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reader comments: free will

20 Feb 2001 
Your analysis of free will and moral responsibility there runs thus: 

To have free will, one must to some extent comprehend and have control over one's own acts.* One is morally responsible for an act only to the extent that the act was freely-willed.**

However, this analysis rests entirely upon notions of comprehension and control that are left unpacked.

reply: True, but I am not writing for the Journal of Metaphysics. I leave a lot of concepts "unpacked." My goal isn't to write a definitive piece on "free will & determinism" but to give the reader some idea of where I am coming from in the many articles where these issues arise.

What sort of 'control' do mechanical, completely determined*** organic systems like humans have that make them 'free'?

reply: You may as well ask why call someone who is not in jail "free"? Or, why do we say that someone who thinks she can fly and jumps off a cliff was "not in control of her senses"? Why do we distinguish between accidentally kicking somebody and intentionally kicking him? To assert all are equally unfree and determined is to assert what is either unknowable or true by definition. To assert that there seems to be some difference in control of actions may need unpacking but it doesn't beg the question, as hard determinism does.

What sort of 'comprehension' could be a contributing cause of 'freely-willed' (but pre-determined) effects? And how does this sort of 'freedom' make fully pre-determined moral agents morally responsible for their actions?

reply: The will is an abstraction. To talk of comprehension as a cause of freely-willed effects is nonsensical. The rest begs the question. The issue is whether any of us at any time is responsible for his or her actions.

These loose strands (1) leave the compatibilist reader free (!) to rely on vague intuitions about a determined-and-yet-somehow-free-willed-and-morally-responsible-self, while at the same time (2) keeping the free will skeptic (c'est moi) in the dark as to just what it is you mean when you say, e.g., "Determinism is compatible with ‘free will’. . . ."
Mike Drake

reply: Free will does not mean a volition free of all causal connection to the past. A person is free insofar as they are not constrained by internal or external factors. Nobody is absolutely free and the degree of freedom anybody has seems determined in large part, if not completely, by factors beyond one's control, such as genetic, environmental, social and historical factors. Some constraints hinder one's ability to comprehend things. Others hinder one's ability to control one's thoughts or actions. I may be wrong, but I think this is clear enough for most of my readers.

---

23 Jan 2001
Thank you for creating and maintaining this wonderful resource. The Skeptic's Dictionary is a lifeboat of reason in the vast deluge of nonsense. Your articles and recommendations for further reading have been a joy and an education (and, occasionally, ammunition). Among the items I particularly value are the links for young skeptics, and I have introduced my enthusiastic nine-year old daughter to them.

One entry that I would like to share some comments about is the article on free will. This is an area I have thought much about, though I lack your formal education in philosophy.

In it you state that, "To claim that to be truly free one must not be bound by laws of cause and effect is absurd and unnecessary." Certainly I agree with your contention that it is absurd, an action cannot both happen without a pre-existing cause and also be non-random. If the action has cause, the cause precedes the action and leads to it. If there is no pre-existing cause to initiate the action it is causeless and random. I find little room for even a theist to insert a miracle.

But I disagree when you add unnecessary. If actions are the product of pre-existing causes, then they are inalterable. Though my conscious mind has "the ability to understand and control my thoughts and actions" it does so based upon opinions, preferences, knowledge, capacity, and situation that are all products of causation. Any straying from that causation would generate a random thought or action, and that would still not be free will. If you are arguing that I can be said to have free will if my conscious mind has control over my actions, even though my conscious mind is acting solely as a complicated conductor of causation (pardon the alliteration), then you are working with a very weak definition of free will. A definition of free will that can encompass actions that could not have been altered or omitted by the actor seems in fact, absurd itself.

I think that if modern views are proceeding along this line, it is for one reason. You point to it when you say, "All our concepts of praise and blame, punishment and reward, depend upon our belief in human responsibility." People accept a poor definition of free will in order to maintain their flawed concepts of justice, morals and responsibility. It is an argument from adverse consequences.

Perhaps, instead of trying to balance some cosmic, spiritual, scales of justice, we should accept the rational materialist view of determinism and alter our view of punishment, reward and responsibility. These have always been, at their roots, tools for enforcing conformity in matters important to society. Maybe if we recognize this, we can transform some of our baser laws from ones based on intolerant traditions to ones based on actual needs of a free society. And maybe we can transform our current criminal justice system, which is based on retribution, to one based on scientific research into what will stop crime. If we focus on proven methods of deterring crimes and/or segregating criminal where shown to be needed, rather than revenge, we might actually be able to improve things--and those consequences would not be adverse after all.

Jeff Omalanz-Hood

reply: I don't deny that actions are the product of pre-existing causes, but I deny that that is all they are. Focus on previous causes makes us lose sight of the obvious fact that some actions are more free than others and some people are more free than others. To assume otherwise would, as you note, require us to abandon notions of praise and blame. No doubt we praise and blame people who don't deserve it because they really are not in control of their actions or really don't comprehend what they have done. Likewise, we probably don't praise or blame some people because we mistakenly think they are not responsible for their actions. Nevertheless, I think it is obvious from observing human behavior that there are degrees of freedom.

I'm doubtful that either the libertarian or the determinist will do significantly better than the other in improving the criminal justice system.

free will