Free Will and Determinism
Free will
I believe, as you do probably, that in some sense or other human beings have free will. I don't know exactly what that means - I wouldn't like to have to define it. Although it may be hard to define, some sort of fairly rough account can be given: To a considerable extent we human beings are in control of our destinies. We deliberate and agonise over our choices and decisions, and the final decision we make is up to us. We are faced with options, we choose between them, decide and then act. These choices may involve which subjects to study, which university to go to and which course to do. In later life we make choices and decisions regarding careers, marriage, financial matters, voting at elections, the lives of our children, and finally perhaps even regarding our death. So that's, roughly, what it means to say that we have free will.This can be made a little bit more precise. Begin with an example. You are faced with a choice between, on the one hand, starting the year at university or on the other hand, deferring university for a year and travelling overseas. You deliberate, thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of each, you agonise, worry, lose sleep but finally decide to go overseas. Isn't this an example of you exercising your free will? But what makes it a free choice? It is a free choice because although your actual decision was to go overseas, you could have chosen instead to go to university. That is to say, you could have done otherwise. Suppose that you are choosing between alternatives X and Y. Then to choose X at time T(1) rather than Y is an exercise of free will if, had the circumstances been exactly the same at T(1), you could have chosen Y instead.
So that's what free will is. Believing in free will has the following consequence: Human beings are morally responsible for their actions ie. they can be praised, blamed, condemned, congratulated for what they do. For if what you did was up to you - you were in control of your action - then you must be held responsible for it. Free will implies moral responsibility. Someone who believes in free will and moral responsibility is called a libertarian. Libertarianism seems the natural view to hold. In our agonising, worrying and deliberating over decisions we actually experience our free will. What could be more obvious? Turn now to determinism.
Determinism
In Chicago in 1924 two teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were convicted of the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Bobbie Franks. Leopold and Loeb were both university graduates, very clever apparently, and from rich families. According to them the murder was committed “for the sake of a thrill”. They were defended by the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow. Since Leopold and Loeb both confessed the only issue was whether they could be saved from execution. Darrow was successful and both were given life sentences. Here is part of Darrow's defence:“Is Dickie Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out of these infinite combinations he was born without emotional feelings?... Is he to blame that this machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know ... I know that somewhere in the past that entered into him something missed. It may have been defective nerves. It may have been defective endocrine glands ... I know that nothing happens in this world without a cause.” (p. 55). Darrow here is appealing to the doctrine of determinism of which he has given a rough account. The classical statement of determinism was given in 1820 by the famous French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace:
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings who compose it - an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis - it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”
Thus, determinism states that every human action, like every other event, is caused by some prior event which is caused by some prior event, and so on back. This can be expressed by saying that every human action is necessitated by the combination of laws of nature together with some set of prior initial conditions. Thus every human action is associated with a causal chain of events stretching back indefinitely into the past. The laws and initial conditions determine the future. For example, Loeb's involvement in the crime was the result of coming under the influence of Leopold whose actions were caused by wanting to commit the perfect crime which in turn was caused, apparently, by reading Nietzsche, and so on... As Darrow suggests, if this causal chain stretches back to events in the past beyond Loeb's control - to the “infinite forces that were at work ... before he was born” - how can he be held morally responsible for his actions?
Determinism has some plausibility, for isn't it true that every event has a cause? And if so, the idea of every human action being associated with a causal chain of events stretching back into the distant past is also plausible. But now what happens to the cosy picture painted earlier of human beings with free will and who have control over their destinies? In other words, what happens to libertarianism and, more importantly, what happens to moral responsibility? This is a classical form of a philosophical problem - having to choose between two fundamental principles, libertarianism and determinism, both of which we want to believe yet seemingly incompatible. Which one should be accepted and which rejected? Are you a Libertarian or a Determinist?
Some questions
- If your decision to go overseas was a result of your having free will, then does that mean that it wasn't caused?
- If determinism is true, are we entitled to praise or blame people for their actions?
- If acting from free will means that your action is uncaused, then does this have the consequence that your action is a purely random event? And how can you be held morally responsible for a random event?
- At the level of human action (rather than at the subatomic level) aren't we discovering more and more about determining causes ie. psychological causes, genetic causes, neurophysiological causes, etc? And if so, do these discoveries confirm the determinist's view that there is no room for free will?