Without baggage, there would be no content
This essay is an attempt to persuade you of something that in practice you
cannot really doubt: your belief that you have free will. It will try to
reassure you that it is not naïve to feel that you are responsible, and indeed
morally responsible, for your actions. And it will provide you with arguments
that will help you answer those increasing numbers of people who say that our
free will is an illusion, or that belief in it is an adaptive delusion
implanted by evolution.
The case presented will not be a knock-down proof — indeed, it outlines an
understanding of free will that is rather elusive. It is of course much easier
to construct simple theoretical proofs purporting to show that we are not free
than it is to see how, in practice, we really are. For this reason, the
argument here will take you on something of a journey.
That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a
deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will.
Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing
on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised from
their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in
the net of material causation.
There is another challenge arising from a deeper argument, which seems to
hold even if the universe is not deterministic — namely, that unless we are self-caused,
we cannot be held responsible for what we do. To answer this challenge, we must
find the key to freedom in first-person being — in the very “I” for whom
freedom is an issue, the “I” who is capable of orchestrating the sophisticated
intentions, choices, and actions required to, for instance, publish an essay
denying its own freedom. The demand for complete self-causation places
impossible requirements upon someone before he can count as free —
requirements, what is more, that would actually empty freedom of its content
and hence of any meaning.
Central to the defense of freedom against the challenges of determinism and
the requirement for total self-determination will be to see how it is that we
are, rather, self-developing — as when we consciously train the
mechanisms of our own bodies to carry out our wishes even without conscious
thought — so that we are able to make natural events pushed by natural causes
the result of human actions led by human reasons.
We must start by characterizing the freedom that we are concerned with.
First, if I am truly free, I am the origin of those events I
deem to be my actions. Consequently, I am accountable for
them: I have ownership of them; I own up to them. Second, they are expressive of
me, in the sense that they cannot be separated from that which I feel myself to
be. In this regard, they are connected with my motives, feelings, and expressed
aims. My actions can be made sense of biographically.
But it is not enough that my actions originate with, and are expressive of,
me. I would not be free if all my willing just brought about what was already
inevitable. A truly free act is also one that deflects the
course of events. So I am free if, as a result of many actions that are
themselves free to deflect the course of events, and of which I am the origin,
I have an important hand in shaping my life. This is what is meant by “being
free.”
Freedom,
Determinism, and Moral Responsibility
There are many versions of the deterministic argument
against free will, but the most straightforward one is as follows. Since every
event has a cause, actions, which are simply a subcategory of events, also have
causes. Furthermore, the causal ancestry of actions is not confined to what we
would regard as ourselves, because we ourselves are the products of causes that
are in turn the products of other causes ad infinitum. The passage
from cause to effect is determined by unalterable laws of nature. For a
determinist, even intentions are simply another means by which the laws of
nature operate through us. In short, we are not the origins of our actions and
we do not deflect the course of events, but are merely conduits through which
the processes of nature operate, little parishes of a boundless causal web
arising from the Big Bang and perhaps terminating in the Big Crunch.
Most philosophers, then, think that physical determinism is incompatible
with free will. The incompatibilists fall into two camps: the libertarians who
save freedom by denying determinism, and the skeptics who affirm determinism and
so deny freedom. As we will see, however, there is reason to believe that
determinism and free will are compatible, since determinism applies only to the
material world understood in material terms.
The traditional deterministic arguments against free will have recently
been dressed up in some very fancy clothes. Evolutionary theory, genetics, and
neuroscience have been invoked in combination to create what we might dub
“biodeterminism.” According to biodeterministic thinking, our behavior
originates in the evolutionary imperative of survival: it is the unchosen
result of the fact that we, and in particular our brains, are so designed as to
maximize the chances of replicating our genome. Primarily through their
phenotypical expression in our brains, it is our genes, not we, that call the
shots.
The attacks on free will that arise from neuroscience go beyond
evolutionary psychology, and any adequate account of them would require far
more than the space of this essay. But there is one particular set of observations
that has captured the deterministic imagination and deserves special scrutiny:
those made by the late University of California, San Francisco
neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet on the relationship between intention and
action. For a long time, it has been known that the mental preparation to act
is correlated with a particular brain wave — the so-called “readiness
potential.” In Libet’s experiment, the action studied was very simple. Subjects
were asked to flex their wrists when they felt inclined to do so. They were
asked also to note the time on a clock when they experienced the conscious
intention to flex their wrists. Libet found that the readiness potential, as
timed by the neurophysiologist, actually occurred before the
conscious decision, as timed by the subject. There was a consistent difference
of over a third of a second.
The interpretation of these findings has been a matter of intense
controversy, much of it over the methodology. Some have argued that, since the
brain activity associated with certain voluntary actionsprecedes the
conscious intention to perform the actions, we therefore do not truly initiate
them. At best, we can only inhibit ongoing activity: we have “free won’t”
rather than “free will.” But many others have denied even this margin of
negative freedom and have seen Libet’s experiments as confirming what we
feared: that our brains are calling the shots. We are merely the site of
those events we call “actions.”
Another attack on the notion of free will, from Galen Strawson, a professor
of philosophy at the University of Reading, goes beyond the arguments from
determinism and purports to prove the inherent impossibility of freedom and
moral responsibility so long as we are not self-caused. Strawson’s basic
argument, articulated in numerous articles and books, can be understood as a
syllogism: First, in order to be truly morally responsible for one’s actions,
one would have to be causa sui, the cause of oneself. Second,
nothing can be causa sui, the cause of itself. Therefore no one can
be truly morally responsible. Performing acts for which one is morally
responsible requires, Strawson argues, that we should be self-determining — but
this is impossible because the notion of true self-determination runs into an
infinite regress.
Strawson’s argument is flawed, as we shall see, because its premises are
flawed. But it is nevertheless useful because it clarifies the underlying force
of deterministic arguments: that whatever I am has been caused by events,
processes, and laws that I am not — and that in order to be free, I have to
escape having been caused. Strawson’s argument is the reduction to absurdity of
deterministic assumptions, for in the end such arguments require that in order
to be free, I have to escape being determined, and in order to escape being
determined, I have to have brought myself into being — but in order to have
brought myself into being, of course, I have to be God. If I am to be
responsible for anything that I do, I have to be responsible for everything
that I am, including my very existence. Since I cannot pre-exist my
own existence so as to bring my existence about, this is a requirement that
cannot be met.
This argument from self-determination will be dealt with by looking a
little harder at the question of whether or not a self is causa sui,
and, closely related, at whether a self’s actions can be seen as expressing
itself. A self is certainly not the cause of itself overall and ultimately —
but it is the cause of itself in a way that is sufficient to underpin free
will.
The
Origins of Actions in the Contents of Consciousness
The case for determinism will prevail over the case for
freedom so long as we look for freedom in a world devoid of the first-person
understanding — and so we will have to reacquaint ourselves with the
perspective that comes most naturally to us. Recall that, if we are to be
correct in our intuition that we are free, the issue of whether or not we are
the origin of our actions is central. Seen as pieces of the
material world, we appear to be stitched into a boundless causal net extending
from the beginning of time through eternity. How on earth can we then be points
of origin? We seem to be a sensory input linked to motor output, with nothing
much different in between. So how on earth can the actor truly
initiate anything? How can he say that the act in a very important sense begins
with him, that he owns it and is accountable for it — that “The buck starts
here”?
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