Philosophy 101
Free Will
Free will has been a topic of intense debate in various fields ranging from philosophy and literature to law and the social sciences. As far as philosophy is concerned, thinkers are generally grouped into two broad schools and vary according to how strongly they agree with them. These schools are determinism and indeterminism. By and large determinists believe that the universe is run by a strict sequence of cause leading to effect while indeterminists believe that between cause and effect there is free will, or choice, which means that an effect need not be a direct corollary of a cause. This paper situates itself, as many thinkers have done, between the two and will hereafter attempt to define and defend the stance taken.
Before attempting to enter into the grey area between the two schools, one must clearly understand what each school says. Determinism is, to be very simple, the belief that every effect must have a cause. Every occurrence has been pre-determined by a huge number of factors and hence humans cannot claim to have free will of any sort. This has the further implication that, having no free will, one is not morally responsible for ones actions. In the article Your Move: The Maze of Free Will by Galen Strawson, the example of a person having to choose between spending their last $10 on a pastry or donating it to a good cause perfectly illustrates the problem with conceptualizing free will. Sartre, as the author himself note, believed that it was at the utter end of reason, where one meets the ‘existential abyss’ one is ‘condemned’ to have free will. However Strawson goes on to refute this claim by taking into account that every decision is preceded by a state of mind – a fixed mental state which has been determined by one’s genes and early childhood experiences, what he has labeled as ‘P1’. Assuming that the chooser is of a generous disposition and decides to donate the $10, it is clear that the situation was pre-determined by genes and influences. However, if, given the generous disposition, the chooser decides to spend the money on the pastry, it might seem that she is acting against influences and thereby exhibiting free will. This, Strawson argues, is not true. Despite the semblance of free will, the choice to spend the money and not donate it was determined by the very same mental framework which would have caused to the chooser to donate her money at the first impulse. Further experience and influence working on the P1 set would have pre-determined her to spend and not donate and hence she is not morally bound by the choice (if it could actually be called a ‘choice’).
In the article Do You have Free Will? Yes, it’s the only Choice, the author John Tierney argues from a scientific standpoint that free will is essentially a desperately desired fact which humans use, regardless of their genetic, cultural, or other influences, to explain the universe they inhabit. It can be deduced from this that free will is an illusion which the mind creates in order to make sense of an incompletely known universe. In the experiment where a ball is rolled into a box and then the researcher puts her hand inside a box and tests to see whether children they believed that the experimenter putting her hand into the box was as pre-determined as the ball rolling into it, they almost unanimously responded that it was not – the researcher had a choice. The researcher then moves into the realm of soft determinism, or compatibilism – the belief that while a pre-determined universe does exist, humans are still endowed with free will insomuch that they can choose how to respond to it.
This pseudo-free will, the author argues is essential to the functioning of society. In the experiments he quoted it is clear that given a system where one has the liberty to act either by the rules or to break them, one naturally breaks the rules when told that there will be no consequences to it. Furthermore, when additional stimuli are present (such as the knowledge of Crick’s views on genes and their nature a final determiners of behavior or the monetary incentive for answering each question correctly) it is seen that upto 70% of the participants cheat their way through the tests. This is because when one is told that all actions are pre-determined moral responsibility no longer lies with the functionary. This has deep implications for fields such as law because, in the absence of free will, ‘law’ becomes an all or nothing game – the modern legal system, based on positivism (Morrison 345-350) cannot exist and the rule of tooth and club will come into force (owing to the fact that in a pre-determined universe, actions are based on the greatest force, be it physical, chemical, or ideological). Clearly, from a socio-legal stand point, the illusion of free will is essential to keep society in any kind of order.
Hard determinists, like Freud or Foucault would refute even this stating that it is either childhood influences (Kahn 201 - 220) or social conditioning (Foucault 232). While Sartre (as stated above) and Schopenhauer (as quoted in Tierney’s article) argue that regardless of the fact that the universe might be pre-determined, the very act of thinking or saying ‘I choose to’ is a statement of free will. This brings into the question the brain and mind. Is there a difference?
Sartre placed himself squarely in the camp of indeterminism. He believed that freedom is essentially a state of mind and one can be free regardless of situation. Coming from a World War II veteran who spent time in a Prisoner of War camp, one is tempted to believe that he must know what he’s talking about, given his first hand experience of imprisonment and being denied freedoms most of us take for granted (Griffith 120-122). However, the determinist’s answer to this is found in Strawson’s article. Sartre’s incarceration simply acts as his P1 set of influences. His later stance on freewill can be seen simply as a response to the life he was forced to live as a prisoner of war, meaning his brand of freewill was pre-determined by the effects of the second World War and therefore not freewill at all.
D’Holbach had argued that it is only in religion – the area of unquestioned faith (or unchallenged ignorance), that any kind of ‘free will’ can exist. A truly educated person, i.e., one who is not merely indoctrinated, could never be under the delusion that free will exists – the material mechanical world is self-sufficient and therefore pre-determined. It could then be said that the mind is the realm of belief and therefore need not, or cannot, exist in a rational human. It could be inferred from d’Holbach’s work that any kind of belief or religious activity is mankind’s attempt at succeeding the natural order and imposing (or self-imposing) free will (d’Holbach, translated by Holohan xv-xx). This can further be equated to Darwin’s vision of evolution which shows each specie trying to evolve and attain supremacy, thereby causing faith and belief to be nothing more than the acting out of a natural law. In other words, even the mechanism for the attainment of free will is pre-determined. Naturally, then, the mind is nothing more than a fiction and the brain is all that exists.
In another work by d’Holbach titled ‘Defense of Determinism’ clearly outlines how the mind, or the ‘soul’, is, in the first place, conceptualized as a free agent, and in the second, is, in fact, bound by the same limits and causes of change as the body which it is said to inhabit. D’Holbach shows that the soul changes and shifts over time. This change was traditionally believed to be proof of the soul’s agency – a characteristic of a being which possesses freewill. However, he shows, almost immediately, that such an idea of the soul can only be propounded in religion – an area where the immortality and ultimate agency of the soul is accepted without question. He further goes on to analyze religion’s use of rewards and punishment. An agent possessing freewill will naturally choose the option which best benefits itself. Taking this idea into a secular field d’Holbach shows that the idea of ‘deliberation’, which can be seen as man’s truest expression of free will – choosing between options. But here again he is vindicated by his desire for a favorable outcome, whether immediate or in the future. The multiplicity of choice is therefore not proof of freewill, rather it shows that man, having many different motives, i.e., many different outcomes which are desirable, is pre-determined to deliberate and eventually choose whichever outcome is most favorable to himself (Pojman 370-374).
It is here then, that one can situate the compatibilism – the belief that despite the existence of pre-determined universe, choice does indeed exist. It is this choice which many thinkers and writers have mistaken for freewill – the all encompassing ability to choose regardless of cause and effect. Having factored in the advances in psychology and science, one sees that, though freewill as traditionally conceived does not exist, choice very much does. This choice is where, one can argue, is where one’s moral responsibility lies and so the whole system of law and justice need not be overhauled due to the non-existence of freewill.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. ‘Discipline and Punishment’. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Vintage-Random House, 2012. Print.
Griffith, Meghan. ‘Free Will: The Basics’. New York: Routledge. 2013. Print.
Kahn, Michael. ‘Basic Freud: Psychoanalytic Thought for the Twenty First Century’.
New York: Basic Books. 2002. Print.
Morrison, Wayne. ‘Jurisprudence: From the Greeks to Post-Modernity’. London:
Cavendish, 1997. Web. 30 November. 2014.
Paul Henri Thirtieth Holbach, Baron d’. ‘Christianity Unveiled’. Trans. David M.
Holohan. Surrey, UK: Hodgson Press, 2002. Web. 1 December. 2014.
Pojman, Louis P. ed. ‘Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary
Readings 3rd Ed.’. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004.
Strawson, Galen. ‘Your Move: The Maze of Free Will’. The New York Times 22 July
2010. Web. 29 November. 2014.
Tierney, John. ‘Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice’. New York Times
21 March 2011. Web. 29 November. 2014.
