Free Will: A Guide for the Perplexed

T. J. Mawson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441153296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Free Will & Determinism in Philosophy

In everyday life, we often suppose ourselves to be free to choose between several courses of action. But if we examine further, we find that this view seems to rest on metaphysical and meta-ethical presuppositions almost all of which look problematic. How can we be free if everything is determined by factors beyond our control, stretching back in time to the Big Bang and the laws of nature operating then? The only alternative to determinism is indeterminism, but is not indeterminism just there being a certain amount of randomness in the world? Does not randomness hinder you from being the author of your actions? Free Will: A Guide for the Perplexed looks at how much of the structure of our everyday judgments can survive the arguments behind such questions and thoughts. In doing so, it explores the alternative arguments that have been advanced concerning free will and related notions, including an up-to-date overview of the contemporary debates. In essence, the book seeks to understand and answer the age-old question, 'What is free will and do we have it?'

Chapter One

Introduction
What is the problem of free will?

If we were to read opinion pieces in our newspapers, we would find in them no shortage of worries about the levels of freedom enjoyed by institutions and individuals in our society. Most often, the worry would be that they enjoy too little freedom: for example, a favourite claim of journalists is, for obvious reasons, that there are undue restrictions on the freedom of the press. But sometimes the worry would be that a group or an individual enjoys too much freedom: if we picked up a certain type of newspaper, we would not have to search for long before we found an opinion piece designed to make us choke on our breakfast cereal by telling us in outraged tones of how the perpetrator of some terrible crime is, nevertheless, free while in prison to enjoy various pastimes of which many ordinary hardworking folk can only dream.

Sometimes our political leaders tell us that they are sending our armies into another country as they are worried about the cause of freedom. Perhaps it is our own freedom that they tell us this invasion will protect (the leader of this other country has weapons of mass destruction which directly threaten us, we may be told). Perhaps it is to the appropriately enhanced freedom of the citizens of this other country, or at least those who will be left alive after our armies have done their work, that we should look if we are to find a justification for their decision. Perhaps their real motive springs from the anticipated enhancement of our own economic freedom, once we have secured access to the natural resources of this country on our own terms. In any case, the notion of freedom does a lot of work – some reputable, some disreputable – in everyday political and social discussion and reasoning. There are certainly important issues in Political Philosophy which cluster around the concepts – concepts, plural, for the only thing that is certain is that there is more than one of them – of freedom as so deployed.

The issue to which this book addresses itself is deeper than any of these concerns. In order ultimately to plunge down to its depths, let me first whisk you up and away from all these worries and take you, in your imagination, to a land where you discover that the occasions for the sorts of worries sketched in the previous two paragraphs have simply disappeared: in this land, you are amazed to discover that all the problems of political and social freedom have been resolved to your complete satisfaction. Let me tell you a little bit more about this marvellous country and thus bring you to see why even here – where the reasons for all worries about political and social freedoms have evaporated – a worry about a deeper sort of freedom might yet remain.

Imagine then that you find yourself in a society which its citizens call ‘The People’s Republic of Freedom’. In this country, the citizens happily share the duties of agriculture; working to maintain and improve infrastructure and the environment; raising families; and caring for the sick and elderly. Their own good efforts and the technology available to them mean that they have ample time to pursue without restriction whatever religious, artistic and scientific projects they wish. You are fortunate enough to be guided around this utopia by its genial creator and are hence able to ask of him the questions that you have.

Being a lover of freedom above all else, you go looking for reasons to worry about the level of freedom enjoyed by people in this society. Early on, you read one of the newspapers and it seems, to your jaded eyes, particularly suspicious in not raising any concerns on this score whatsoever, so you inquire of the creator first what restrictions on the press are in place. To your astonishment, you learn that there are none at all. ‘Ah,’ you surmise, ‘so that must mean that sometimes people choke on their breakfast cereal by reading of the good treatment being given to criminals.’ Again, you learn, you are wrong in your presumption – this time for two reasons. First, no editor of any paper in The People’s Republic of Freedom ever wishes to print anything that would interfere in this manner with the freedom of his or her readers to enjoy their breakfast uninterrupted and so, even were there such a story to be told, he or she would not choose to tell it. But, secondly and more fundamentally, there is no such story to be told for there are no criminals.

You are incredulous; you have passed only unlocked doors since you have arrived and have, it suddenly occurs to you, not seen a single CCTV camera (in your home country, such things now seem to sprout from every lamppost). Surely sometimes, you say, the temptations provided by this chronic lack of security-mindedness on the part of the citizens of The People’s Republic of Freedom will have proved too great for one of them to resist. However, the creator benignly assures you that they have not and indeed over the next few weeks you are able to remove any cause for worry you might have on this score by experiment: try as you might, over several weeks living in this society, you cannot find a single person whom you can tempt to infringe, in even the slightest way, the laws or the freedoms of anyone else. The citizens are entirely benevolent.

Over an elongated period living amongst the citizens of The People’s Republic of Freedom, you cannot find any cause to worry to any extent at all about the political and social freedoms its citizens enjoy; their society thus seems to you maximally deserving of its name. And so, being a lover of freedom above all else, you ask the creator how you might yourself apply for citizenship. He is delighted to report that the procedure for becoming a full citizen is quick, easy, and guarantees success. He himself will guide you through it over the next few minutes. Very soon you will never need to worry about suffering from a lack of freedom again, he amiably assures you.

Guided by the creator then, you are ‘scanned’ by a sophisticated computer, the purpose of which, the creator tells you, he will describe in just a moment; you salute the country’s flag and pledge an oath of allegiance; and you drink to the dregs a large cup of the country’s national beverage, Freedom Froth. This is a beverage which – it now occurs to you for the first time – you have seen being drunk by the citizens of The People’s Republic of Freedom at every mealtime since you have arrived and yet had not hitherto tasted yourself. As soon as you have downed the Freedom Froth, you start to feel yourself becoming rather light-headed. ‘Do sit down’, the creator affably suggests, ‘the drink will take a couple of minutes to work its wonders, a couple of minutes which – with your agreement – I’ll happily fill by telling you a little bit more about the computer and just how it is that I have managed to eliminate any cause for worries about freedom within The People’s Republic of Freedom.’ The creator then goes on to tell you the following.

‘I was always impressed by Mill’s ideal that the state should try to grant to each citizen the maximum freedom compatible with a similar level being held by every other. But, at the same time, I was concerned that meeting that ideal by itself would not prevent there being an upper bound on the amount of freedom that each citizen could enjoy, an upper bound generated by the fact that citizens might have conflicting desires or make, as we might say, “conflicting choices”. You might be familiar with the thought as expressed casually with words such as, “Your freedom to extend your arm must finish just prior to your fist hitting my nose.” The presumption of such a case of course is that a citizen who chooses to extend his or her arm might find himself or herself in close proximity to a citizen who has the desire not to be hit on the nose. It thus quickly occurred to me that society could only be maximally free – this upper bound could only be removed – by eliminating conflicting desires and choices. But that, it struck me, was no physical impossibility; it was just a neurological engineering problem and I happened to have a suitable background. I thus spent several years working on three projects that, in conjunction, have enabled me to build a sustainable society of people about whose freedom no worries can legitimately be raised.’ Despite now feeling rather woozy, you lean forward to make sure you hear all that the creator goes on to say; from somewhere deep within you, a sense of unease is struggling up towards your consciousness.

‘The first project was a computer of such sophistication as to be infallible about what desires being had and choices being made by what citizens at what time would eliminate conflict and best enable the society to continue on in existence. The second was a transmitter capable of beaming this information in a targeted way into the heads of the relevant citizens. And the third, with which I’m particularly pleased as I was able to make it into a pleasant-tasting (even if rather gassy) beverage, was a drug which attuned people’s brains to pick up on this information and necessitated that, from within five minutes of their first drinking it, they could only ever have the desires the computer legislated and make the choices the computer decreed for them. Finally, I completed these three projects and thus The People’s Republic of Freedom was born, a society in which every citizen has maximal freedom – he or she can literally do whatever he or she wants or chooses – as a result of his or her being incapable of wanting or choosing anything other than whatever it is the computer tells him or her to want and choose. Your scanning by the computer is complete; your first instructions are already being transmitted; the five minutes needed for the drug you have drunk to take effect are almost up. Very soon now, you will mesh in perfectly with the rest of us, being incapable of wanting, choosing, or indeed – joy of joy! – thinking or believing anything other than what the computer determines you to want, choose, think and believe, being incapable then of having your freedom to act on your wants and beliefs as you choose frustrated by anyone or anything else.’ The feeling of unease that was growing in you is now taking the shape of a more determinate thought even as you become aware that the drug is making you care less about it. With a last effort, you try to articulate it. The words are almost there, but they seem somehow stuck on your lips. The creator pauses, noticing the look on your face. ‘What are you worried about?’ he asks.

What you are worried about in the last moments before the drink completes its work is the problem of free will to which this book addresses itself.

Chapter Two

Our Experience of Choice

INTRODUCTION

You have to start from where you are. So in this chapter we’ll start by looking at five thoughts which people ordinarily have about themselves as they first begin to reflect on their experience of themselves as – apparently – making free choices. Having treated these five thoughts in turn, we’ll see how they ‘lock together’ into a certain view about the existence and nature of free will, the view which we’ll follow tradition in calling ‘Libertarianism’.1 This, it will be argued, is the common-sense view of the subject of this book – what our everyday experience suggests to us about free will. This is the thing you feared that you were about to lose in joining The People’s Republic of Freedom as discussed in Chapter One. Of course our common-sense view of ourselves might be wrong and in subsequent chapters we’ll look at various arguments which suggest that various parts of it are wrong. But to assess the force of those arguments we need to know what they’re arguments against; we need to know what the common-sense view is. And the aim of this chapter is to get that pretty well nailed down by the end.

One point before we start properly: you may have noticed that this book has a glossary of key terms at the end. I’ll give a brief definition of each of these terms when they’re first used in argument in the chapters between now and then, but – especially if you’re new to the topic or the study of Philosophy – you might like to have a quick skim through the glossary now and fold the corner of the page down (unless you’re one of those people who has a principled objection to folding page corners down), so you can find it easily again as you read on.

* * *

In everyday life, we often suppose ourselves to be free to choose between several courses of action. Shall I read a book on the nature of free will or shall I watch television? If I watch television, shall I watch the news or The Simpsons? Moment by moment, paths seem to be opening before us. From these paths, we seem to be picking out one route into one future and turning aside from other routes, routes which would have taken us into other futures. Once we have passed the given moment in time at which we made a particular choice, we cannot, of course, go back to travel instead one of the roads not taken, or at least we cannot go back to travel it from the start. Sometimes we can cut across, as it were, from one path to another – for example, having started reading the book, I might well put it to one side after five minutes and turn on the television instead, finding myself to have missed only an insignificant moment or two of the programme I then watch. But we can never go back, only sometimes sideways in this sense and sometimes not even that. Sometimes, by the time we find ourselves wishing that we’d chosen differently, it is too late for us to find a way across to the route we now wish we’d chosen.2

When we are more or less contented with the way that a section of our lives has worked out, we seldom spend much time in reflecting on how our lives would have been different had we chosen differently during that period. And no doubt this is often psychologically healthy: reflecting on what might have been can lead to dissatisfaction with what is; and, if we can no longer cut across to an alternative path, one which we realize on reflection we wish we had taken from the start, this dissatisfaction threatens to be pointless. But sometimes even reflection that is dissatisfying and pointless in this sense can be satisfying and worthwhile in another, through being educative. In realizing that, had we chosen differently, things would now be in some significant way better for ourselves or others than they are and that we cannot in this instance recover the situation, we are often enabled thereby to commit ourselves all the more wholeheartedly to making better choices in the future. And sometimes of course reflection on what might have been can lead to satisfaction and even extreme relief, as when one realizes that only by the narrowest of margins did one avoid some disaster: ‘My goodness! Had I stepped out into the road then, as I almost did, I would have been hit by that bus.’ And whatever its psychological effects, we certainly can reflect on what our lives would now be like if we had chosen another route from the one that we actually chose and we can form more or less confident counterfactual judgements concerning such things.

For example, perhaps, as I finally switch off the television having watched The Simpsons, I find myself thinking something like the following. ‘Had I read the book, instead of watching television during that half hour, I would have learnt something about free will; had I watched the news rather than The Simpsons, I would have discovered more about current affairs. [Sigh.] But, then again, had I not watched The Simpsons, I would not have had as enjoyable a half hour as I have just had; the book would no doubt have proved boring; the news, no doubt, depressing. On balance, I wouldn’t choose differently were I to have that half hour again.’ And, of course, whenever we think a thought of this kind, we think that we think it truly; that is to say, we are committed to thinking that the world must be however it needs to be to make the thought true. If my thinking concerning the half hour I’ve just spent watching The Simpsons is to be true, it must really be the case that had I read the book or watched the news I would have learnt something but had a less enjoyable half hour.

Everyday reflections such as the above are necessary for us rationally to improve our judgement over time and thereby make better choices in the future than we did in the past; and, for everyday reflections such as this to be adequate reflections of reality, reality must thus be whatever way it needs to be to make thoughts such as this often true. What way is that?

The five thoughts we are looking at in this chapter are descriptions of five aspects of the answer to this question that we presuppose in everyday life. We shall deal with them in turn.

* * *

Here’s the first ‘everyday’ thought we have about ourselves:

Sometimes I could do something other than what I actually do.

It seems that, just below the surface of our everyday decision-making and reflection on it, we believe that our world has a character such that, at certain moments, it has a number of futures greater than one possible for it. For example, in my reflections after the half hour I spent watching The Simpsons on television, I am committed to thinking that if I could – as is of course impossible – go back in time to the moment when I actually chose to put the book aside and spend the next half hour watching television, then it would be possible for me at that time to put the television remote control to one side instead and take up the book and, from then on, the world would go on in a slightly different fashion from the way it actually went. It would go down that path on which I end up after the half hour (unless I then subsequently switch path once more) being more informed about free will. It seems then that we believe that our universe is one in which, at least for some times, whatever it is we actually do at a given time is just one of several things that it is possible that we do at that time. We could hence call this belief our belief that the actual does not exhaust the possible; what actually happens isn’t always the only thing that could happen; perhaps sometimes it is, but sometimes it is not. For obvious reasons, this assumption is sometimes called The Principle of Alternate Possibilities (though see the glossary). Let’s ‘unpack’ this assumption a bit, first by getting a bit clearer on what it amounts to and then by looking briefly at how we would ordinarily suppose ourselves to justify particular applications of it.

First then, what exactly do we mean when we say that the actual does not exhaust the possible or that alternative futures are possible for us? There are a number of different notions of possibility available and we wish to be clear-headed as we deploy this idea hereafter, so we shall take a moment distinguishing from one another the two sorts of possibility most relevant to our discussion. The two sorts of possibility that it is most important for us to distinguish from one another at this stage are epistemic possibility and physical possibility.

Epistemic possibility is apparent possibility, relative to a set of known facts; it is, we might say, ‘For all I/we know, . . .’ possibility. By way of example, let us imagine a scientist investigating the issue of whether the force present in the Big Bang was sufficiently great to mean that the universe will keep on expanding forever, even if ever more gradually (the result being a ‘heat death’), or whether, on the contrary, it was not great enough to produce such an effect and thus everything will eventually collapse back in on itself under gravitational attraction (ending in a ‘big crunch’). She might perform a few relevant experiments and, as a result of them, report her inconclusive findings with the words, ‘Either is possible’, meaning that, so far, she has not been able to rule out either the hypothesis of heat death or that of big crunch on the basis of the evidence she has gathered. Were she to do so, she would be using ‘possible’ to refer to epistemic possibility; each hypothesis is consistent with what she knows so far; the truth of each is apparently possible given what she knows about the physical universe. However, at a later stage of investigation, the scientist we are imagining might discover something rather more startling about the way the universe is constructed, something which she also wished to report with the sentence, ‘Either is possible’. With this sentence now she might be wishing to report her discovery that the force of the Big Bang was not so great as to necessitate heat death, but neither was it so small as to necessitate big crunch either; rather, which of these outcomes finally comes about will be brought about – she may be suggesting these new findings have led her to believe – by some not-yet-determined element. If this were the discovery she were trying to get across by saying of the heat death and the big crunch that ‘either is possible’, she would be using the second notion of possibility, physical possibility.

Physical possibility t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Our Experience of Choice
• Chapter Three: Incompatibilism
• Chapter Four: Indeterminism
• Chapter Five: Ultimate Authorship
• Chapter Six: Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index
• eCopyright