Two Short Essays on Free WIll

This post might help some who have read my previous posts understand better why I thing the arguments I espoused there are strong. The first is a preparoty essay. The second essay was written to a friend in response to why I didn't believe the death penalty; I've left it in because what it says is still relevant to what I posted in The Ethics of Faith.

Free Will

The problem of free will can be stated as follows: how is it possible to reconcile determinism with the common sense notion of an agent’s ability to freely choose one option of action over another? In what follows I will explain what ‘determinism’ exactly means, and examine and evaluate the major responses to the problem.

Determinism

To say that determinism is true is to hold the following things:

1. There are universal causal laws (i.e. laws of nature).
2. The universe can be described by a set of propositions describing the ontological features of what composes the universe.
3. These propositions are bound by the universal causal laws.

This version may be too strict but the general point of determinism is preserved: the events in the universe, which involve what makes up the universe, follow strict laws of nature. General everyday ‘laws’ such as ‘fire burns human flesh’ serve as good examples, though it is possible that this law could be disconfirmed. What is meant by ‘law of nature,’ then, is the fundamental causal laws that apply over what makes up the universe and for which no disconfirming events are possible. In the case of fire and human flesh, the true laws of nature would be those that cover and explain what is going on in both the flesh burning and non-flesh burning events. The laws of nature for this universe are generally taken to be the basic laws of physics plus certain logical truths. It’s important to point out, though, that the determinist isn’t committed to saying what exactly the laws of nature are; the determinist is merely claiming that there are such laws.

Notice that determinism is ontologically unbiased. The determinist isn’t necessarily committed to physicalism – the thesis that material objects are the only object in the universe. He could admit mental objects (or states, properties, etc.) into his ontology; the only stipulation he would impose on these entities is that they follow strict causal laws of their own, whether ‘physical to mental’, ‘mental to mental’ or ‘mental to physical’.

Hard Determinism

Hard determinism answers the problem of free will by rejecting the agent’s ability to freely choose anything. What the hard determinist means by ‘freely choose’ is that the agent can make this claim: “I could have done other than what I did in fact do. I don’t mean that states of affairs outside of my mental states (which, in most cases, would be the ‘decision box’ where the outcome of choice deliberation is made) could have been different and led me to a different choice than what I did make. I mean that the same state of affairs that did hold in this choice-procedure could have held again and it was possible for me to reach a decision different than what I made.”

The hard determinist rejects this outright. The central rebuttal is that the mental states themselves (or neurophysical states, ‘soul’ states or whatever makes up the agent’s ‘decision box’) are composed of objects that follow strict causal laws. Whatever it was that went into the decision process, if it was an object than it was subject to a strict causal law; because strict causal laws are never broken, what in fact happened could not have not happened. An easy way to picture the hard determinist’s universe is to say that, given a complete description of the universe at a specific time coupled with the laws of nature, it is possible to completely describe every consequent state of the universe.

This view is supported by most of the major sciences, thus the one involving the least revision of common sense notions about reality. It’s often objected, however, that there would be no moral responsibility in the hard determinist’s universe. The very reason the free will problem is a problem, the critic says, is because determinism conflicts with the personally valuable idea that people are responsible for what they do. In a conflict between values, one can’t just dismiss the other and claim the spoils of victory.

The obvious line of response for the hard determinist is that scientific facts trump moral ‘facts’ because the events we call moral facts are composed, literally, out of the objects that makes up scientific facts. To avoid this unseemly response, though, he could reply that morality does exist in his universe, albeit in a different form. A hard determinist could consistently jail an axe murderer, not because it was up to the axe murderer to be the kind of person that kills someone with an axe, but because he is already that kind of person and cannot safely be freed into the community.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism states that there are uncaused events in the universe; this is generally meant to refer to some human actions which have moral ‘worth’. More precisely, the libertarian is committed to the proposition that the universe is governed by non-strict causal laws. The force of this argument comes from an intuitive appeal to the reality of free choice from the agent’s perspective. The idea that we have no free choice, the argument runs, is so appalling to the average person that our common sense notion of free choice must correspond to something. That something, for the libertarian, involves uncaused events in the agent’s decision box. This view undermines the determinist’s suggestion that all events in the universe are ultimately predictable; it allows that the agent, given the same set of external circumstances, could have chosen a different outcome than she did, in fact, chose.

The determinist will obviously respond that the libertarian’s universe doesn’t jive with the universe proposed by the fundamental laws of science. It seems, however, that the libertarian can easily charge the determinist with the same fallacious thinking that the hard determinist charged his critic with: you’re merely setting one set of values (‘scientific values’) over another and declaring victory. One would only accept the scientific view if one already was a determinist in the first place, which is no threat to a full-fledged libertarian.

Nevertheless, the libertarian’s position does have a weakness, which happens to be the same as the hard determinist’s problem: the libertarian universe is one without moral responsibility. The reason the libertarian is one at all, she says, is because she views the causal chain of decision leading outside her decision box as a grave threat to the idea that she is ultimately responsible for her actions and thus deserving of praise or blame. So, to counter this, she posits a thesis opposite that of determinism: there are uncaused events. But it’s hard to see how this saves responsibility. If the events in the agent’s decision box are uncaused, the no one is responsible for their existence, including the agent. The moral problem with determinism is that the causal responsibility ultimately leads back outside the agent. The libertarian’s problem is that causal responsibility eventually leads back to nothing! An uncaused event is just that. No one can be responsible for its existence, even the agent in which the uncaused event happens.

Because of this, the determinist tops off, we should reject the libertarian world view altogether. The main reason we shirked the scientific world view is because the libertarian argued doing that would save moral responsibility. Now that we see even her view can’t handle this problem, her call for the rejecting of scientific determinism should go unheard.

Soft Determinism

Soft determinism tries to answer the problems of both hard determinism and libertarianism by simply accepting both determinism and moral responsibility. The soft determinist’s argument would run: “The question isn’t about the origin of the causal chain of responsibility. It’s about what, in fact, happens in the agent. As long as the process in the agent’s decision box is unimpeded by anything other than what normally constitutes the decision box, then the agent is morally responsible for the actions that result from it.” Thus, nothing from the scientific determinist world view would have to be abandoned while keeping the common sense notion of moral responsibility in tact.

The obvious objection to this view is the soft determinist’s very first claim: why is the causal chain of responsibility not important? The soft determinist says that the events that happen in the agent’s decision box is the important thing, not where the causes of the events that initiates the decision making process come from. But this question can be asked in turn: how was the agent’s decision box formed? It hardly seems fair to the agent that we will hold him responsible for the outcomes of his decision box if the way the box is constituted is out of the agent’s control. If the agent made a decision as to how to form his decision box (active learning, possibly), that decision would have to come from another decision box the agent possessed (it’s irrelevant whether the old one is ‘discarded’ or ‘transformed’ into the new one) and the same problem of responsibility faces the previous box. In sum, either the agent made a decision as to how his decision box is formed – in which case another decision box was used in which he had no role in how it was shaped, or the agent did not make such a decision – in which case it’s hard to see how he could them be held responsible for the way decisions are processed in his box.

One tack the soft determinist could take in response to this criticism is to reformulate his answer entirely. Harry Frankfurt, in his paper Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, famously argues that what instead matters for moral responsibility in a deterministic universe is whether the agent identifies with whatever his desire (the outcome of his decision box) is. We are to imagine two people in identical situations with one important difference: the first person has a cocaine addiction and acts on it, all the while assenting (to use the best word) to what he is doing; the second person has a cocaine addiction and acts on it, but this person greatly desires not to succumb to his addictive impulses and ultimately fails. In both instances the decision is made by the agent to do the drug; however, we are more inclined to say that the second person was forced against his will to follow through with the outcome of his decision box. Thus, we are more apt to lay moral blame on the first person, who had no desire not to do the drug.

This response is interesting, only in it shows how some people just don’t seem to grasp the central point of determinism. One can simply ask: what caused the agent to desire or not desire to follow through with his decision? If the desire is the result of a decision process, the exact same dilemma once again faces the soft determinist. It doesn’t seem to me to do any good to merely assert that what’s important is the fact that the agent does desire or not desire a given decision outcome: if the agent is not responsible for the occurrence of the so-called higher order desire to follow through (it makes no difference for this objection whether the desire to follow through a decision is a first-, second- or third-order desire), then he is not responsible period.

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Can you choose what you want to do? I don't think you can, really. Now, you'd say that you have free will because you are not led around by your emotions. If I decided things strictly based on "gut feelings", I wouldn't have free will since it wouldn't be "me" doing the deciding; my emotional drives would be doing that.

You choose what you want to do based on reasons, yes... but you have to be the kind of person that desires to base your decisions on reasons and not emotions. Now, that's the question: how do you decide to be that? Can you really choose to be the kind of person you are?

Answer: no. In order to choose to be what kind of person you want to be, you already have to be something. An agent (say X) already has to be a person with preferences in order to make a choice. X, say, can't be an agent with no desire to be one way or another and then choose to be a certain kind of person. What would he base his decision on? How would he even come about to be impelled to make a decision in the first place?

So, in order to be able to choose what kind of person X wants to be (say, person*), X already has to be a kind of person (we'll call person** the kind of person he already is). Now, did he choose to be person**? If he did choose to be person**, he had to have already been person***, since you have to already be a person to make any kind fo choice. This is a vicious regress. If we follow this reasoning:

1) the regress continues forever... which is absurd

2) the regress ends at nothing... which is absurd

3) the regress ends at some state of affairs over which you had no control

So you see, eventually, if you follow the regress far enough, you will run into either three states of affairs that determined the kind of person you are:

a) culutre - you are the kind of person you are because of the ideas, beliefs, ideologies and power systems present in a society. You didn't choose (say) to value rugged individuality on your own will, the belief system corresponding to that was one of the factors that shaped your personality. Since you didn't choose what kind of culture you grew up in, you didn't choose the kind of person you are.

b) genes - you are the kind of person you are because of the genes you have. Remember the first rejoinder I gave against not having free will: "I don't follow my emotions, I use my reasoning, so I have free will." Well, that has a weakness also. Yes, your emotions are a product of your genetic makeup dictating the way your brain works... but so is your reasoning skills. Those aren't just there; your genes formed your reasoning capacity. It would also seem to dictate how great your reasoning capacity is during the course of your life. Since you didn't choose the way your body and mental capacities interact with each other, you didn't choose the kind of person you are.

c) atomic - it's not necessary to go this far, but it's still true. As far as we can tell, there are set laws of physics in the universe. There's only one way that things could have turned out in the world, given the initial state of atoms and the laws of physics. You are make up entirely of atoms. Thus, since you didn't choose the way the atoms are distributed throughout the universe, you didn't choose what kind of person you are. Someone might object, saying that quantum physics says that there are uncaused events (right now, there are trillions and trillions of infinitely tiny subatomic particles popping in and out of existence between your face and the computer screen). Since there are uncaused events, they say, determinism is false. Well, okay, they are uncaused. Which means that no one choose for them to happen. If there's uncaused quantum events happening in your brain, so what? You still didn't cause the events to happen.

So, what has this got to do with the death penalty? Simple: it is impossible that Scott Peterson could have not killed Lacy. Scott didn't choose to kill her (the same way you didn't choose to read this) since it was impossible for him (or you) not to choose to be the type of person whose thought process, in relation to certain environmental factors, leads him to kill his wife (reads a twoplustwo post). So, he does not deserve to be killed. Now, he should still be put in prison, but only for pragmatic reasons: since he is that kind of person, we need to keep him away from society even though he didn't choose to be that kind of person. However, he doesn't deserve to go to prison, since that implies he is responsible for his action.

I'll leave you with some words from Clarance Darrow, in his famous closing statement from the Loeb and Leopold trial: here; also: here

"Why did they kill [Bobby Franks]? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood...

I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that in back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance, which man cannot solve...

Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out of these infinite combinations he was born with out [moral sense]? If he is, then there should be a new definition for justice. Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had? Is he to blame that his machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know. I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not wise enough to fix it. I know that somewhere in the past that entered into him something missed. It may be defective nerves. It may be a defective heart or liver. It may be defective endocrine glands. I know it is something. I know that nothing happens in this world without a cause."

[malorum]

Good long post.
Hard determinism is the world-view implied by current scientific consensus. The 'soft-determinism' you describe appears to be a fuzzy attempt to derive a set of 'meaningful' moral rules given this world-view ( necessarilly arbritary rules IMHO)

The interesting thing is that many rational people live with this dissonance: at some level they accept the science that suggests that free-will does not exist, but they act legislate and do jury service as though it did. (soft-determinism is an ill formed attempt to resolve the problem.)

Some are religiously irrational and insist that free-will does exist. Like me [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] As far as i'm concerned science tells me to be a hard determinist, the bible (As my tradition reads it) tells me otherwise, so I choose the bible.