Chapter dzǷ: Free Will and Ethics ȂǿȂfrom the beginning of time, of apparently ever more complex states of
the world having been fully specified in advance by the apparently less
complex earlier states—that doctrine is practically incredible. Ļe idea of
some kind of sheer chance almost imposes itself. Chance enters ethical dis-
cussion not because it itself provides scope for responsible human choice
but because it undermines the claims of full, fatalistic determinism. Once
determinism is shaken, the idea of some sort of free will, operating along
side of both causation and chance, gains a possible foothold. Everyday
personal experience supports some such idea.
One question, however, remains dangling:Cana person’s will be shaped
in any manner other than by chance and by external influences such as
heredity, environment, and experiences (including exposure to ideas con-
cerning responsibility, praise, and blame)? Is reflection in one’s own mind
such an “other” manner? No, or not unequivocally; for although ample
experience testifies to its reality, that reflection is itself conditioned by
external influences, including the actions and ideas of other people. Yet
some such “other” manner of determination seems to be what the cheer-
leaders for free will are postulating.
One approach to a solution—to reconciling free will with the sort
of determinism that science deals in—appeals to the notion of emergent
properties. “Specific combinations, arrangements or interactions of com-
ponents can give rise to totally new attributes. Ļe whole is more than the
sum of its parts.” Diamond and charcoal possess properties quite different
from those of their component carbon atoms. A drum made from flat
planks can roll. An essay has meaning not contained in the individual ink
dots on the printed page. Laws of grammar are quite different from but
not incompatible with laws of physics. Similarly, somehow, the human
mind is able “to make choices not determined solely by external or genet-
ically fixed factors; the mind is self-programming—it modifies its own
processes” (VossȀȈȈȄ/ȀȈȈȅ).
I admittedly cannot form a satisfactorily definite conception of what
suggestions like that may be getting at. I claim, then, not to have settled
the free-will issue but to have kept alive the possibility that if it is not
merely a pseudo-problem after all, it anyway is not a problem subversive
of ethics. Ļe determinist thesis appears meaningless in the sense of car-
rying built-in immunity to any conceivable adverse evidence. Since no
observations about the world could conceivably clash with it, the thesis
does not really say anything about the world and about whether any free
will operates in it.