SkepticWiki wrote:Definition
When we wish to define free will, we run into a problem straight away, since part of the debate on this topic involves the definition of the phrase "free will" itself.
However, intuitively, "free will" refers to your ability to decide for yourself what you want to do.
[edit]Freedom of Will is not Freedom of Action
One point needs to be clarified. According to the rather imprecise definition given above, freedom of will is not freedom of action. For example, I might want to fly to the moon, but I am not able to do so. This does not deprive me of my freedom of will, since I can want to fly to the moon as much as I like.
We emphasize this point because some people commit the Fallacy of Equivocation as between freedom of will and freedom of action. As an example, take the Christian apologist who argues that God cannot prevent a murder because that would involve depriving the murderer of his free will. Clearly it does not: in such a case the murderer can still will the murder: he has only been deprived of the practical possibility of committing it.
[edit]Compatibilism versus Incompatibilism
Traditionally, the debate on free will has been divided into compatibilist and incompatibilist views. The incompatibilist believes that free will is incompatible with determinism; the compatibilist believes the opposite.
It might seem to the reader that consideration of quantum effects, which may truly be random, should make this whole debate moot. As we shall see, such considerations don't affect the arguments on either side so much as you might suppose.
[edit]Incompatibilists Who Don't Believe In Free Will
The incompatibilist who rejects free will argues something as follows:
Let us neglect quantum effects for the moment, and take the universe to be deterministic. Suppose that I am then offered a choice, such as whether to eat asparagus. Then, the universe being deterministic, I am as fated to say "yes" (or, as it might be, "no") as certainly as a stone is destined to fall when I drop it: it is simply a result of the state of the universe (which includes my brain) and the laws of nature at the point when I am asked if I want asparagus, or at which the stone is dropped.
I may, to be sure, have the illusion of making a choice; and perhaps the stone believes that it's passionately in love with the ground and wants to be near it. The fact is that I have never made a choice any more than the stone chooses its trajectory.
[edit]Incompatibilists Who Believe In Free Will
Alternatively, we might accept the validity of the chain of reasoning in the argument above, take free will to exist, and so conclude that one or more of the premises of the argument is false. For example, we might reason as follows:
Determinism is incompatible with free will.
I know darn well I have free will.
Therefore, the Universe is not deterministic.
[edit]Randomness As Free Will
The syllogism given above may seem to have a lot going for it, not least the fact that the randomness apparently implicit in Quantum Mechanics has given scientific credence to the idea that the universe is not entirely deterministic. Whether such non-determinism could affect the workings of your brain is, so far as we know, an open question.
This sort of argument accounting for free will has a long pedigree: amongst the ancient Greek philosophers, the Epicureans supposed that the material universe was not entirely deterministic, but that it had, almost literally "wiggle room", which could account for free will.
It is not clear that this resolves the problem. The man who doubts free will might reply to such arguments as follows:
Now you attempt to console me with talk of quantum mechanics, and tell me that the universe is not deterministic after all. This is no use to me, for what is not deterministic is random. Do you suppose it is "free will" that a photon might dance this way or that way in my brain? Not at all! That is simply having my destiny determined by something which, being random, is out of my control. So, let the laws of nature be deterministic or random, you have not explained how free will is possible.
[edit]An Immaterial Soul As A Source Of Free Will
One response to incompatibilist arguments is to postulate an invisible intangible thing, sometimes called the "soul" but for which we will prefer the more neutral term "mind", and which has the faculty of free will.
This does not, in fact, solve the problem. The question of free will has traditionally been posed in terms of a material universe with a material brain doing your thinking; but this is not intrinsic to the problem.
If the materialist faces the problem that the future state of his brain is determined by the present state of his brain, the sense data received by his brain, and possibly some random factors not determined by the state of his brain --- then the immaterialist faces exactly the same problem, only substituting the word "mind" for the word "brain" throughout. The invisible, intangible world, just like the material one, is either deterministic in its responses to stimuli, or partly random. Either a particular set of stimuli perceived by the same frame of mind will always have the same set of results, or there is a spread of different possible results determined by something other than the frame of mind you're in.
The misconception that the immaterialist has an easier time than the materialist in accounting for free will is sometimes used as an argument in favor of immaterialism. It is, as we have shown, a mistake, and a common one: that of supposing that a difficult question can be solved by postulating the existence of an invisible man having the property of solving the problem.
[edit]Compatibilists Who Believe In Free Will
The argument may be presented as follows:
When Incompatibilists say that they have no free will, what they mean, in part, is that the state of their brain, or their mind, determines their choices. But this determination is exactly what I mean by the phrase "free will".
When someone demands that in order for his will to be free, it must be free of his brain, his mind, or whatever he imagines instantiates his will, what he is asking is that his will should be so free that it's free of his will. He is chasing after a chimera.
[edit]Compatibilists Who Don't Believe In Free Will
There is at least one other position that a philosopher might take (though we know of no examples): it would be possible to assert that the way the universe works is perfectly compatible with free will in principle, but that as a matter of fact we do not possess it. By analogy: someone might assert that there is nothing in physics or biology that would rule out the existence of a flying amphibian in principle, while also asserting that as a matter of fact there are no flying amphibians.
[edit]Other Arguments
There are other takes on the argument besides compatibilism and incompatibilism.
[edit]The Naive Argument
To quote Dr Johnson:
"We know our will is free, and there's an end on't!" (Dr Johnson, from Boswell's Journals)
This does not address the problem of free will; it simply asserts that we know from experience that it exists; the question of how or why can be left to the philosophers.
By analogy, when scientists discovered that according to their knowledge of aerodynamics and bumblebees, bumblebees couldn't fly, they did not announce to a bewildered world that bees couldn't fly; they concluded that they didn't know everything about aerodynamics and bees.
In the same way, one might claim, you might produce a proof which I cannot fault, from premises I cannot fault, proving that I have no free will, and yet although I cannot find the fault, I know it must be there, because I do in fact have free will: I know this from direct experience.
[edit]"Ordinary Language Is Alright"
We might reason as follows:
If I have a free franchise, I can vote for whom I want.
If I have freedom of movement, I can go wherever I want.
If I have freedom of will, I can want whatever I want.
As Wittgenstein said, "ordinary language is alright", and on that basis it seems that we have free will by definition.
We leave it to the reader to decide whether this line of argument is sophistry, or a proof with all the force of a tautology. It fits in nicely with the attitude of the compatibilist who believes in free will; it does not quite answer the question raised by the incompatibilist who doubts free will, since like the "naive argument" given in the previous subsection, it does not account for the existence of free will, it merely offers a proof of it.
[edit]A Pragmatic Viewpoint
Or one might argue as follows:
We would behave exactly the same way whether we believed that we had this undefinable and undetectable property of "free will" or not. Therefore, this whole argument is about an undefinable undetectable thing which has no effect on our decisions, i.e. nothing. What's the fuss about?
[edit]Ethics and Free Will
It is sometimes argued that if we agreed that people have no free will, this would lead us to ethical consequences which we wouldn't like. This is not a valid form of argument for the existence of free will. If it is a fact that we have no free will, then the ethical consequences of this fact may well not be to our liking, but that wouldn't make it untrue.
That being said, we might look at some of the possible consequences of denying free will. The most obvious is this. If a man, through no fault of his own, falls on another man and kills him, then we do not blame him for the death: he fell according to physical laws. We would not jail him for such an offense. But then it might be argued that when a serial killer commits his crimes, then if he has no free will, there is little distinction between his bad luck in being a serial killer and the other man's bad luck in falling off the cliff. Both are the results of the way the universe works, whether the universe is material, immaterial, deterministic or random.
It seems, then, that we need the concept of free will to hold the murderer to blame. This may be true, but blame is all that we need the concept of free will for. We do not need to blame a murderer to imprison him any more than we need to blame the carriers of plague to quarantine them --- we do not need to blame them for having the plague, we only need to recognize that they are dangerous.
In the same way, consider the case of a man born blind as a result of some genetic disorder. We would attach no blame to his blindness, but we should feel entitled to deprive him of certain liberties that are granted to ordinary citizens, such as the right to drive a car: not because we blamed him, but for the sake of our own self-preservation.
And in the case of the man who falls off a cliff onto a bystander, killing him, then if we could show that he had some tendency to fall off cliffs onto innocent bystanders, then we would also be justified in curtailing his liberties, at least to the extent of banning him from ever going near the edge of a cliff. The only reason that there is no law dealing with such a case is that such people are imaginary and hypothetical: on the other hand, people with tendencies to violence are real, and we can feel justified in curtailing their liberties, for our own self-protection, whether or not they have free will.
[edit]Further Discussion
This article is no more than an introduction. It shows the first moves that can be made by the various sides in this great philosophic game. There is more to be said: we can imagine what the Incompatibilist might say next to the Compatibilist, and what the Compatibilist might say right back. We can imagine how both the Compatibilist and the Incompatibilist might reply to the "Naive Argument". We can imagine what the Immaterialist might say to his treatment in this article, and how we would counter-argue.
For those who are interested, there is a huge amount of philosophical literature on this question. There just isn't a consensus as to the answer.