Free Will or Determinism

Ah yes, the problem of free will. Now that a Stanford biologist has pretended to offer a scientific refutation of the concept, we ought to recognize that it has been debated for millennia, in theology.

One might argue that Western civilization is built on the notion of free will. Theologians have argued that human beings first exercised free will in the Garden of Eden.

They sinned by transgressing the divine admonition. They were held responsible for their sins, because in principle they could have done otherwise.

How well or poorly you exercise your free will determines whether you make it to Heaven. Later theologians, whether the Jansenist movement or John Calvin declared that your place in Heaven or Hell is predetermined, before you were born, before you attended your first church service, before you confessed your first sins, before you did penance for your sins.

As for the story of Garden of Eden, its meaning is reasonably clear. It says that you are responsible for your actions, no matter how tempted you were. We do not know you by your intentions, but by your behavior. Just because a biologist can trace a series of prior influences, does not mean that your actions were not free. After all, if there were influences telling you to eat the apple, there were others that were telling you not to eat the apple.

One might argue that Western civilization is built on the cornerstone of free will. One might even say that free enterprise and free elections posit free will.

Now, however, a hirsute Stanford biologist has stepped forth to declare that there is no such thing as free will. Robert Sapolsky-- he who never gets haircuts and who never shaves-- has told us that we have gotten it all wrong.

I will mention in passing that if you affect a pseudo-hippie mountain man appearance, most people are not going to take you seriously. Of course, certain others will take you very seriously, for rejecting grooming codes and getting in touch with the noble savage or natural man within, but that theory hopefully died with Rousseau.

This assumes, as David Hume would articulate, that free will means that you could have done otherwise. Evidently, Hume was not the first to present such a definition. Whatever reason you have, whatever influence weighed on you, your actions are free if you could have done otherwise.

For a valuable exposition of Hume’s views, see Kieran Setiya’s article on Sapolsky in the Atlantic.

He writes:

David Hume, who helped invent the science of the mind. “By liberty,” he wrote in 1748, “we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.” 

And then there is the greatest mystery in the matter of the will. No less than Augustine himself pointed out the limitations of the concept of will. He remarked, in The City of God, that no one can will sexual arousal. I will not explain that, in a family blog, but surely the Bishop of Hippo knew whereof he spoke.

So, if you are sexually aroused and did not will yourself to be sexually aroused, are you responsible for being aroused?

Evidently, Augustine believed that this made sexual arousal a sin.

Besides, Sapolsky believes that biology can answer all philosophical and theological questions. Coming from a biologist, it sounds like hybris, like self-promotion. If only Adam and Eve had had a friendly biologist in the Garden of Eden… it’s all becoming silly.

Imagine that you can choose freely to make free will the basis for moral order. Imagine that you want to judge people, not by their actions, but by their intentions. At that point, you will need to spend your time reading minds.

Is it not more economical to hold people responsible for their behavior, regardless of their state of mind? 

In truth, you never really know what anyone else is thinking or feeling. Trying to read minds to ascertain intention is a fool’s errand. It might even be the ultimate fool’s errand.

Thus we will reject the notion that free will is a switch in the brain that chooses one or another move in life’s chess game. Are your moves in a chess game free or determined? Most of us would agree that they are not a function of your childhood traumas or your grandparents’ love life.

How do you solve the problem of free will? Surely you cannot solve it by taking pictures of brain function. I trust that you have better things to do with your time. Instead, you do what our civilization did. You establish a culture on the basis that free will exists and you step back to see whether it works. You hold people responsible for their behavior. Only in the most extreme cases do you excuse bad behavior, because the legal system says that some people do not know the difference of right from wrong-- that is, they did not choose freely.

If a civilization based on free will has prospered and even thrived, that should count as evidence that, as a moral principle, free will works.

Now, Sapolsky sets himself apart by declaring that he does not believe in punishment. Since no one acts freely, no one can be responsible for his behavior. Sapolsky wants people who do bad things to be quarantined. As though they have a contagious disease. But, doesn’t that count as punishment.

Setiya explains:

Sapolsky is appalled by our ruthless urge to see the guilty suffer. “If there’s no free will,” he writes, “there is no reform that can give retributive punishment even a whiff of moral good.” Hence his public-policy proposal: to replace the punitive carceral system with “quarantine,” the comfortable confinement of those who are a danger to others, until they aren’t.

Making the guilty suffer sounds like sadism. Incarceration involves paying one’s debt to society, and being removed from social congress. Does this not sound like rewarding bad behavior, with a comfortable confinement.

Why not give them uncomfortable confinement. And what makes anyone think that those confined will not, in their comfort, behave badly toward those with whom they share their confinement.