FREE WILL

To have free will means that in some nontrivial sense persons are able to make choices that are not determined by causes other than themselves, so that each person may be regarded as the unique author of his or her own thoughts and actions. The term nontrivial indicates more than the absence of external and future determinants. A snowflake is free to fall until it hits the ground, but this freedom seems trivial. Free will implies the absence of internal or prior determinations.

Notions of free will involve two closely related ideas. Moral freedom is the idea that human being are morally responsible for their actions, and so may legitimately be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished. Metaphysical freedom amounts to the more radical claim that human choosing involves a break in the chain of physical causation. The human being is thus an indeterministic system, producing outcomes that are not wholly caused by previous physical states. Modern controversies over the meaning and possibility of free will tend to pit science against morality. Free will in some sense is thought to be necessary for human dignity, but both versions of free will appear to be at odds with the causality investigated by modern science.

Historical Background

Human free will was not a problem in classical philosophy, for at least two reasons. According to Plato (c. 428–c. 348 b.c.e.), for instance, human freedom is not a given but something to be achieved through education. Most human beings are described as slaves, of their passions if not of other humans. Moreover, for Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) nature itself was not seen as a rigid set of causal relations; those things that are by phusis, or nature, have their own source of motion and rest, that is, are self-moving. Thus the achievement of human freedom is not opposed to nature but its perfection.

Augustine's De libero arbitrio (On free will) is the first extended analysis of the concept. For Augustine (354–430), the early Christian church father, the problem arises not from an opposition between human will and physical causation but between human will and God as the cause of everything. If God is all powerful and all knowing, including predestining humans for salvation and knowing the future, how can humans have free will? The Christian theological solution to this problem is simply to argue that God created humans with free will.

In the modern period, however, it is argued that all human beings are equally free (the democratic proposition) and that nature is a deterministic system of causal relations (the scientific proposition). The ethical implication of these two propositions is that humans should use science to control nature for human benefit (the technological proposition). There nevertheless remains a problem of how to reconcile free will and scientific determinism, in theory if not in practice.

Common Sense and Moral Freedom

Moral freedom is grounded in a commonsense interpretation of choosing (sometimes called folk wisdom). I am persistently conscious of alternatives—rare or medium rare? More importantly, I am subject to temptation—I should not break my promise, but just now I really want to. The impression that I could do either allows for a sense of moral responsibility. If you respect my rights, I ought to respect yours; if I do not, I deserve to be punished. This sense of responsibility in turn becomes the ground of all moral authority. Because I am as capable of it as anyone else, I can be ruled only with my consent. In this way, moral freedom supports the idea of individual dignity that underlies both liberty and democracy.

This folk wisdom view of free will has been vigorously challenged within the modern social sciences. Human beings are subject to any number of influences beyond any individual's control: culturally sanctioned values and taboos, character as formed over a lifetime of interactions, genetic inheritance, and more. When one thinks one is choosing, perhaps one is only expressing these social and biological forces. From this perspective, free will is an illusion. The real authors of one's choices are the various forces of social and natural history.

But it is unclear whether these challenges amount to much. Everyone recognizes powerful outside influences on their will. But our very consciousness of alternatives suggests that these influences never quite add up to a choice. A person is required to complete the action. It may be enough to recognize social forces do not act, people do. Each person stands as a unique pivot point in history, interpreting rather than merely communicating biological and social inputs. This may be an adequate ground for human dignity.

Metaphysical Freedom and Determinism

Unlike moral freedom, which largely abstracts from physical causes, the concept of metaphysical freedom focuses on causation all the way down. A person is metaphysically free only if the sum total of physical forces acting on her, including for example the momentum of every molecule in her brain, is insufficient to determine her choice. This would be to say that human choosing is not in all respects a physically caused event. At first glance modern science would seem to preclude such an account of free will. Much of science presupposes a physically deterministic universe in which the state of a system at one time rigidly determines its state at any future time. The view that the universe as a whole constitutes such a system is known generally as determinism.

Yet modern science is no longer uniformly deterministic. Quantum physics, in some interpretations, allows that very small events may be physically uncaused. But it is not clear that this does anything to save metaphysical freedom. Quantum events may have no appreciable consequences on the scale of human perception and action, or if they do this would still represent the influence of material constituents on the brain and could not explain how the person as a coherent self makes choices.

Given that metaphysical freedom involves more radical claims than moral freedom, the obvious question is whether the latter depends on the former. Call metaphysical freedom F1 and moral freedom F2. There are then three general positions. Determinists hold that F1 is required for F2, but that F1 does not exist. Thus there can be no free will in either sense. Libertarians accept the dependence of F2 on F1, but argue that F1 is possible. They then try to show how physical indeterminacy can support human choosing.

Finally, compatibilists argue that there can be F2 without F1. In fact, some have argued that F2 requires determinism. It is only because actions are rigidly determined by what a person is that we can praise that person for the actions; otherwise they would be regarded as mere luck. But this is unconvincing. We recognize that a horse's performance on the track results from its breeding and training, but we do not praise the horse for this. We praise an owner because the owner was free to make poorer choices. Compatibilism may save this sort of freedom only as a necessary illusion. We assume we are free precisely because we have no choice in the matter.

Reconciliations

All three positions rest on the assumption that determinism is the primary obstacle to moral freedom because freedom is conceived as whatever wiggle room does or does not exist between the boundaries set by causation. This is probably a mistake for two reasons. First, determinism relies on a concept of rigid causation that is neither required by theory nor possible in practice. While it simplifies our models of many phenomena to assume a perfect determination of events by antecedent states, there is no reason to believe that this perfection is real. And real or not, we can measure anything only to within some degree of precision. Past that point, things can be as messy as they please.

Secondly, the fundamental requirement of moral freedom is that my individual self is the cause of my own thoughts and deeds. To be more precise, I am genuinely free if my conscious choosing is among the causes that determine my choice. Otherwise I am indeed a puppet of forces beyond my control. But determinism is not, in itself, inconsistent with this, because it involves no theory of consciousness. It cannot rule out a role for awareness in the chain of causation. Conversely, libertarians have a hard time explaining how noncaused events can contribute to conscious choosing. If my puppet strings are being pulled by very small particles, it matters little whether those particles themselves are determined or indeterministic. Either way something besides me is in charge.

The real challenge to free will comes not from determinism but from two closely related views of consciousness. Both are examples of reductionism in so far as they attempt to explain an apparently complex thing, in this case the brain, by reference to its simpler material constituents. The epiphenomenalist claims that the conscious mind is an effect of physical events but is in no sense a cause of those events. No conscious state can be responsible for another, so there is no sense trying to think anything through. More radical still, eliminative materialists argue that consciousness does not exist at all. Like a ghost or a mirage, it is a delusion, though who is being deluded is something of a mystery. Moral freedom can scarcely survive any of these claims.

But perhaps it does not have to, because both seem to rest on an untenable dualism. They treat consciousness as something separate from the brain as a whole. A more mature view is possible. Just as sight is not produced by the eyes but is rather the activity of the eyes, nerves, and neurons, so consciousness is precisely an activity of the body and brain working in concert. The mind is a complex whole that functions to gather and store information and translate it into thoughts and actions. Its material constituents, determined or not, participate in this work only by virtue of their integration into the larger whole. It is this larger whole, perhaps, this congress of neurons, that is the seat of government. Consciousness is what happens when congress is in session.

Free will, like vision or flight, may be regarded as a product of mammalian evolution. Evolution can be understood only in the context of real time. The present is the finished product of a now vanished past. The future is, both in theory and practice, open and unpredictable. Trial and error is the engine of evolution, and free will may be understood as a small-scale model of that engine. Human beings adapt with astounding speed to unforeseen circumstances. Moreover they have constructed moral cultures and political regimes to preserve their successes. Liberal democracy using science for technological benefit is among the most effective of these precisely because it recognizes human beings for what they are. Both determinism and reductionism may have outlived their usefulness as models of the human mind.

Paradoxically, the democratic use of scientific technology may also propose more of a practical than a theoretical threat to free will. Advanced biomedical technologies for the control of human behavior and genetic nature can be interpreted as willful actions that can destroy the will. Recognition of such a possibility might then appeal to the phenomenon of free will as a good to be protected and thus as a moral limit or boundary on technoscientific action.

KENNETH C. BLANCHARD JR.

SEE ALSO Complexity and Chaos;Determinism;Freedom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dennett, Daniel C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking. Dennett is among the most famous of contemporary compatibilists. He relies on a thoroughly Darwinian account of the human mind in order to build a philosophical account of consciousness and choice. Many critics argue that his version of free will is not genuine and that he is in fact a strict determinist.

Double, Richard. (1991). The Non-reality of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Presents a rigorous argument against free will from the standpoint of contemporary analytical philosophy.

Hume, David. 1999 (1748). An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume is a famous early modern critic of the notion of free will. Like Dennett, he claims, in effect, to be a compatibilist, but most see his argument as determinist.

Kane, Robert. (1996). The Significance of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kane, a libertarian, is a frequent foil for Daniel Dennett. Kane argues that metaphysical freedom is both necessary for moral freedom and that it is possible.