The Problem of Free Will
Part I: It was always going to be the case that I would write this post
“It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.”
-Voltaire
This is the first part of a three-part series about free will and whether we have it. I’ll release one new part a month.
In this installment, I’ll introduce the problem of free will, then look at the two earliest approaches to solving it: libertarianism and hard determinism. In part two, we’ll look at three other contenders - compatibilism, impossibilism, and my own approach to the problem. And in part 3, we’ll explore whether morality and goodness can survive if we don’t have free will as traditionally conceived.
Note that the first section of this post is free to read for everyone, but the remainder is for paid subscribers only. Since the earliest moments of the Big Bang, it was always going to be the case that I would write this post - and hopefully, that you’d upgrade to a paid subscription to read it, if you haven’t already. If you’re still undecided, though, feel free to check out the other benefits of a paid subscription here.
Getting to Grips With Free Will
Let’s kick things off with a simple question: Why are you reading this essay?
Here are two possible answers:
You chose to read it of your own free will, and you could have chosen otherwise.
It was determined. You did choose to read it… but given all the causal factors acting on you from the moment of your conception to the moment of the choice, your decision was as inevitable as the motion of Earth around the sun (albeit a lot more complex).
This question captures the classic formulation of the philosophical problem of free will: either our behavior is free and we could have done otherwise, or it’s determined and we couldn’t have.
You won’t be surprised to hear, given that this is philosophy, that the problem is actually considerably more complicated than this. A step toward a deeper understanding is the idea that the problem of free will stems from the incompatibility of the following three propositions.
Freedom of Will: We freely choose our own behavior.
Determinism: Every event has a cause or causes that fully explain it.
Incompatibilism: Determinism is inconsistent with freedom of will.
The reason the free will problem is so captivating is that these three propositions can’t all be true, yet all seem extremely plausible.
To start with, it really does feel that we have freedom of will. Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant, scanning the dessert menu and trying to decide which ice cream to order. What could seem more obvious than that you could choose either the vanilla or the chocolate? How could your upbringing or your brain or the laws of physics stop you?
Second, it really does seem that every event must have a cause. Suppose that on your drive home from the restaurant, your car breaks down and you have it towed to a mechanic. Two days later, the mechanic calls and tells you that, although he’ll have to charge you for his efforts, he couldn’t fix the car because it broke down for absolutely no reason. It was one of those rare cases, he insists, of an event without a cause. Would you be satisfied with this explanation and happy to cough up the cash? Clearly not. You’d protest that of course there was a cause, because everything has a cause. That’s just how the world works.
Third, it really does seem that free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything has a cause, then everything you think or do has a cause. But that means that your behavior is as mechanical as the movement of the tides, and that you could never have done anything other than what you actually did. And if that’s the case, then in what possible sense could you have free will? Some deny that people have an intuition that free will is inconsistent with determinism. If we didn’t, though, we wouldn’t have been debating the free will issue for the last two thousand years.
So, we’re faced with a puzzle. All three propositions are intuitively plausible, but not all can be true. We have to give up at least one to avoid falling into logical contradiction.
At first glance, this would seem to leave us with three options:
Deny that we have free will (Proposition 1). This commits us to the view that everything is determined, a position known as hard determinism.
Deny that everything is determined (Proposition 2), thus preserving the notion of free will. This position is known as libertarianism (not to be confused with the political philosophy that goes by the same name).
Deny that determinism is incompatible with free will (Proposition 3). This position is known as compatibilism.
These are the three big players in the free will debate, and a good place to start our discussion. As we’ll see, though, we’ll need to add several more layers of complexity to bring the problem under control. Among other things, we’ll tackle the following:
Mind-body dualism doesn’t necessarily imply free will, and physicalism isn’t necessarily incompatible with it.
Determinism doesn’t mean that we don’t make choices, that deliberating about our decisions or trying to change people’s minds is futile, or that humans are incapable of acting on reason.
Unpredictability and randomness are not the same thing as free will, although people often blur these concepts.
Modern physics tells us that the universe is not entirely deterministic - but it doesn’t matter, because indeterminism is at least as much a threat to free will as determinism.
In addition to the traditional positions of libertarianism, hard determinism, and compatibilism, there’s a fourth one, namely that whether or not determinism is true, free will is impossible.
None of these four positions is right!
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Let’s get the ball rolling by looking at the two longest standing and most intuitively compelling positions in the debate: libertarianism and hard determinism.