Stance on free will and determinism?

anonymous asked:

I was wondering about where you stood on Free Will? Compatabilism or determinism? :)

I’ve written about my views on this a little bit here and here. But I think I’ll take this opportunity to break down each position before telling you where I stand.

There is a lot of confusion around the topics of free will. Oftentimes, when people are speaking of free will, they are referring to the ability of an agent to make a choice without any sort of external or environmental or historical influence. The choice, in other words, is made by sheer force of will. This would mean that every choice is a self-caused cause. It’s not the inevitable result of previous conditions. It’s not just another physical phenomenon subject to the laws of cause and effect (perhaps a choice emanates from a supernatural source like a soul). A choice, then, is not one domino falling in a long flow of other dominoes. On this view, a choice is a domino standing on its own, falling on its own. In the philosophical literature, this is called ‘libertarian free will.’

This is contrasted with another view called ‘incompatibilism,’ which is sometimes mistakenly just called ‘determinism’ (but more on that soon). This view states that free will, as defined above, is simply incompatible with how the world works. Humans are physical beings, just like rocks and rivers and cloaca, and this includes our thoughts, beliefs, and choices. Even if it may not feel like it, our choices are the unavoidable result of the laws of nature and the flow of history. There is simply no good reason to accept a domino standing and falling on its own. It’s dominoes all the way down (or to the big bang), and we are no exception.

The other most popular position is called ‘compatibilism.’ This view seems to confuse people the most often, from what I’ve seen. In short, compatibilism argues that free will and determinism are a swell combo, like tomato and basil or THC and sex. There is, in other words, room for free will in a deterministic universe. The first thing that’s important to note here is that both compatibilism and incompatibilism are deterministic; they are both types of determinism.* This should immediately strike you as a noggin’ scratcher, since it seems like compatibilism is contradicting itself. By stating that free will and determinism are compatible, it seems to be saying that determinism (i.e. everything is subject to cause and effect) is compatible with self-caused choices (i.e. some things aren’t subject to cause and effect). That doesn’t make any sense, you might say. And indeed it doesn’t, astute reader. Luckily, compatibilists are making no such claim, since compatibilists are rejecting the libertarian definition of free will. They think that the libertarian idea of making a self-caused choice outside the laws of nature and history is pure philosophical silliness, a stance they share in common with the incompatibilists. The compatibilists don’t attempt to square libertarianism and determinism. Rather, they are attempting to redefine free will, to make it less absurdly demanding and more in line with our best science. In short, the compatibilists say, ‘Of course we reject libertarian free will. That’s a stupid view. But we shouldn’t therefore just abandon the notion of freedom. We can still talk about free choice, it just has to mean something different from what most people think.’ The compatibilists argue that incompatibilists are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now, there are a lot of attempted compatibilist strategies to salvage our notion of free will. They might say that a choice is free not because it is made in isolation from any external influence, but because the agent wasn’t under any sort of coercion. Or perhaps a choice is free so long as it’s wholly endorsed by the agent, and not free when it isn’t. There is an abundance of other compatibilist strategies that have been developed over the decades.

At this point, though, you might be wondering why compatibilists are concerned with re-claiming the notion of free will at all. If they’re on board with rejecting libertarian free will, then why not just jump on the incompatibilist bandwagon and tell free will to suck it? Well, the compatibilists often argue that the costs of rejecting free will are too damn high. Some argue that abandoning free will means also abandoning meaningful human relationships. Wouldn’t rejecting free will mean rejecting our ability to take pride in our accomplishments, to praise our loved ones on their successes, to feel gratitude and appreciation for that tasty spaghetti dinner your grandma made for you? After all, she wasn’t free to choose to make that spaghetti. So why feel any sort of appreciation? When she looks at you with that affectionate granny gaze, the only thing it makes sense to say is ‘Gram Gram, your spaghetti was tasty and all, but it would be irrational to say thank you since we are all just helpless gnats entangled in a massive cosmic spider web and your illusory choice to make me supper was as inevitable as death.’ This is what compatibilists fear might be entailed by a rejection of free will. Even if libertarian free will is to be rejected, there must be salvageable elements to it, or else we’re all fucked.

Well, after this long-winded reply, I’ll finally reveal my hand. I am an incompatibilist. I don’t share the compatibilist worries about rejecting free will. I agree that a rejection of free will entails some radical consequences, but just not the ones that are most feared. A denial of free will does not mean that our interpersonal relationships will self-destruct. Indeed, I think that the world in general would be better off for it. Kiss goodbye the notion that people are ever fully, 100% deserving of what happens to them and we’ll see a more compassionate sphere of humanity. We will no longer be viewed as the sole progenitors of our actions. Instead, we will recognize that each of us is ensnared in the teeth of circumstance. And this demands of us to be more sensitive, understanding, and forgiving of everyone, all the time. This doesn’t mean that we simply won’t or shouldn’t feel anger or pain or indignation or any other emotion. There can still remain a place for the whole constellation of human emotion. What it does do is encourage us to acknowledge the complexity to everyone’s situation—a situation that involves infinite variables and a fathomless cosmic drama in which we have all accidentally awoken. So, again, this doesn’t undermine our relationships, but it does call for a radical revisioning of how we structure society. This is perhaps at its starkest concerning our justice system. It renders a retributive approach to justice—punishment for the sake of punishment—totally unjustifiable. There is only room for a justice system aimed at rehabilitation and social well-being. Punishment might be justified in certain circumstances, but only if it’s a forced option, never because one simply ‘deserves’ it.

This is a messy, messy metaphysical and moral issue. I can’t even begin to do justice to the problem in this post. I just wanted to provide a brief survey of the primary positions, and then quickly spell out where I stand. There are, no doubt, an overwhelming amount of other concerns and questions that pop up for any one of these views. For a deeper dive, I highly recommend the book Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction by Derk Pereboom and Michael McKenna. This is a lovely and nuanced exploration of the contemporary debate. Plus, Pereboom is an incompatiblist and McKenna is a compatibilist, so you can bet your sweet ontology that you’ll be getting a balanced perspective.

My apologies for the bloated nature of this response. I simply was not free to do otherwise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

*this isn’t technically correct since they’re both committed to our best scientific picture of the world, which means they might both prove to be indeterministic, as some quantum models appear to show. This matters little, however, since what’s important is that both views reject the libertarian view of free will.