Free Will

Free Will

Free will is the power to choose one’s actions. The interest of free will in academic philosophy primarily lies in whether free will exists, although some attention is given to precisely what it is and how it is important in our lives. The topic of free will is a specific topic in the field of metaphysics. (Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies phenomena beyond the scope of science.) For this reason, free will is often referred to as ‘metaphysical freedom’. Here is an example of the problem.

We often praise valedictorians for their intelligence or industriousness (or both). But some philosophers would argue that since no one can choose to become a valedictorian, no one deserves praise for becoming a valedictorian. For instance, if a person Jen is a valedictorian because she is very smart, then Jen’s genes, not Jen, determined her accomplishment. Furthermore, if Jen is a valedictorian because she is hard working, then either her environment (e.g. her parents) or her genes determined her accomplishment— because these are the only causes of character traits. However, Jen did not choose her environment, and we already know that Jen did not choose her genes. Hence, Jen did not choose to become a valedictorian, it was determined from the day she was born.

Philosophers are interested in free will for several reasons, but the most important reason is because free will is considered to be a requirement for moral responsibility. For example, it makes sense to praise valedictorians only if they choose their fates. Nevertheless, the discussion of free will in metaphysics is divided into at least two parts: whether there is free will and whether free will is required for moral responsibility.

However, free will is also an issue in religious metaphysics, and for that reason, there will be some discussion of the problem of free will in one major religious study, Christian theology.

1. Does Free Will Exist?

1.1 Determinism or Indeterminism?

The debate over whether free will exists is a debate about the compatibility of free will with how the world’s events proceed. The two dominant philosophical views on how the world’s events proceed are known as determinism and indeterminism. Determinism claims that the laws of nature and all past events fix all future events. For example, according to Newtonian mechanics—which is a deterministic physical theory—after two elastic bodies A and B come into contact with initial momentums pA and pB, the final momentums of A and B are fixed from pA, pB, and the law of conservation of linear momentum.

In contrast, indeterminism claims that it is not true that the laws of nature and all past events fix all future events. For example, according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—which is an indeterministic physical theory—Heisenberg’s relations stipulate that the momentum and position of quantum particles are two physical quantities of which we cannot simultaneously assign values. Thus we cannot predict the momentum and position of an electron at a future time even if we knew its momentum and position at a past time.

1.2 Theories on Free Will and Determinism

The major metaphysical theories on the compatibility of free will with how the world’s events proceed are outlined below:

Incompatibalism. If determinism is true, then free will does not exist. Hard Determinism. Determinism is true and free will does not exist. Soft Determinism (or Compatibalism). Determinism is true and free will exists. Libertarianism. Indeterminism is true and free will exists.

1.3 Discussion of the Theories

Incompatibalism is a view about the inconsistency of free will and determinism. It is not a view about whether determinism or free will exists. So, an incompatibalist can believe that free will exists if she does not believe that determinism is true. Peter van Inwagen (1983) is a philosopher that holds an incompatibalist view. He defends incompatibalism with what he calls the Consequence Argument. Van Inwagen summarizes the consequence argument as follows:

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us (Van Inwagen 1983).

Although van Inwagen elaborates on the consequence argument, his main point is that compatibalism is incoherent because in order to have free will in a deterministic world, people must be able to violate the laws of nature, because we certainly cannot change past events. Since it is absurd to think that anyone (with the possible exception of God) can violate a law of nature, it is absurd to believe in compatibalism.

Hard determinism is the bold view that determinism is true and that, as a result, free will does not exist. Thus hard determinists are nothing more than incompatibalists who are also determinists. Some hard determinists believe that science (especially biology and psychology) shows that human behavior is ultimately reducible to mechanical events. For example, thinking is just neuron firing and bodily movement is just muscle contraction, both of which reduce to certain chemical reactions, which themselves reduce to certain physical events. So, these hard determinists claim that if we could acquire all of the past facts about a human, then we could predict his or her future actions from the laws of nature.

Soft Determinism (or Compatibalism) is the view that determinism is true, but free will exists nevertheless. Soft determinists have two critics: incompatibalists and hard determinists. Although the arguments against soft determinism seem insurmountable, there are several ways to reply to the critics. One way is to challenge the truth of incompatibalism. For example, some philosophers disagree that we would need to violate a law of nature in order to have free will. One such philosopher is David Lewis (1981), who argues that we might be able to do things that require a law of nature to be broken without ourselves breaking a law of nature. Lewis calls such an action a “divergence miracle” because it requires that a miracle occurs, but not that we are the ones conducting the miracles. For example, God could render a law of nature false so that one of us can act in a way that violates a law of nature.

Another way to reply to the critics is to argue that while determinism is true, the interpretation of it that leads to incompatibalism is not true. This reply answers hard determinists. Roderick Chisholm (1964) is one philosopher who takes this approach.

Chisholm revives Aristotle’s [384-322 B.C.E.] view that not all events are caused by events, but rather, some events are caused by agents. In Aristotle’s words, “A staff moves a stone, and is moved by a hand, which is moved by a man” (Chisholm 1964). Thus Chisholm claims that agents or events can determine events. He calls the former “agent causation” and the latter “event causation”. So, although determinism that assumes only event causation leads to incompatibalism, determinism that assumes event and agent causation leads to compatibalism.

A popular criticism against soft determinism inspired from the thesis of agent causation is that this form of soft determinism is implausible because agent causation appears from nowhere. In short, science cannot explain how agent causation is possible because scientific laws apply to events. Specifically, how does a man move a stone, as Aristotle claims, if not by a series of events such as muscle contraction and neuron firing? Hence agent causation is mysterious from a scientific point of view.

Chisholm’s response to this concern is that this criticism applies equally well to event causation. For example, how do positively charged bodies cause negatively charged bodies to move toward them? There is no answer to this question because electromagnetic force is a fundamental—and thus inexplicable—physical cause. Thus causation between events is equally mysterious. Chisholm’s explanation of this dual mystery is that what is not well understood is causation. Thus all apparent problems about agent causation are really problems about causation itself.

Libertarianism is the view that indeterminism rather than determinism is true, and as a result, free will exists. A major impetus of defending indeterminism instead of determinism is the advent of quantum mechanics. However, one should be aware that not all interpretations of quantum mechanics are indeterministic, such as Bohmian mechanics and other hidden-variable theories (Bohm 1952). But more importantly, even if the world’s events are indeterministic, some philosophers argue that indeterminism is incompatible with free will.

For example, J.J.C. Smart (1961) argues that libertarianism posits the absurd concept of “contra-causal freedom”, which is metaphysical freedom that exists in the absence of causes, since all undetermined events should occur by chance, instead of a cause, in an indeterministic world.

Robert Kane (1999), a well-known libertarian, claims that philosophers who attribute contra-causal freedom to libertarianism misunderstand the thesis of indeterminism because their view rests on the false assumption that the Luck Principle is true. The luck principle states the following:

If an action is undetermined at a time t, then its happening rather than not happening at t would be a matter of chance or luck, and so it could not be a free and responsible action (Kane 1999).

However, the luck principle is false according to Kane because indeterminism does not reject causation, only deterministic causation. In fact, some philosophers have constructed reasonable and detailed theories of probabilistic causation (Suppes 1970; Salmon 1993). To prove the possibility of indeterministic causation, Kane provides a “shaky assassin” counterexample to the luck principle:

Consider an assassin who is trying to kill the prime minister but might miss because of some undetermined events in his nervous system which might lead to a jerking or wavering of his arm. If he does hit his target, can he be held responsible? The answer (as J.L. Austin and Philippa Foot successfully argued decades ago) is “yes”, because he intentionally and voluntarily succeeded in doing what he was trying to do—kill the prime minister (Kane 1999).

Thus Kane argues that an indeterministic world does not undermine our control over our actions because we can voluntarily and intentionally cause events to happen even though we cannot guarantee their occurrence due to indeterminacy.

2. Is Free Will Required for Moral Responsibility?

Another debate in metaphysics about free will is the importance of it in our lives. The importance of free will is often taken to be its necessity in assigning moral responsibility. Namely, if a person cannot really control her actions, then how can we hold her accountable for what she does? For example, if a boy is predetermined to be a criminal from his environment and his genes, then it seems we should not punish him later when he becomes a criminal.

The principle at work in this intuitive link between free will and moral responsibility is often called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. According to Harry Frankfurt (1969), the principle of alternate possibilities, or PAP, states that if a person is morally responsible for an action, then she could have done otherwise.

Frankfurt acknowledges that PAP is appealing in many respects. For one, it seems to explain why we do not attribute moral responsibility to people who are coerced into doing something because PAP implies its contrapositive: If a person could not have done otherwise, then she is not morally responsible for her action.

Despite its intuitive appeal, Frankfurt claims that PAP is false. In short, all of its appeal rests on a mistaken way of viewing moral responsibility. In order to prove this claim, Frankfurt imagines a scenario where the antecedent of the principle is true, but the consequent is false. In other words, he imagines a scenario where someone has moral responsibility even though that person has no alternate possibilities of action. The scenario is as follows:

Imagine a sinister man Black is lurking in the background and carefully observing another man Jones. If it looks like Jones will do what Black wants him to do, then Black will let Jones do it. However, if it looks like Jones will not do what Black wants him to do, then Black will intervene and coerce Jones to do it (e.g. through threat, hypnosis, medication, etc.). As it happens, Jones ends up doing what Black wants him to do, so Black does not intervene. Hence, Jones’s action is his own doing and he is solely responsible for it. However, Jones also had no alternative to do what he did. Since Jones has moral responsibility for an action he had no choice but to do, PAP is false.

The above scenario is supposed to prove that even if hard determinism is true, there is no threat to moral responsibility because PAP is false. We are perfectly justified in assigning moral responsibility to people even though people have no choice but to do what they do. The proposal is not as strange as it sounds. Imagine a different scenario. Imagine that someone holds a gun to you and demands that you eat a slice of chocolate cake. However, unbeknownst to the gunman, you love chocolate cake and would have eaten it anyway. Thus, even though you had no choice in eating the chocolate cake, we can hold you responsible for eating it because you approve of the action.

Philosophers who separate metaphysical freedom from moral responsibility due to apparent counterexamples to PAP are often called members of the ‘Frankfurt school’. Nevertheless, just like any philosophical viewpoint, there are critics to the Frankfurt school of thought. The most popular criticism is that Frankfurt-like counterexamples are question-begging insofar as they assume moral responsibility without an appeal to an ethical system of assigning moral responsibility. However, if one were to use a traditional ethical theory to assign moral responsibility in so-called counterexamples to PAP, we would see that these ethical theories presuppose metaphysical freedom. Thus so-called counterexamples to PAP are viciously circular.

Despite the appearance of a circle, a philosophical viewpoint can always be saved from a charge of circularly. For example, a Kantian would hold Jones morally responsible for his actions just in case he is a rational being. But to be a rational being in a Kantian sense requires that one is capable of autonomy, which requires that one has free will (Kant [1785] 1993). Now it might seem that Kant’s presupposition of a free will in his assignments of moral responsibility is question-begging. However, since free will does not require alternate possibilities of action in Kantianism, assignments of moral responsibility in Frankfurt-style counterexamples are not circular if we use Kantianism to assign moral responsibility. Let me explain.

To be free in a Kantian sense is to always act in such a way that the rule on which you are acting can be made a rule of action for all rational beings. Since acting in such a way is acting in accordance with what Kant calls the “categorical imperative”, which is the supreme principle of morality in Kantianism, being free and acting morally amount to the same thing in Kantianism. In Kant’s words, “a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same” (Kant [1785] 1993).

The Kantian notion of free will is attractive because it can explain how God can have free will despite the fact that he must act in a single way: morally. Hence, it is far from obvious that metaphysical freedom is required for moral responsibility, and so it is best to keep the discussion about free will in metaphysics and out of ethics.

3. Free Will in Christian Theology

Given Kant’s effort to secure free will for God, we can see how important metaphysicians consider the issue of free will in the context of religion. Particularly, in Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient, but omnipotent; a fact which suggests that God not only knows what choices individuals will make tomorrow, but has actually determined those choices. That is, they believe by virtue of God’s foreknowledge, he knows what will influence individual choices, and by virtue of his omnipotence, he controls those factors. This problem becomes especially important for the doctrines relating salvation to predestination. Thus incompatibalism in the Christian sense, is somewhat different from the standard philosophical version, since the determinism under question does not involve the laws of nature, but rather, God’s omnipotence.

Proponents of Christian compatibalism make the point that knowledge of a future happening is entirely different from causing the event to happen. Proponents of Christian incompatibalism agree with this point, but question whether knowledge of the future is possible without the presence of a determining cause. Thus the definition of ‘predestination’ varies among Christians.

4. Bibliography

1. Bohm, David. (1952). A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables, I and II. Physical Review 85: 166-193.
2. Chisholm, Roderick. (1964). Human Freedom and the Self: Lindley Lecture. Lawrence: University of Kansas.
3. Frankfurt, Harry. (1969). Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. Journal of Philosophy 66 (23): 829-839.
4. Kane, Robert. (1999). Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism. Journal of Philosophy 96 (5): 217-240.
5. Kant, Immanuel. ([1785] 1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (James W. Ellington, trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
6. Lewis, David. (1981). Are We Free to Break the Laws? Theoria 47: 112-21.
7. Smart, J.J.C. (1961). Free Will, Praise and Blame. Mind 70: 291-306.
8. Salmon, Wesley. (1993). Probabilistic Causality. In Ernest Sosa and Michael Tooley (eds.), Causation (pp. 137-153). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9. Suppes, Patrick. (1970). A Probabilistic Theory of Causality. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publication Company.
10. Van Inwagen, Peter. (1983). An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. Suggested Reading

Watson, Gary. (2005). Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.