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The problem of free will is the problem of whether rational agents exercise control over their own actions and decisions. Addressing this problem requires understanding the relation between freedom and causation, and determining whether or not the laws of nature are causally deterministic. The various positions taken differ on whether all events are determined or not—determinism versus indeterminism—and also on whether freedom can coexist with determinism or not—compatibilism versus incompatibilism. So, for instance, hard determinists argue that the universe is deterministic, and that this makes free will impossible. The principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will may imply that an omnipotent divinity does not assert its power over individual will and choices. In ethics, it may imply that individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In psychology, it may imply that the mind controls some of the actions of the body. In the scientific realm, it may imply that the actions of the body, including the brain, are not wholly determined by physical causality. The question of free will has been a central issue since the beginning of philosophical thought. Free will in philosophy
Determinism Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings. Corresponding to each of these different meanings, there arises a different problem of free will. Theological determinism is the thesis that there is a God who determines all that humans will do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience In this article, only causal determinism is discussed. Compatibilism Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. A common strategy employed by "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, is to claim that a person acts freely only when the person willed the act and the person could have done otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan (1968 edition). London:Penguin Books In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains".Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature (1967 edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 0-87220-230-5 To illustrate their position, compatibilists point to clear-cut cases of someone's free will being denied, through rape, murder, theft, or other forms of constraint. In these cases, free will is lacking not because the past is causally determining the future, but because the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what overrides free will. Thus, they argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' choices are the results of their own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will. William James's views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds. Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as formulated above; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work Pragmatism, he wrote that "instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories.James, W. (1907) Pragmatism (1979 edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief"—it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through individuals' actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism—the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world. "Modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue that there are cases where a coerced agent's choices are still free because such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires.Frankfurt, H. (1971) Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person in "Journal of Philosophy"Dennett, D., (1984) Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Bradford Books. ISBN 0-262-54042-8 Frankfurt, in particular, argues for a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevail over the others. A person's will is to be identified with her effective first-order desire, i.e., the one that she acts on. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling addicts" and "willing addicts." All three groups may have the conflicting first-order desires to want to take the drug to which they are addicted and to not want to take it. The first group has no second-order desire not to take the drug. The second group has a second-order desire not to take the drug, while the third group has a second-order desire to take it. According to Frankfurt, the members of the first group are to be considered devoid of will and therefore no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third group willingly take the drug to which they are addicted. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference.Watson, D. 1982. Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Others argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the hierarchy mesh together.Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book Freedom Evolves.Dennett, D. (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03186-0 The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist. Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance.Kane, R. The Oxford Handbook to Free Will. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513336-6. More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques. Incompatibilism "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true.van Invagen, P. (1983) An Essay on Free Will. Oxford:Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-824924-1 One of the traditional arguments for incompatibilism is based on an "intuition pump". The idea is simply that if man is determined in his choices of actions, then he must be like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior. That is, if man's behavior is causally determined, then he is nothing more sophisticated than a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot. Since these things have no free will, then man must have no free will, if determinism is true. Fischer, J.M. (1983) "Incompatibilism" in Philosophical Studies. 43:121-37 This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it does not follow that there are no important differences. Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain." Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. He must be a causa sui, in the traditional phrase. To be responsible for one's choices is to be the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is the ultimate cause of his actions. If determinism is true, then all of man's choices are caused by events and facts outside his control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts outside his control, then he cannot be the ultimate cause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot have free will.Kane, R. (1996) The Significance of Free Will, Oxford:Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512656-4Campbell, C.A. (1957) On Selfhood and Godhood, London: George Allen and Unwin. ISBN 0-415-29624-2Sartre, J.P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, reprint 1993. New York:Washington Square Press. Sartre also provides a psychological version of the argument by claiming that if man's actions are not his own, he would be in bad faith. This argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.Fischer, R.M. (1994) The Metaphysics of Free Will, Oxford:BlackwellBok, H. (1998) Freedom and Responsibility, Princeton:Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01566-X A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the consequences of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the consequence argument.Ginet, C. (1966) "Might We Have No Choice?" In Lehrer, 1966: 87-104. Van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. (1998) Metaphysics: The Big Questions. Oxford:Blackwell The difficulty of this argument for compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities. David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise if different circumstances had actually obtained in the past.Lewis, D. "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" in Theoria, 47:113-21 Other views Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or incompatibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. John Locke, for example, denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense. He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "...the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose".Locke, J. (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1998, ed). Penguin Classics, Toronto. Similarly, David Hume dicussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He also suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity) which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.Hume, D. (1765)An Enquiry Concerning Human Undertanding, Indianaplolis: Hacket Publishing Co. Second edition. 1993. ISBN 0872202305 Arthur Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsiblity in these terms: Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life... . But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...."Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Wisdom of Life, p 147 In his On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer stated, "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing." Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Freedom of the Will, Oxford: Basil Blackwell ISBN 0-631-14552-4 The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the problem. He argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless. According to Strawson, if one is responsible for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in any respect. This is because in order to be responsible for the way one is in some situation "S", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S-1". In order to be responsible for the way one was at "S-1", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S-2", and so on. At some point in the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states ex nihilo. This argument entails that free will itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism. Strawson calls his own view "pessimism". Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if determinism is true, incompatibilists have not, and cannot, provide an adequate account of origination. He rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and origination. Both notions are needed in order to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this conflict.Honderich, T. "Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as Both False and the Real Problem" in The Free Will Handbook , edited by Robert Kane of the University of Texas, published by Oxford University Press in 2001. Moral responsibility
Physics and free will Since the beginnings of science, people have attempted to solve the problem of free will using scientific methods. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, Robert Kane has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom in his The Significance of Free Will and other writing. In a 1928 speech to the German League for Human Rights, Einstein summarized his dismissal of free will in these terms: I don’t believe in the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer’s saying, that a human can very well do what he wants, but can not will what he wants, accompanies me in all of life’s circumstances and reconciles me with the actions of humans, even when they are truly distressing. This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals.• Genetics and free will Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior. The view of most researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories. This raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as behaviour responds to praise and blame. Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination. Neuroscience and free will
Neurology and psychiatry There are several brain-related conditions in which an individual's actions are not felt to be entirely under his or her control. Although the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will. For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary", People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics to some extent for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control which can be exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic. In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviours without the intention of the subject. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original). This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will. Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force. People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control. Determinism and emergent behaviour In generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist.Kenrick, D. T., Li, N. P., & Butner, J. (2003). "Dynamical evolutionary psychology: Individual decision rules and emergent social norms." Psychological Review, 2003 Jan;110(1):3-28. PMID 12529056Epstein J.M. and Axtell R. (1996) Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom. Cambridge MA, MIT Press. However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behaviour from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist. In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations. Wolfram, Stephen, A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc., May 14, 2002. ISBN 1-57955-008-8 As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behaviour. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable.Kenrick, D. T., Li, N. P., & Butner, J. 2003; Nowak A., Vallacher R.R., Tesser A., Borkowski W., 2000Epstein J.M. and Axtell R. 1996; Epstein J.M. 1999 Cellular automata and the generative sciences model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy, showing the experience of free will to be a gift of ignorance or a product of incomplete information. In Hindu philosophy The six orthodox (astika) schools of thought in Hindu philosophy do not agree with each other entirely on the question of free will. For the Samkhya, for instance, matter is without any freedom, and soul lacks any ability to control the unfolding of matter. The only real freedom (kaivalya) consists in realizing the ultimate separateness of matter and self. For the Yoga school, only Ishvara is truly free, and its freedom is also distinct from all feelings, thoughts, actions, or wills, and is thus not at all a freedom of will. The metaphysics of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools strongly suggest a belief in determinism, but do not seem to make explicit claims about determinism or free will. A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition. Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here. On the other hand, Mimamsa, Vedanta, and the more theistic versions of Hinduism such as Shaivism and Vaishnavism, have often emphasized the importance of free will. The doctrine of Karma in Hinduism requires both that we pay for our actions in the past, and that our actions in the present be free enough to allow us to deserve the future reward or punishment that we will receive for our present actions. The Advaitin philosopher Chandrashekhara Bharati Swaminah puts it this way: Fate is past karma, free-will is present karma. Both are really one, that is, karma, though they may differ in the matter of time. There can be no conflict when they are really one. In Buddhist philosophy Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent.Gier, Nicholas and Kjellberg, Paul. "Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses" in Freedom and Determinism. Campbell, Joseph Keim; O'Rourke, Michael; and Shier, David. 2004. MIT Press The Buddha wrote, "There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the connection of those elements." Buddhism takes something like causal determinism as one of its central doctrines. The doctrine is called pratitya-samutpada in Sanskrit, and is often translated as "dependent co-origination", and is part of the theory of Karma in Buddhism. However, denials of freedom are taken to be in danger of undermining the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress. Pubbekatahetuvada, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view in Theravada, for instance. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strategies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had active fights about the nature of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Carvakans, and Buddhists all taking slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of "conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. A contemporary American monk, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, puts it this way: The Buddha's teachings on karma are interesting because it's a combination of causality and free-will. If things were totally caused there would be no way you could develop a skill - your actions would be totally predetermined. If there was no causality at all skills would be useless because things would be constantly changing without any kind of rhyme or reason to them. But it's because there is an element of causality and because there is this element of free-will you can develop skills in life."Bhikkhu, T. (1997) Dhammapada: A Translation, Barre, MA: Dhamma Dana Publications In theology The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question. If God had timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this would seem to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true propositions about the future. However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient. Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that animals lack free will. Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root nshm or נשמ meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yechid", singular), the part of the soul which is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected). In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge, but with God's jabr, or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and divine jabr were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari position. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness. As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free." Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent. See also Further reading | |||||||||||||
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