Free Will Skepticism

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion:

Saul Smilansky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality or rights:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice. Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist. But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option. In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.