Free Will, Determinism, and the Self:
I Introduction
If determinism is true, then free will, I will argue, is an illusion. This is because the notion of free will depends on our ability to have done otherwise, and that what we mean when we say we could have done otherwise further depends on the view we have of our ‘selves’. Though as will emerge, there seems to be conflicting attitudes to what this even means. Given this, the salience of my argument really depends on our attitude toward free will. But I will explore whether we have good reason to think these attitudes are warranted, and what, in the end, should matter to us in this respect. I will provide a general account of determinism and then move towards an understanding of the problem as it relates to free will. I then look at reasons to keep our cherished belief in free will, before arguing the inadequacy of these accounts.
II The Problem and Its Consequence
As I see it, the situation is this: whether we think free will is an illusion, is really a question about our attitudes towards what matters. The argument is foremost guided by this concern then — since determinism poses a problem for free will only if we think free will is something that is at odds with determinism. This seems like an inescapable starting point. The question is also difficult to strip away from ethics, and that is simply the recognition that free will is a question, primarily, from within our perspective — it relates deeply to human affairs. But I will consider the question as separate from that of moral responsibility. Free will bears strongly on our conception of what it is to be a ‘self’,[1] which must, I argue, be part of our understanding of free will. It is easy to lose track of this in talking of metaphysics.
Before I discuss matters further, let me clarify the determinism problem. Determinism can be described as the position that the future is determined by the conjunction of the laws of physics together with the past state of the world.[2] It is a metaphysical position of the nature of reality, therefore. The result of a vast swirling of cosmic history fixed by immutable laws. Nothing can escape this picture, since to escape it would render it false. Our life partners, the degrees we choose, and all of the meaningful exercises of our deliberation, are not under our control. Another way of saying this is that every event has a cause.[3] When I raise my hand, the action is preceded by contracting muscle fibres, which is preceded by motor neurons firing, which is further preceded by events in the brain, of which many more spatio-temporal events are said to precede that too. Perhaps I had a mosquito bite from yesterday which was causing an itch I felt compelled to scratch. The mosquito was probably drawn indoors by the effect of the light I had on before bed. I had the windows open because it was warm, and the heat was making me sweat, as it usually does this time of year, given seasonal temperature fluctuations. The story goes on, all the way back to the big bang. Determinism looks like a reasonable thesis given that there is usually an explanation of all observable phenomena — things don’t tend to happen unaccompanied by some antecedent circumstance that can account for the things happening. In other words, things don’t just happen, they happen ‘because’.
At odds with this hypothesis are what seem to be most people.[4] People do not just think that they possess free will, but that other life forms, and also other objects, are in fact lacking in this quality.[5] Perhaps they think it is because they are human and have unique ontologies? Whether or not we all think this way is unclear, but those of us who do, think that we each have both the ability to originate our behaviour and also that we could have behaved differently than we chose to — such that we are not merely subject to cause and effect.[6] Yes I raised my arm to itch the mosquito bite, but I could have equally resisted the impulse altogether. Alternative futures really seem possible. Moreover, it is actually ‘I’, the conscious self who am the source of this action. I decided to itch, and I itched. Thus, free will can be stated as two propositions,
i. The ability to have done otherwise than one did.
ii. That it is we who are the source and origin of our behaviour.
It being determined that I raise my arm is at first glance incompatible with it being the case that I could have done otherwise. The reasonable question to ask next is what do we mean when we say we could have done otherwise? The answer we give to this question is going to have significant consequences for the subject of our enquiry.
III Could Have Done Otherwise
One tradition in philosophy has provided such a solution to the problem of free will and determinism: compatibilism. This position states that free will is not at odds with determinism. In this respect, compatibilism proclaims that a person is free so long as they act within their desires or intensions, and that, in acting, they were not under any external or internal compulsion — freedom is thus voluntariness.[7] So the kind of act that is clearly unfree on this account, are the actions of a prisoner, or someone with a neurological disease. The prisoner cannot voluntarily leave prison, nor can a person with epilepsy voluntarily resist a seizure.
One keen proponent of compatibilism, Daniel Dennet, sees a way out of our earlier problem. He argues that nobody really means that they could have done otherwise in the metaphysical sense — that is, originate their behaviour such that they were not determined to do what they had done.[8] Perhaps this is too obscure for ordinary people to understand in the way philosophers do. He thus rejects the kind of free will we spoke of earlier. Instead Dennet views ‘could have done otherwise’ as a kind of assessment of competence. What we really mean is ‘would this person have done otherwise’, were they constituted such that in other various situations, similar to this one, they would have the capability of doing otherwise?[9] If I left the dog in the car with the windows closed on a hot summers day, and it died as a consequence, asking if I could have done otherwise might provoke certain questions. Was I thinking clearly? Did I have every opportunity to remember the dog was with me as I walked away from the car? Would I have remembered if not for some set of consequences that would perturb even the most responsible of dog owners? In other words, was I reasonably free from inner and outer constraints? It would indeed be a different verdict for one who intentionally left their dog in the car to die because they had wanted to, than one who had merely been so negligent as to forget or be distracted. And yet a different verdict for one intentionally killing their dog because of a crazed reaction to some wrongly labelled medication. It is no use saying that someone could ‘not’ have done otherwise if there were no reasonable constraints on a person’s behaviour which prevented them from acting otherwise.
IV Voluntariness
I think the compatibilist is wrong to locate our free will with our voluntariness and intensions. I think we claim much more than this. Dennet assumed that ordinary people do not make such grand metaphysical claims (a philosopher’s privilege perhaps). However, given the prevalence of other kinds of metaphysical beliefs around the world — for instance rejection of evolutionary theory, there is reason to doubt this.[10]
But there is a very important distinction to make between voluntary and involuntary behaviour. The dog owner who intentionally left their dog to die, and whose intension was perfectly coincident with who they are, is a very different kind of person to the one who was merely negligent or understandably compelled. There is a different story to tell about voluntary and involuntary behaviour — a story that really matters to us. This is because we view ourselves and others differently when we make decisions based on who we are as people, rather than impulses or instances of bad luck. Behaviour that is coincident with who we are as people, is how we assess others, since it is likely the proximate cause of future behaviour. Luck does not tell us much about who a person is, or who they might be in the future. This is another reason why free will is so interwoven with moral responsibility. But it is not a story that requires us think of people possessing free will under voluntarily chosen circumstances. To see why, we only need to consider that our intensions and our volitional behaviour is also the result of circumstances we had no intension of creating. The compatibilist agrees to this, of course, but the intuition does not make sense given how ‘who we are’, and our corresponding desires, is just as determined as any of the inner and outer constraints we might face in a given situation.[11] I am no more responsible for planning to kill my dog because it’s just who I am, than doing it accidentally. How is there freedom in wanting what we want, if our wants are not themselves our choices? Voluntariness is just a different path of causality; it doesn’t evade causality in any way, and so it doesn’t make the intuition of freedom in voluntariness meaningful. I lack freedom in a prison cell. I also lack freedom in being the kind of person who reliably ends up there.
But there is more. We do not just have one desire or intension, we have many, and of which many are in conflict. We are ourselves, divided. I may do what I wanted to do, whilst also doing what I did not want to do. I want to work hard, but I often don’t like working. I want to be a morally good person, but barring getting caught, I would probably do some immoral things. Freedom seems either to be smothered too liberally across conflicting domains, or it seems too conservative if we restrict it to only some. Who am I, such that I never know who I will be next?
V From Feature to Gestalt
Could have done otherwise might seem to collapse into the second tenet of free will I stated earlier. We feel like we are originating our actions. That we could have done otherwise because we could have wanted to do otherwise. I could have wanted cheese instead of desert. The crucial aspect, I think, is not just that things could have been different, but that I could have made them so. This intuition motivates another philosophical position; Libertarianism.[12]
The ‘I’ that features in so many shades of thought, conversation and action, throughout history, seems ubiquitous.[13] We assume a kind of idealised and unitary authorship in so many of our behaviours. But not all. We recognise our lack of control in getting ill, or getting stuck in traffic, or generally being determined by things that a simple comprehension of physics imputes. This, I think, is because some things are epistemically accessible through our immediate senses, and some are not.[14] I know I cannot fashion a meaningful life for myself if all I do is sleep and watch television. This is overtly true. I am reminded of it by the day. But other things are less apparent. I have, for example, no experience of the 100 billion neurons I am said to possess. I don’t know what any one of these brain cells is doing, ever. If some significant proportion of them were to get damaged, I would probably be a different person.[15] Indeed, I have little access to much of what goes on inside me — the things that contribute to what I think I am are all but hidden. It is because of this, I argue, that the second tenet of free will is what contributes to the first. Perhaps it is that so many of our thoughts and actions are indeterminable with respect to their cause, why we presume authorship.[16] Perhaps also why we feel we could have done otherwise.
We feel like the nucleus from which our thoughts and actions are borne. We don’t feel like any of the reality that biology describes. And yet we know that these realities exist. But it is not as if we have no way of overcoming any of these underlying illusions. We can pay close attention and see the naked self-deception at work. But if this is really our experience, that the phenomenology really does feel like self-origination, why not just reject the incompatibility of free will and determinism on these grounds? Why not be happy with the experience of ‘feeling’ like the authors that could have done otherwise?
I contend that our very experience cannot even qualify this felt authorship. Paying close attention to our phenomenology reveals this locus of control to be illusory. Intensions are just as mysterious as subconscious or impulsive behaviour. From our perspective, deliberation (and its outcome) is as cloaked of origin as the spelling mistake, or the slip of tongue — unplanned and spontaneous.[17] I do not know why I use specific words and not their synonyms. I do not know why my intension to write succeeds some mornings and does not in others. And I feel strongly that I want to live well, and I want others to. But if I did not, I would be a puppet to these states of mind, not their puppeteer. I am merely lucky that I was not born attracted to children, and that I generally seek to be law abiding. Lucky. One could say that this feeling of authorship occurs when we are not paying close attention to thought and behaviour arising in the stream of consciousness. This feeling, I argue, can be undermined.[18]
VI Two Attitudes
Ted Honderich alludes to two sets of prevailing attitudes that feature in the belief of free will.[19] Both of these attitudes, he says, contain personal hopes, feelings, and beliefs about knowledge. One set of attitudes involves thinking of ourselves as originators of our thoughts and behaviour, the other involves our familiar compatibilist concern of locating our freedom in our embraced desires.[20] Of course, the first of these attitudes is incompatible with determinism, the latter not so. ‘Could have done otherwise’ depends on which of these attitudes we have. As we have seen already the compatibilist takes this to be a kind of behavioural assessment in which we judge whether someone was acting on their desires and intensions. But this does not make sense given that our desires and intensions are not our own creation, nor do we ever truly know which of the many intensions and desires were the ‘real’ ones — this problem seems epistemic. Either we butt heads with determinism, or we seem perplexed with compatibilism. Neither are palatable.
Honderich says that bringing our life hopes into alignment with the belief in determinism could lead to dismay.[21] But this is to confuse our life hopes of the future for an honest description of the past. We needn’t feel dismay for the future simply because we do not originate our decisions in life. Our thoughts and actions are still part of our experience, wherever they come from. Our desires, however conflicted, are still our desires — in the sense that they are not someone else’s.[22] Any goal or life hope I find myself having is really possible from my present perspective. The future is a mystery. That being said, we do actually know how many things will turn out in our lives: it doesn’t stop us from doing them. Because there is more to life than outcomes. There is meaning in processes and journeys. Which is why we sometimes feel lost at the end of a project. We may know the ending of a book or film and yet still find ourselves wanting to experience them again. Determinism does not render our life meaningless, because the experience of novelty seems a product of how we use our attention.
VII What Matters
It is because we attribute these views to others, and how we make sense of ourselves, that it really matters what we believe about free will. The argument seems to rest on what free will means to us. As Honderich points out, we have different attitudes about the question of free will. Perhaps we also think determinism is not even metaphysically credible. Should indeterminism turn out true though, that is, the negation of determinism, little about my argument would change. This is because, even if it is, ‘we’ are still not determining anything ourselves, since we no more author the content in our minds and our subsequent action, than we do the circumstances around us.
I think this argument shows a far more optimistic view of the world than would be made out prima facie. Consider what the world might be like when we see ourselves as part of a network of causes. The frustration and suffering of thinking that we could have turned the tide, and that things could have gone differently, ceases to be parasitic in our thoughts. The past is no longer a memory we must endeavour to justify. The present may exist exclusively — psychologically, where before it may have been the least travelled part of our lives. And the thought that our lives are entirely explicable in terms other than our own originating wills, gives us a different kind of control — one I think more meaningful. What arises on this view can be a real sense of equanimity. We are not fatalists, and efforts matter just as they always did. But when our efforts fail, or others do, we need not be beleaguered by it. A sense of control is still important. And since I don’t know how things will turn out, deliberation is as necessary as it was before. There is humility is this realisation, I think.
VIII Conclusion
I have argued that free will is an illusion. I considered the importance of placing this question in the context of our experience, since I think it relates primarily to how we view ourselves. The argument really depends on what we mean by could have done otherwise. I have sought to show that construal of it as acting voluntarily and from our desires, fails. This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, our very desires and intensions themselves seem to nullify freedom just as much as inner and outer constraints do. So, to ask whether we would have done otherwise is incoherent, because no kind of causality satisfies the intuition we have of freedom. Secondly, it is clear that we are not a locus of singular intensions or desires that exist in harmony. Our desires are often in conflict and whichever ones outcompete others will always be a mystery to us. Either we attribute free will to all of them, thereby liberalising the extent to which we are free, or we constrain freedom to some, thereby being unjustly selective. I argued further that these features seem to rest on an idealised view of what we are, a kind of unified self, originating our behaviour. Lastly, I have considered that though we may have more than one attitude to free will and ‘could have done otherwise’, the rejection of free will should matter to us more given that it may liberate us from some of the ways we reliably suffer, psychologically.
References
[1] Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 82.
[2] Peter Van Inwagen, The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 27 (1975) 185–199 (pp. 185–186).
[3] Ted Honderich, Determinism as True, Both Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as False, in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed by Robert Kane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 461–462.
[4] Galen Strawson, Freedom and, p. 2.
[5] Ibid, p. 3.
[6] Ted Honderich, How Free are You? (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 2.
[7] Ted Honderich, Determinism as, p. 471.
[8] Daniel Dennett, ‘I Could Not Have Done Otherwise — So What?’, Journal of Philosophy, 81, (1984) 553–565 (pp. 555–559).
[9] Ibid.
[10] David Masci, For Darwin Day, 6 Facts About the Evolution Debate (2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/ [Accessed 2 Feb 2020].
[11] The point I am trying to stress here is that compatibilism seems to be making a distinction without a real difference. As I have said, there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary behaviour, but since inner and outer constraints are just as causally efficacious on a behaviour whether they were imposed now, or ten years ago, this is the distinction without the difference.
[12] Galen Strawson, Freedom and, pp. 22–23.
[13] Galen Strawson, Selves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 8–9.
[14] It is not only that some things are accessible and some not, but that we seem to perceive some causes more readily than others, in virtue of how our attention is habituated.
[15] Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London: Penguin Random House, 2017), pp. 51–53.
[16] Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics and Treatise on Correction of the Intellect, trans. by Andrew Boyle (Great Britain: The Guernsey Press, 1993), p. 32.
[17] Galen Strawson, Selves, p. 192
[18] Galen Strawson, Freedom and, p. 103.
[19] Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? P. 122.
[20] Ibid. pp. 93–97.
[21] Ted Honderich, How Free, p. 95.
[22] Galen Strawson, Selves, p. 196.
Bibliography
Dennett, Daniel, ‘I Could Not Have Done Otherwise — So What?’, Journal of Philosophy, 81, (1984) 553–565.
Honderich, Ted, Determinism as True, Both Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as False, in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed by Robert Kane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 461–476.
Honderich, Ted, How Free are You? (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Inwagen, Peter. V, The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 27 (1975) 185–199 (pp. 185–186).
Masci, David, For Darwin Day, 6 Facts About the Evolution Debate (2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/ [Accessed 2 Feb 2020].
Sapolsky, Robert, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London: Penguin Random House, 2017).
Spinoza, Benedictus de, Ethics and Treatise on Correction of the Intellect, trans. by Andrew Boyle (Great Britain: The Guernsey Press, 1993).
Strawson, Galen, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
