Welcome friends!
I was thinking the other day about how religion has the power to obfuscate even the most straightforward moral issues. Yes, the scholastic debates about how many angels fit on the end of a pin may have subsided, but we’re left with a similar bit of metaphysical nonsense in the concept of the “free will.”
So what are we talking about? Well, ultimately we’re talking about human behavior so let’s start with that. I hope I’m not being too controversial when I suggest people act the way they do at any given moment for a great variety of reasons. I’m no expert but I suppose the reasons might include such factors as one’s psychological predispositions, upbringing, values, experiences, education, physical and mental and emotional health, nutrition, intoxication or lack thereof, and of course a myriad of more immediate external circumstances and stimuli. People make decisions about how to act almost continuously every waking hour of every day and each of those decisions is made for some particular constellation of reasons. Indeed, I suppose if I were quite clever at listing all the reasons people act the way they do, and I had all the relevant information relating to those reasons, then I would be able to predict with one hundred percent accuracy how everyone would act under any set of circumstances. Well, except maybe for those rare random actions in which one is exactly evenly split between taking two courses of action and just sort of randomly chooses one. I suppose most people feel they can already predict the behavior of at least some people they know quite well fairly accurately even without extensive knowledge of all of the vast variety of potential reasons they act the way they do, but I’m saying theoretically I don’t see any reason we couldn’t go well beyond that with the relevant knowledge and resources.
Then we have “free will.” So what’s that? Well, I think there’s a definition of free will that makes sense and one that does not. The definition that makes sense to me is that free will is just a way of expressing the relative importance of immediate external stimuli at the time one takes a particular action versus all the other various potential reasons for behavior. So, for example, if someone grabs your hand and forces you to do something with it, say pull the trigger of a gun, then I think it makes sense to say you did not pull the trigger of your own free will. That is simply a way of saying that in this case the immediate external stimulus of someone manipulating your hand in a particular way was much more important than all the other factors that govern what you would otherwise have chosen to do. Then you have an entire continuum of situations in which the immediate external stimuli are important but less so. For example, suppose someone points a gun at you and tells you to give them your wallet. That’s a pretty powerful external stimulus and I think it would be generally OK if someone said you didn’t hand over your wallet of your own free will, but of course in some cases people in that situation don’t do as they’re told and do indeed resist, which is a decision that would obviously involve reasons for acting beyond the immediate external stimulus. So there is some element of free will. Finally, I suppose at the other end of the spectrum you have situations in which the immediate external stimuli are not very important at all and the entire or almost entire motivation for a given action seems to rest with other causes. Perhaps the culminations of one’s life experiences suggest robbing a bank is a good idea and maybe the day one actually gets around to robbing a bank one is feeling particularly cranky so perhaps immediate external circumstances play some role but not a major role in that decision. In that case, I suppose it makes sense to say you acted of your own free will.
Then we have the definition of free will that doesn’t really make much sense to me but that seems quite popular in conservative circles. According to this definition, free will is (or has, that’s a bit murky) a sort of power that allows one to transcend the normal influence of the various reasons we act the way we do. The basic idea appears to be something like the following: Yes, someone with perfect information might predict a particular person would act in a certain way but that person needn’t act that way at all; he or she could choose to act in any entirely different way because of his or her free will. Huh? We’ve already accounted for all the reasons that influence why someone acts in a certain way in a certain situation, so what are we talking about now? Are we just making the point that if some condition somewhere had been different then that person would have acted differently? Duh. Are we saying there is a little sub-mind that makes decisions based on its own set of reasons that are different from that of the normal mind? That’s just weird. And if there were such a thing, then what’s to prevent us from doing a similar thought experiment with all the reasons this sub-mind chooses to act in a certain way in certain situations? Are we saying there is a random component to how people act so even if you had all relevant information you could still not predict behavior with one hundred percent accuracy because some decisions are not really based on anything at all? (I actually already accounted for that but, anyway, if we’re saying that, then what do we propose to do about it? I don’t see how ethics can be brought to bear on behavior that is entirely random.) I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t really seem to find any way to shoehorn this second conception of free will into either my understanding of how people make decisions or my ethics.
If this second conceptualization of free will is so awkward then why do conservatives seem to be so hung up on it? Well, it seems to me to be a sort of blame thing, or more to the point, a pass the buck type of thing. Specifically, I suspect the popularity of this notion of free will in conservative circles has to do with the ease with which one can pull it out of the hat whenever convenient to deny the conceptual bond between the actions other people take and the reasons they take those actions. Now why would one want to do that? Well, we all make decisions that influence other people in various way (i.e., by affecting other people’s experiences, values, emotional attachments, education, financial situation, etc.) If we don’t have something on hand to break the conceptual bond between those influences and the subsequent behavior of other people then we could all be implicated to one degree or another in other people’s unfortunate behavioral choices. This creates a little problem because people like to feel good about themselves. And I think studies have shown conservatives tend to like to feel better about themselves than your average person. People don’t like to be implicated in other people’s bad behavior. They prefer to let other people take all the blame. In other words, I think the primary role of this second conceptualization of free will is to support a sort of moral laziness and hypocrisy by encouraging people to deny their own role in setting the stage for the unfortunate decisions of other people.
I find this somewhat ironic because one can often find conservatives banging on about how people should take responsibility for their actions. Hey, I’m all for it! But for me that includes taking responsibility for how your own actions affect other people. Just an example, let’s say you support a society in which most of the money goes to a few people at the top and you spend as little as possible on education, job training, job creation, etc., but you inculcate in the general population through advertising and other means the notion that the most important thing in life is material success. Suppose one day some kid with no job and no prospects hits you on the head and steals your wallet so he can buy some trendy shoes he saw on the TV. Who’s responsible? Yes, the kid. No question about that. There are plenty of nice kids out there who would never do such a thing. And you know who else is responsible? You are! Yes, I’m sorry to have to be the one to let conservatives know, but they’re not the paragons of light and virtue they think they are. If it helps, neither am I. Let me be blunt. What I’m saying is I think conservatives are being hypocrites when they talk about personal responsibility and free will. (And I think I’ve suggested before that conservatives usually have trouble acknowledging the role of other people in their own successes as well, so at least they’re consistent on that point. In the egocentric world of your average conservative there is only the Great I, existing in some mysterious realm beyond all normal human influences and influencing no one in return. Well, at least until the market goes sour. Then the Great I is merely a pawn crushed by the inexorable forces of governmental and social ineptitude.)
But wait a minute! Won’t our entire way of thinking about ethics and justice come crashing to the ground if we don’t use this second conceptualization of free will? No, not at all. We’re perfectly OK using the definition of free will that actually makes sense. That is to say, in thinking about justice I think it is perfectly reasonable to consider the relative importance of immediate external stimuli when thinking about the moral significance of other people’s actions. If someone holds a gun on you and tells you to rob a store that’s clearly different from just deciding to rob a store because the totality of your experiences up that point suggests it’s a good idea. The actions in the second case seem to carry more ethical import. However, I think we need to be clear on why this is the case. I don’t think the difference has to do with any fundamental difference in the decision making process. It’s not that you could have acted differently than you did at that moment. In particular, a person who does not have a gun being held on him or her is just as influenced by reasons for acting as a person with a gun being held on him or her, so with complete information I see no reason why one couldn’t predict behavior in both cases with one hundred percent accuracy. No, I think the actual difference that commends itself to the moral sense of many people is what that particular action says about someone’s overall state of mind, moral sense, and probable future decisions given all the various reasons for acting one has been subject to up to that point. In the gun case, one imagines robbing the store actually says little about that person’s overall ethical character. You can be as morally upright as you like but someone might still get the drop on you and force you to rob a store. In contrast, the case in which no immediate external stimulus is evident seems to point to a rather larger and more deep seated problem with that person’s overall ethical outlook. Clearly that person has had time to be subjected to a variety of different influences and experiences so the fact he or she deliberated on the issue to whatever extent he or she felt appropriate at the time and then chose to rob a store suggests a rather more worrisome predilection toward robbing stores. And it’s not clear what additional experiences or education would lead that person to the more conventional ethical decision. Yes, one might have some influence; that’s where ethics (which is, after all, just people talking about how they think people ought to be behave and why) and the justice system come into play. Who knows? Maybe the person was torn between robbing or not robbing the store and all he or she needed was a little push to convince him or her it was a bad idea.
And, by the way, what does all this have to do with the idea of “will power?” Not much. I think “will power” is just a funny way of talking about perseverance or maybe the relative ability to ignore immediate external stimuli in favor of more long standing reasons for acting. Of course, both of these behaviors have their causes like any other behavior.
If you ask me, the concept of the free will tends to promote rather more moral confusion than light, and I doubt we need it at all for a discussion of humanist ethics. Anyway, that’s the way I feel about it right now based on my psychological predilections, experiences, education (and whatever else is relevant) to date. And my free will or maybe the part of my mind subject to free will agrees. So that makes two of us.
