Chapter
Nine
Agency and free will
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s
essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though
you know that they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s
important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to
avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception.
Perhaps it always has.
(Ted Chiang, ‘What’s Expected of Us’, Nature, 436 , 150 [2005])Should we then ‘protect’ people from such dangerous knowledge? Concerned
that ‘advocating a deterministic worldview could undermine moral behavior’,
Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler (2008, p. 54) suggest that ‘identifying
approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative’.
Wegner himself seemed to share such fears, saying that doubting free will makes
everyone uncomfortable and that ‘sometimes how things seem is more import-
ant than what they are’ (2002, pp. 336, 341).
If free will, as commonly conceived, is really illusory, this attitude amounts to a
conflict between truth and expediency, with some wanting to keep the truth
from people through fear of the consequences. Dennett argues that anyone who
gives up free will ‘is essentially disabled as a chooser’ and that ‘the experience,
however brief, is grim. And its implications if we take it seriously are almost too
grim to contemplate’ (1984/2015, p. 184). In Freedom Evolves (2003) he propounds
his strong compatibilist view, and in a review of Sam Harris’s Free Will (2012) he
lists the dangers he sees in giving up belief in free will. ‘If nobody is responsible,
not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid,
mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for
anything they do’ (Dennett, 2014). Responding with a blistering attack, Sam Harris
(2014) concludes, ‘I have not argued for my position primarily out of concern for
the consequences of accepting it. And I believe you have’.
Are the consequences really as disastrous as Dennett claims? No, not necessarily.
People could still be sent to prison either as a deterrent or in extreme cases to
keep everyone else safe. People (whole human beings) can still be held to account
for their actions and sign mortgage applications without having to believe they
were truly free to do so. Unfree choices (which means all choices if you give up
believing in free will) still have consequences and legal implications. And there
may be positive consequences such as encouraging compassion for the poor and
the mentally ill and discouraging retribution in legal contexts (Greene and Cohen,
2004; Miles, 2013; Shariff et al., 2014).
Independent researcher James Miles argues that the incoherence of many philos-
ophers’ and psychologists’ positions on free will is actually helping keep our world
unequal and unjust. For him, Wegner’s statement that the illusion of free will makes
us ‘who we are’ (Wegner, 2002, p. 238) is darkly ironic, because ‘the myth of free will
does not just excuse indifference to poverty, it creates and maintains much of that
poverty in the first place’ (2013, p. 216). In his criticism of ‘everything that has ever
been written by academic philosophers, scientists, and theologians in defence of
the notion of free will’ (p. 206, see Figure 9.9), Miles includes the category of ‘free
will illusionism’: understanding that free will does not exist but openly misleading
‘the responsibility of
free will is necessary for
belief in a just world’(Carey, 2009, pp. 8, 20)‘the myth of free will
does not just excuse
indifference to poverty,
it creates and maintains
much of that poverty in
the first place’(Miles, 2013, p. 216)