Written in 2003, unedited
The Free Will debate usually gets broken down to the question, “is determinism compatible with free will?” The answer to this question would seem to definitively answer many questions about our free will. If they are compatible, determinism will be able to live happily along side free will, which would detour much of the opposition to determinism. On the other hand, if they are not compatible, we are forced to surrender one for the other, which for many would be hard to do. When faced with any tough question, it is always a good idea to stop and go back to the basics of the problem. In this paper I will first analyze the attractive qualities of compatibilism. I then will discuss the basic problems with the current notion of free will, and then look into why it is we are concerned with free will in the first place. Finally I will examine the possibility of throwing out free will while still attempting to salvage our morality.
Compatibilism is, simply, the philosophical attempt to combine the classic idea of free will and all that it entails, with the newer idea of determinism. Outright, this is a very daunting task, but at the same time very attractive. Determinism is certainly hard to deny, but with it usually comes the necessity of throwing out free will. So being able to join these two very compelling ideas seems great, but very difficult.
To make these ideas compatible, philosophers first take a close examination of what free will is. A freely willed action, according to philosophers like Hume and Ayer, is one that satisfies three conditions. According to Ayer these conditions are, “first, that I should have done otherwise if I had chosen otherwise; second, that my action was voluntary… and third, that nobody compelled me to choose as I did…”
For my argument let us grant the first condition. The second condition seems to be clear. If my action was not voluntary, I certainly didn’t freely will it, and therefore I can’t be held morally responsible. It is in the third condition, however, that I believe a problem arises. “That nobody compelled me to choose as I did” might suggest that if someone convinced me to make a certain decision, then that decision, and any action that came from it, were not free willed. For example, if someone had a gun to my head and told me to kill a kitten or they would shoot me, according to Ayer, killing the kitten would not be a freely willed action. But if I do kill the kitten, it certainly still seems that I choose to kill the kitten. I could have not killed it and tried to disarm my assailant, or I could have passively accepted a bullet in the head. No matter what the situation, as long as my action was voluntary, I still choose to act in that way.
While it is clear that I did have a choice in my action, Ayer would argue that I was coerced into my decision, and by being “compelled” to act in a certain way, my other choices, while still present, became unacceptable and so I was forced to act in a specific way. This notion of being “compelled”, however, is not a clear one. How compelling does a certain influence need to be? Am I compelled by my thirst to get a glass of water? Yes. But does that absolve me from any wrongs I may have done in the process? No. But of course these are two very different things. I was compelled to get a glass of water, but not getting a glass of water is an acceptable option for me, while getting shot might not be.
Now we have given a stricter definition of “compel.” A person is compelled to do something if, when faced with choices, all but one are unacceptable to her. But is this really a good prerequisite to a freely willed and therefore morally responsible action? The answer lies in our definition of “unacceptable.” Clearly most people would consider death as unacceptable, and this would explain why self-defense is a great justification for murder. There have been people, however, that have willingly given their lives in order to save others, which shows that the loss of one’s own life is not universally unacceptable in all situations. If not life, then it seems that nothing is universally unacceptable, and therefore we must, as a society, agree on a pre-set list of unacceptable options that, when faced with, absolve the person of any moral responsibility. Of course the task of determining every situation in which an agent is compelled is quite impossible, and without such a list situations may arise that we are unprepared to morally judge. As a society we need to be able to have a system to judge all situations morally, so instead we need to accept everyone’s personal views on the acceptability of certain options.
This, however, leads to a downward spiral, eventually making this version of free will unacceptable itself. If a person happens to highly value her money, to the point of it being unacceptable to lose it, then with this factor she becomes morally absolved if her money is threatened. But surely we would hold her morally responsible if she murdered presidents of competing companies in order to secure her money. Or perhaps she murdered a threatening IRS agent, because had she not then she would have lost an unacceptable sum of her money. If she were faced with the choice to either killing a kitten or losing some of her money, then according to Ayer’s notion of free will, if she finds losing the money unacceptable than she can kill the kitten and not be held morally responsible. If this is not an extreme enough case to prove this point, we can replace money with popcorn and kitten with baby. No matter what fills the variable, if all options are unacceptable by that person’s standard except one, then that person can act without moral responsibility.
This absurd conclusion from the compatibalists notion of free will shows that through their third condition the compatibalists have doomed themselves form the beginning. This means they must go back to the basics of the free will argument and reconstruct a more sound definition of a freely willed action.
But why save free will? Why seek to salvage compatibalism? Why not just be happy with determinism and call it a day? Morality! Our society functions on the idea of taking and placing responsibility for actions. Once responsibility has been placed, then a proper form of praise or punishment can be enforced to either encourage or prevent the action from occurring again. This is of course our basic system of law, and the reason why free will is held to be so important. The common notion is that without free will, we cannot justifiably hold someone responsible for their actions, since their actions were not free.
For a person to qualify as a morally responsible agent, they must fulfill two conditions. First, this person must poses free will, or in other words be in control of their actions. Second, this person must know, or be in position to know what they are doing. If a person fails to meet either of these two conditions, then they cannot be held responsible for their actions. The second condition excludes young children and severely mentally retarded and insane people from being morally responsible. The first condition is obviously what the free will debate concerns. If there is no free will, there are no morally responsible agents. But with the compatibalist’s idea of free will we would have to restrict punishing people even though it may be detrimental to our society. Morality would lose its purpose of regulating our society and keeping it safe because someone with different priorities could murder everyone he saw, and no one would be in a position to judge her because she was “compelled” by her lack of other acceptable choices. We could just label her insane because of her difference in priorities, but then we would just be imposing our beliefs on her because we are in a position of power. Morality would become totalitarian, and we would lose all the freedom that logic and reasoning has provided us with.
This being the case, attempting to salvage free will from determinism for the sake of morality now seems pointless. Instead, efforts should be put forth in determining a form of morality that is not dependent on the free will of the agent, and yet still consistent with the morality that has constructed our society. Ultimately, when dealing with determinism, not only are our actions determined, but also so are our reactions. To pass judgment on a person’s reaction, a reward or punishment, to another person’s action, is no different then passing judgment on the original action. Determinism knows no boundaries, and because nothing can escape determinism, it has little effect on our day-to-day life, except for proving the invalidity of counter-factuals and possible world scenarios. Hard determinism is something we should accept, and then set on the back burner of our holistic set of beliefs. With a careful analysis and makeover of morality, we can salvage our moral society and more openly accept a deterministic view of the world.
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Oh Truth.
In order to create a sense of structure and facilitate more posts, I, Sid the Walrus, am setting out to write a philosophical dictionary. This dictionary will, not unlike that of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, cover a handful of terms and concepts that strike my fancy. I’m going to do my best to cover a new term every day, at least for a bit.