May 19, 2022 10:47 PM
(This post was last modified: May 19, 2022 11:49 PM by C C.)
How to think about free will in a world of cause and effect
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-ab...and-effect
EXCERPTS: Are you reading this as a result of your own free choice? It certainly seems as though you are. After all, surely you could have read something else, or done something completely different. We feel that we are free, the originators of our own choices, not just conduits through which the chain of cause and effect flows. But think about it a little more and this ‘voluntarist’ conception of free will starts to look untenable.
[...] Voluntarist free will therefore appears to be an illusion. No matter how free we feel, our understanding of nature tells us that no choice originates in us but traces its history throughout our histories and our environments. Even leaving aside physics, it seems obvious that, at the moment of any choice, the conditions for that choice have already been set, and to be able to escape them would be no more than the ability to generate random actions. And if all that is true, praise, blame and responsibility look like illusions too.
Is it therefore time to accept that we are just biological machines, intelligent apes fooled by our perceptions into believing that we are above nature?
Think it through. If we are to save free will, it would be quixotic to try to deny both the findings of neuroscience and the fact that the world is governed by laws of physical cause and effect. A better strategy is to think again about what free will means. If we do that, we can see that the voluntarist account is highly suspicious.
Take the assumption that we would be robbed of an essential human capacity for choice if our decisions were in any sense inevitable. But imagine what would need to be true for your choice not to have been inevitable. It would mean that you had the power to override your settled preferences, personality and life history, and could decide to do something that is not determined by these but only by something we call your ‘free will’. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself. Is pure caprice really a form of free will worth wanting?
To take a trivial example, we don’t want the capacity to choose any flavour of ice-cream but the one we think we’ll most enjoy. We don’t want the capacity to vote for any political party but the one that we think will most advance our values. Our freedom to choose matters precisely because it reflects our personalities, preferences and values, not because it can override them. Our moral and political commitments would mean nothing if they were things we could choose to change at will.
The constraints upon our choices allow for the concept of character. As David Hume argued, it is both inevitable and desirable that every choice we make will be the one that, at the time, best matches our motivations, conscious and unconscious. We would have no moral character if we did not strongly feel that there were things we could simply not do, and others we felt we must. Human society depends upon the fact that we can expect people to behave with the same kind of regularity and predictability as the rest of nature. Were that not so, you’d never know what gift to give to a friend or have any reason to commit to a long-term relationship, since you would have no idea if the person in question was going to change their tastes or lose their lovable features.
Praise and blame don’t depend on absolute freedom. The idea that we need the concept of voluntarist free will for praise and blame, reward and punishment is also highly questionable. The major philosophical justifications for punishment are retribution, deterrence, reform of the offender and signalling societal disapproval. Of these, only the first requires voluntarist free will for its justification, and many find the notion of retribution repugnant in any case.
A rethink of free will requires not the abandonment of the idea of responsibility but its reform. No one is ultimately responsible for who they are, nor therefore for what they have done. But responsibility does not need to be ultimate to be real. Responsibility is not given out whole and complete at birth but is something we learn to take more of. To accept that one has done wrong and take responsibility for it is to resolve to try not to do it again and to put right anything that went wrong. We evidently do have the capacity to do this, and that is all that matters. Whether at some fundamental level these responses are inevitable is beside the point.
It’s useful to feel you could have done things differently, even if it’s a fiction
To the extent that the idea of free will involves some fictions, this could be a good thing, as long as we are aware that they are fictions. Take the idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’, so central to the free will debate. There is a sense in which this is never literally true. But the thought that we could have done otherwise is neither meaningless nor useless.
[...] Don’t reject the concept of ‘free will’: rethink it.
In giving up the voluntarist conception, we don’t have to throw out the notion of free will altogether. Free will isn’t an illusion, it’s just that the voluntarist conception of free will is flawed and untenable. It understands the free/unfree distinction to hinge upon whether our beliefs, desires and choices have causes or not, which is ridiculous, since obviously everything is caused. What we need is a ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will, one that reconciles human freedom with the causal necessity of the physical world... (MORE - missing details)
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-ab...and-effect
EXCERPTS: Are you reading this as a result of your own free choice? It certainly seems as though you are. After all, surely you could have read something else, or done something completely different. We feel that we are free, the originators of our own choices, not just conduits through which the chain of cause and effect flows. But think about it a little more and this ‘voluntarist’ conception of free will starts to look untenable.
[...] Voluntarist free will therefore appears to be an illusion. No matter how free we feel, our understanding of nature tells us that no choice originates in us but traces its history throughout our histories and our environments. Even leaving aside physics, it seems obvious that, at the moment of any choice, the conditions for that choice have already been set, and to be able to escape them would be no more than the ability to generate random actions. And if all that is true, praise, blame and responsibility look like illusions too.
Is it therefore time to accept that we are just biological machines, intelligent apes fooled by our perceptions into believing that we are above nature?
Think it through. If we are to save free will, it would be quixotic to try to deny both the findings of neuroscience and the fact that the world is governed by laws of physical cause and effect. A better strategy is to think again about what free will means. If we do that, we can see that the voluntarist account is highly suspicious.
Take the assumption that we would be robbed of an essential human capacity for choice if our decisions were in any sense inevitable. But imagine what would need to be true for your choice not to have been inevitable. It would mean that you had the power to override your settled preferences, personality and life history, and could decide to do something that is not determined by these but only by something we call your ‘free will’. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself. Is pure caprice really a form of free will worth wanting?
To take a trivial example, we don’t want the capacity to choose any flavour of ice-cream but the one we think we’ll most enjoy. We don’t want the capacity to vote for any political party but the one that we think will most advance our values. Our freedom to choose matters precisely because it reflects our personalities, preferences and values, not because it can override them. Our moral and political commitments would mean nothing if they were things we could choose to change at will.
The constraints upon our choices allow for the concept of character. As David Hume argued, it is both inevitable and desirable that every choice we make will be the one that, at the time, best matches our motivations, conscious and unconscious. We would have no moral character if we did not strongly feel that there were things we could simply not do, and others we felt we must. Human society depends upon the fact that we can expect people to behave with the same kind of regularity and predictability as the rest of nature. Were that not so, you’d never know what gift to give to a friend or have any reason to commit to a long-term relationship, since you would have no idea if the person in question was going to change their tastes or lose their lovable features.
Praise and blame don’t depend on absolute freedom. The idea that we need the concept of voluntarist free will for praise and blame, reward and punishment is also highly questionable. The major philosophical justifications for punishment are retribution, deterrence, reform of the offender and signalling societal disapproval. Of these, only the first requires voluntarist free will for its justification, and many find the notion of retribution repugnant in any case.
A rethink of free will requires not the abandonment of the idea of responsibility but its reform. No one is ultimately responsible for who they are, nor therefore for what they have done. But responsibility does not need to be ultimate to be real. Responsibility is not given out whole and complete at birth but is something we learn to take more of. To accept that one has done wrong and take responsibility for it is to resolve to try not to do it again and to put right anything that went wrong. We evidently do have the capacity to do this, and that is all that matters. Whether at some fundamental level these responses are inevitable is beside the point.
It’s useful to feel you could have done things differently, even if it’s a fiction
To the extent that the idea of free will involves some fictions, this could be a good thing, as long as we are aware that they are fictions. Take the idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’, so central to the free will debate. There is a sense in which this is never literally true. But the thought that we could have done otherwise is neither meaningless nor useless.
[...] Don’t reject the concept of ‘free will’: rethink it.
In giving up the voluntarist conception, we don’t have to throw out the notion of free will altogether. Free will isn’t an illusion, it’s just that the voluntarist conception of free will is flawed and untenable. It understands the free/unfree distinction to hinge upon whether our beliefs, desires and choices have causes or not, which is ridiculous, since obviously everything is caused. What we need is a ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will, one that reconciles human freedom with the causal necessity of the physical world... (MORE - missing details)