choice: A career is something you (ordinarily) want to be initiated and directed by yourself.

But that we do care does not explain our interest. Why exactly is it important to so many of us whether or not we can be self-directed, not just politically but also metaphysically? In certain philosophical contexts, such as some discussions of the problem of evil, the high value of free will is taken as an undefended premise.⁸ And attempts to support it are sometimes less than persuasive. For instance, it has been argued that free choice is required for rationality, for learning, and for cooperation, and that therefore it is significant.⁹ But, on the contrary, there seems to be nothing in the notion of a rational (or a warranted or a justified) belief that depends upon the belief's being freely acquired. And if learning is the acquisition of information, then it is, at least in principle, not reliant on tree choice. Cooperation, likewise, is arguably engaged in by creatures (carpenter ants, for instance) not generally thought to possess free will. If having free will is valuable, then its value apparently must either be intrinsic or derive from its enabling goods other than these.

Moral Responsibility

The most widely recognized source of interest in free will is concern for the appropriate assignment of moral responsibi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Problem of Human Freedom
• 2 Arguments for Incompatibilism
• 3 Compatibilist Arguments and Free Will Accounts
• 4 Varieties of Libertarianism
• 5 The Concept of Moral Responsibility
• 6 Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities
• References
• Index