One Thought

The Standard Debate

The free will debate in philosophy is usually framed as being about two concepts: determinism and compatiblism.  Determinism is the idea that the world is, at a fundamental level, ordered and consistent: all events are caused, and the same causes always produce the same effects.  Nothing is left up to chance.  Everything that happens was destined to happen since the beginning of time.

It seems intuitive that free will is impossible if the world is deterministic.  After all, how can our actions be free if they were determined billions of years ago?  Compatibilists think this intuition is wrong: they claim that free will is possible even if determinism is true.  Compatibilists base their claim on their definition of “free will,” which they usually hold to mean something like “freedom from restraint.”  A person is free, they say, if she is of sound mind and isn’t bound in chains.

Most of us are free according to the compatibilists’ definition of “free will.”  But is “freedom from restraint” really what we mean by “free will”?  According to incompatibilists, the answer is no.  Incompatibilists insist “free will” implies that we, ourselves, are the ultimate, originating cause of our actions. If we have free will, we control our destinies.  Being free from restraint is not enough: if our actions were determined prior to our birth, incompatibilists say, we cannot be free.

I agree with the incompatibilists.  Or, more accurately, I agree that the compatibilist definition of “free will” is a bad one.  The free will debate would not receive nearly the attention it does if “free will” and “freedom from restraint” were synonymous.  People who are free from restraint are nevertheless bothered by the idea that they don’t possess free will.  The compatibilist definition does not capture what people mean when they say “free will.”

Incompatibilists usually turn to non-determinism in the hope that it will explain free will.  According to non-determinism, some events don’t have a cause.  They just happen randomly.  This view has credence: current theories in quantum mechanics do imply the universe is non-deterministic.  But can non-determinism explain free will?  If free will requires that we are the ultimate, originating cause of our actions (as the incompatibilists claim), how can non-determinism help explain it?  Random actions are not free ones.  Neither are “mostly-determined” actions with a little bit of randomness thrown in.  Non-determinism seems to offer no help.

The Problem Clarified

So both the compatibilists and the incompatibilists appear to have major problems.  The compatibilists have redefined “free will” to mean something trivial and uninteresting.  The incompatibilists cannot explain how non-determinism explains free will any more than determinism does.

This is the problem: “Free will,” as a concept, does not–and cannot–make sense.  When examined closely, the concept breaks down.  Whether determinism is true or not is irrelevant: the compatibilists and the incompatibilists are both wrong.

Of course, I need to explain why ”free will” doesn’t make sense.¹  Let’s first understand what “free will” would mean, if it did make sense.  The incompatitibilist definition is a good one to work with: to repeat, it states that we have free will if we, ourselves, are the ultimate, originating cause of our actions.  Of course, our actions may be caused partially by factors outside our control, be they laws of physics, randomness, or anything else.  Thus it might be more correct to say that we are free if we are an (rather than “the”) ultimate, originating cause of our actions.  What’s important is that our actions are not caused fully by factors outside our control.

Now we must ask ourselves: What would it mean for this definition to be true?  To answer this question, I’m going to look more closely at how we make decisions.  We base our decisions on reasons.  There are, broadly-speaking, two kinds of reasons: objective ones and subjective ones.  Objective reasons point to facts of the world.  They refer to things outside our minds: our physical environment, the limitations of our bodies, the behaviors of others, and so on.  Because objective reasons are external in nature, they can’t play a role in explaining free will.  Subjective reasons, on the other hand, are characteristics of our minds: our moods, emotional dispositions, tastes, and so on.  We base all of our decisions on a combination of objective and subjective reasons.²

A Series of Questions

From now on, I’ll use character as an umbrella term that encapsulates all subjective reasons.  Character makes us who we are.  If anything gives us free will, character is it.  But where does character come from?  Let’s look at an example.  Say I’m faced with a decision: I can eat an apple or I can eat an orange.  I like oranges better, so I pick the orange.  My decision is based on one subjective reason: my preference for oranges.  This seems like a clear-cut case of free will in action.

But things aren’t so simple.  To show why, I’m going to ask a series of questions.  First, why did I pick the orange?  Say my response is, “I don’t know–I just prefer oranges.  That’s just the way I am.”  If that’s the case, my preference appears to be arbitrary.  By my own admission I didn’t freely choose to prefer oranges, so how can my exercise of that preference be free?  It can’t: if I was not the ultimate, original cause of my preference for oranges, then I am not now the ultimate, original cause of my choice of an orange. 

But what if I did choose to prefer oranges?  Say I read a book a year ago that convinced me oranges are more environmentally sustainable than apples.  Since I value environmental sustainability, I decided from then on to choose oranges over apples.  Surely that choice makes my present choice of an orange free–right?

Wrong.  Once again, we must ask a question.  This time it is: Why do I value environmental sustainability?  Say my answer is, “I’m a moral person, and it’s immoral to destroy the environment.”  Unfortunately, that leads to a new question: Why am I a moral person?  If my response to this question is, “That’s just the way I am,” my decision is, as before, not a free one.  If on the other hand my response is, “Because my parents taught me to be that way,” yet another question arises: Why did I accept my parents’ teachings?

I won’t go further.  A pattern is emerging: each “Why?” question about character yields a “That’s just the way I am” response or a further question.  And since we haven’t made infinitely many decisions in our lives, “That’s just the way I am” will always come eventually.

For us to have caused our characters–and therefore our actions–we would have had to have caused ourselves, which is impossible.  The fact of the matter is: We are not the ultimate, original cause of our characters.  And because we aren’t, we are not the ultimate, original cause of our actions.  “Free will” does not make sense as a concept.  It’s definition implies an impossibility.

The Implications

This argument has important implications.  One of them is: It does not make sense to worry about whether we have free will.  After all, we can’t even imagine what it would mean to have free will, so how can we worry about not having it?  The concept breaks down under scrutiny.  Worrying about whether we have free will is like worrying about whether we’ll die before we’re born.  Neither worry has meaningful content.

The fact that we’re not the ultimate, original cause of our characters is interesting.  It means we’re not as radically self-determining as we might like to think we are.  We did not choose our core preferences and dispositions–we were created with them.  There’s no getting around this fact, and it has substantial implications for answers to meaning-of-life-type questions.  I haven’t worked them all out for myself yet, but I’m thinking about them.  More on this topic is sure to come.

Footnotes:

1. My argument is very similar to one put forth by British philosopher Galen Strawson.  Though I did come upon the general idea on my own, an online interview with Strawson greatly helped me to clarify my position.
2. Note that I’m not making a broad metaphysical claim with my distinction between objective and subjective reasons.  I’m using the distinction only in the hope that it make my argument more clear.  If you think all decision-making factors are subjective, that’s fine–the rest of my argument remains the same.