We may be better off acting as if free will does not exist (even if it does)
A while back I participated in a parliamentary style debate “at” Trinity College Dublin on the subject of free will. I put “at” in quotes…
A while back I participated in a parliamentary style debate “at” Trinity College Dublin on the subject of free will. I put “at” in quotes because I was calling into a zoom meeting from my office in Atlanta.
I was invited as a guest debater to argue against the proposition that people have free will. In a parliamentary style debate like this, the goal isn’t to determine if free will exists. Instead it is to determine if we should accept that free will exists. Unlike in physics, in government it is perfectly acceptable to adopt unestablished facts as policy if they are for the public good.
As a physicist and a philosopher, my debating tactic was naturally to argue that free will doesn’t exist. Truth is important and so we should just accept the facts as policy.
This was despite having argued in print many times that free will does exist or at least is plausible.
A lot of the problem with the philosophical proposition “I have free will” is that none of those words are well defined. In philosophy, arguments are deductive, based on definitions. Thus, you have to establish what “I” means and what it means for “I” to “have” something before you can even get to free will. Is “I” some kind of non-corporeal soul or is it just the human brain? Or is it just a part of it responsible for consciousness? Does consciousness exist as a unique entity or is it a collection of phenomena?
You can see the rabbit hole this gets into.
Now, suppose you establish what “I” means and you identify that with the brain; then you have to indicate what it means to have a certain property like free will. Is it okay if that property is outside conscious awareness, for example? The well-known psychiatrist and author of the best selling tome on the right and left brains The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, argues that it is.
So far, we haven’t even gotten to defining free will. In English, free will is defined as having the power to do otherwise, all things being equal. Thus, it means that at any given decision point, there exists a range of possible futures with identical pasts up to that point, and the only difference is what decision you made.
Interestingly, this definition says nothing about how you make decisions or even if “you” are making them. They could be completely random. This definition necessarily sidesteps the whole question of what “I have” means. It just assumes there is an I that has this ability, and that somehow affects what happens in the universe.
It also doesn’t mean that you have the ability to actually change the future with your decisions. In other words, it doesn’t mean you live in a non-deterministic universe. It only says that things “could” be different if you made a different decision, not that you actually have the power to make different decisions. That falls into the “I have” argument. In particular, some define “I” not by some physical or non-corporeal entity but precisely by the decision you would make in a given situation. By this definition of “I” your future is deterministic because if you could make a different decision, you wouldn’t be you.
This is the premise of the novel The Midnight Library by Matt Haig which I highly recommend to anyone who feels lost in life. Not to give any spoilers, but the main character has the opportunity to live a few hours or days in the bodies of copies of herself who made different decisions during the course of her life. Although these copies are more or less physically the same and have the same DNA, she quickly finds that they aren’t really her. Her decisions, it seems, are a product of who she is deep inside. Thus, regretting a decision is, in a sense, a desire to be someone else.
This definition of free will is called compatibilism because it means that determinism is “compatible” with free will. In other words, you are free to make different choices but, because of who you are, you won’t.
There is even a theology based on this idea dating back to the 16th century called Molinism after the Jesuit Priest Luis de Molina which challenges the non-compatibilist determinism of Calvin as well as the non-determinism of Arminianism. (This was considered a matter of life and death during the Protestant reformation but nowadays is a niche issue.)
Only philosophers and people who study philosophy usually understand this subtlety which is why you get terrible popular articles and whole books (not naming names) about free will which assume that determinism and free will are not compatible from the outset.
This means that even if science establishes that the universe is deterministic, which is far from clear given the quantum measurement problem, that does not kill free will at all.
Free will is probably an unanswerable question, in fact, because it depends more on how we define it than any measurement we can make.
As it is often the case with philosophy, accepting an answer to the question based on some reasonably consistent set of definitions is more important than whether that answer is “correct”. Once you accept an answer, it informs your whole outlook on life, especially your attitude towards justice and ethical behavior.
Indeed, philosophy is primarily concerned with free will not as an isolated question but because its existence determines whether people are morally responsible for their actions.
If we accept the case that free will exists in either a non-deterministic or compatibilist way, then people are making decisions to do good or evil and are morally responsible for those decisions. If we deny free will entirely however, then people are not responsible for the good and evil they do. They are simply like machines that are either working well or broken.
Let’s look at each of the three cases in turn:
Non-deterministic Free Will
In a non-deterministic world, many possible futures stem from our each and every choice. Hence, we have a moral responsibility to others, to the human family. Whether the future is a bright and joyous one or a living hell is up to us.
This is an onerous position in which to place people. It means that when we make a decision, and we don’t like the way our lives turn out as a result, we really could have made a different choice and had a different life. It also means, however, that we have the power to change things for ourselves. We have agency.
The novel by Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, which most people know about from the hit Broadway musical or from the movies based on it, is all about the power people have to make different choices, that who they are and how they behave in life morally is not fixed. Now, this does not necessarily require a non-deterministic definition of free will to be true, but, conversely, believing we can choose who we are and who we become seems to prefer this kind of free will. We can change or not. It is up to us.
On the other hand, the justice system in this model of free will is perfectly justified in punishing those who choose to do wrong because they could have done otherwise.
Most religions assume that people who do evil choose to do so. Only those possessed by demons, for example, do evil without choosing it, and they are not held accountable but are in need of rescue. Likewise, those who do evil and are under the weight of their sins are free to change their ways. This is what the word “repent” means.
The debate on whether the universe is non-deteministic goes on, but even if it is, it isn’t clear how we are responsible for our choices in such a universe. That is, a non-deterministic universe, from a physical perspective, is simply one where physical states lead to multiple possible other physical states. This is usually characterized by randomness, not by deliberate decisions. Thus, non-determinism doesn’t help the argument for free will.
Compatibilist Free Will
In a deterministic world with compatibilist free will, we are free to make different choices but for one reason or another we will always choose not to. In this world, some people are just evil, and it is perfectly logical to believe they will always choose to do evil. This is the world in which Jean Valjean’s nemesis Javert lives. To him, Jean Valjean can never redeem himself because he once did wrong. There can be no repentance.
Many people, usually on the “left” side of the political spectrum, have fallen into this mode of thinking these days. Cancel culture is all about labeling people as good or evil based on a few tweets or statements, even if they were made decades or centuries ago. Shifting moral codes are applied to the past in blanket fashion and used to condemn people living in a different time. People are not given the chance to say they’ve changed. Once the mob turns against someone, it is game over. People have lost jobs and even become pariahs because of this.
There is nothing inherent in compatibilism that people can’t change and repent. Again, it is the converse assumption, that people can’t change, that seems to prefer compatibilism. If they do change, it was because that is the sort of person they are, the sort of person who can change.
In a compatibilist world, harsh justice justifies itself based on the premise that people do wrong because of who they are. Hence, they must be kept away from the rest of society, eliminated. Even if the definition of what is wrong changes, people can be held accountable for their past actions because now they are the “wrong sort of person”. They are still morally responsible, which justifies the punishment, but now there is no escape.
In compatibilist world, your past is the way it is because of the sort of person you are. If you regret anything, stop because by regretting your decisions you are really asking to be a different person. Those decisions were not only a reflection of your own identity but also a chance to change and become a better person.
In my own life, I often ask if, given the information I had at the time, would I have made a different decision, and the answer is always no. I know myself well enough to know who I used to be and, just because I would make a different choice now, doesn’t mean that I would have then. That choice I made then became a part of me and made me the person I am today.
No Free Will
In a world absent free will, we are simply observers watching events unfold around us. We cannot make different decisions. The notion of identity in this model is completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what “I” and “have” mean at all because nothing we do affects anything. The universe as a whole unfolds the way it always was meant to.
There is freedom in this idea. Not only are you free from having to make your own decisions or be responsible for them, you can also get rid of the philosophical need for a personal identity. You and the universe are free to be one.
A justice system that assumes there is no free will treats wrongdoers as broken machines in need of fixing. A good example is the Norwegian system which treats all imprisonment as a chance for rehabilitation, even for the worst offenders like mass murderers. Whether the system would work in other countries like the USA is open to debate, but in any prison reform movement answering the free will and hence moral responsibility question is critical.
If people have no free will, it is illogical to hold them accountable for their actions. You have two choices: harshly eliminate them as the body does with cancer cells or treat them as a case for repair and rehabilitation as the body does with living tissue.
This can go in utopian or dystopian directions. Science fiction is full of worlds where the only punishment for crime is death. Other stories explore the possibility that one could directly repair or alter the brain to become more moral. These approaches to moral responsibility implies a no free will philosophy.
Christianity’s Calvinism takes the harsh approach. People are fated to either damnation or salvation based on God’s decree and not their own choices. God threshes the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. From a certain point of view, this is perfectly logical if you accept that God decided to make a world with people who are inherently evil. You cannot say those people are responsible for their evil. They were simply born that way by some mysterious divine intention.
Other Christian philosophies, by the doctrine of original sin, actually explore the idea that repentance and asking for God’s intervention, i.e., being saved, is a form of repair. We on our own cannot become good, but we can ask God to fix us. This suggests that we have limited free will. We can choose to ask to be saved, but we do not have the freedom to make moral choices without God’s help.
As a general philosophy, limited free will can be likened to being a slave with no ability to make any choices for themselves except one: to escape. In Christianity, this is by prayer and repentance to escape from sin and death. In Buddhism, it is by enlightenment to escape from suffering, birth, and death. There is something deep in the human psyche that recognizes that life, no matter how pleasant, is a kind of slavery. We are slaves to the circumstances of our births. We are slaves to our forthcoming deaths. They bracket us in. Can there be free will without overcoming them?
Another Christian concept is universalism, the idea that God saves everyone. In a no free will universe, this makes a lot of sense. If people cannot choose to do good or evil, then they have no responsibility at all. All that responsibility falls on God or the universe, the source of being. A good God in such a universe would surely choose to “repair” his wayward creatures, not condemn them for faults that are not their own.
In any case, if we accept physical and biological determinism and reject the concept of compatibilism, from a moral perspective, people who do wrong should be repaired and rehabilitated. Even if we do have free will, this may be the more ethical perspective because it results in better outcomes for those who enter the justice system. To be clear, we need not let people off the hook for their evil actions. Rather, we see evil as the result of many converging circumstances that, if they are changed, eliminate the evil rather than emanating from a particular person’s identity or free choices. These circumstances could be psychological or they could be physical. Yet, because the need for recognizing personal identity and responsibility in a no free will philosophy is diminished, it is easy to see the need for some people to change or be changed.
Perhaps this too seems dystopian. There is a slippery slope from correcting the worst among us down to eugenics, trying to make us all the same, all fitting a standard. Then again, this isn’t much different than punishing the smallest crime with death. Slippery slopes are only a danger if you allow yourself to slip too far.
Given that punitive justice systems, whether official as in the criminal justice system or unofficial as in the twitterverse, are in need of reform, it makes sense to question the philosophical basis for their holding people accountable. Assuming that people are morally responsible for their actions may lead to greater wrongs and worse outcomes than assuming they are automata in need of repair.