Chapter
Nine
Agency and free will
The problem of free will may be the most-discussed philosophical problem of
all time, going back at least to the Greek philosophers two thousand years ago
(for an overview of psychology and free will see Baer, Kaufman, and Baumeister,
2008). The basic question is whether or not we are free to choose our actions and
make decisions. The question for us here is whether consciousness has any role to
play in our acting freely, or feeling that we do.
Major religions, especially the monotheistic religions, depend heavily on the belief
that we do have freedom of will. Christianity teaches the doctrine of original sin
and that God gave us the choice between good and evil, between His way and
that of the Devil. Islam teaches that we are accountable for every choice, despite
the fact that Allah already knows everything that will happen. If asked who has
this choice, or who is good or evil, believers will point to the human soul or spirit –
that immaterial, conscious being which is ultimately responsible and after death
is rewarded or punished in heaven or hell. Arguably these threats and promises
are meme-tricks which benefit religious memes by keeping people hopeful or
afraid (Dawkins, 1976; Blackmore, 1999). Certainly the belief in free will is intrinsic
to these religions, and it is also widespread across many cultures (Sarkissian et al.,
2010).
There are two main problems: one for free will, the other for its absence. The first
is determinism: if this universe runs by deterministic laws, then everything that
happens must be inevitable, so the argument goes, and if everything is inevitable,
there is no room for free will; no point in my ‘doing’ anything; no sense in which
I ‘could have done otherwise’. The second is moral responsibility: if I am not truly
free to choose my actions, then how can I be held morally or legally responsible
for them?
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in
fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty
of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars: as if we were villains
on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers
by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are
evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster
man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
(Shakespeare, King Lear, I.ii, 1606)Determinism may or may not be true, but note that it is not the same as pre-
dictability. For instance, physicists describe random events such as radioac-
tive decay which seem both undetermined and unpredictable, and chaotic
processes which are determined but unpredictable, for example because of
sensitive dependence on starting conditions. Whether the universe is really
deterministic is a different argument from whether determinism is compatible
with free will. Among modern philosophers, non-compatibilists argue that if
the universe is deterministic, then free will must be an illusion, while compati-
bilists find many and varied ways in which determinism can be true and yet free
will remain free, for example by stressing ways in which it can still be true that ‘I
could have done otherwise’.