Machan's Musings - Is Free Will Real?
by Tibor R. Machan
Here we have one of the all-time favorite philosophical topics, one rarely omitted from any thinker’s agenda, yet one, also, that’s constantly revisited, by thinkers of every generation. And that’s for good reason.
If what I am doing when I write these lines of thought is something I must do, just as the rain has to fall when it does (though my writing involves more complicated processes), the issue of whether it is true that there is free will cannot even be established. For establishing anything at all would be no more than behaving as one must—there could be no right or wrong about the matter. One cannot sensibly consider whether it is right or wrong that a river flows as it does, or a virus kills as it does. What must be isn’t subject to right versus wrong. At most, one can ask whether it is beneficial or harmful to some life form. (This is why scientists need to be objective and think independently, as do juries or indeed anyone who seeks understanding.)
What hangs up the case for free will so persistently seems to me to be the idea of causation. Ever since the beginning of recorded human thought there has been a dispute about what kind of stuff exists, and there have been very influential thinkers who have answered that there is just one kind of stuff, namely, bits of matter (specifically, the candidates have been atoms, strings, monads, you name it). If this is so, then there could only be one kind of causation in the world, since a cause is dependent on the identity of whatever is involved in a causal relationship. If there is just one kind of thing, then, there is just one kind of causation. So, since bits of matter exhibit the causal relationship of mechanical interaction—a movement here causes a movement there—any novel movement, initiative, or free action is out of the question.
But there is the contrary view that there are innumerable types and kinds of things in the world. As the world evolves, new types and kinds of beings emerge, and so different causes emerge, too. Once a human being has emerged in nature, given its unique nature—especially that of its type of consciousness—a new kind of causation has also emerged, which involves, by all accounts, being a first cause, an agent. This is what makes sense of assigning personal responsibility for what someone does or fails to do; it also makes sense of being able to be right or wrong not just in ethics or law, but also in science or philosophy; it is also the basis for the vast measure of human creativity and destructiveness in evidence throughout history.
Some who object to this kind of free will claim we can have it both ways, namely, personal responsibility along with unavoidability or determinism. Yes, they say, we are responsible, but only in the sense that, say, a rainstorm is responsible for a mudslide. Such an event was unavoidable, in the sense that if the circumstances lined up in a certain way, it had to happen, and no choice about it could exist. Applied to people, this means that they do have an intermediary role in how some things happen in the world. But they couldn’t have acted other than as they did—only if some of those circumstances or factors had been different could they possibly have done something else. By this line of thinking, que será, será, is the real situation for us all—whatever will be, will be. That kind of “responsibility” isn’t what free will, morality, law and creativity are about—these all assume people could act differently, all things being equal apart from their self-produced choices.
The “couldn’t have done otherwise” position, I take it, rests on the notion that everything is the same kind of thing, ultimately, and so is governed by the same kind of causation, which leaves no room for initiative or agency. But that everything is the same kind of thing goes against what we have in evidence around us throughout the world. Is a pebble the same kind of thing as a human heart? Is a reflexive movement of the eyelids the same kind of thing as the creative movement of Mozart’s composition of his music? Is a mathematical equation the same kind of thing as a volcano?
It is patently obvious that there are major differences between such things or processes, and to contend otherwise is very odd. Robert Laughlin, the Stanford University physicist, argues against the idea of just one kind of being making up everything, even in the field of physics, which is a favorite domain where that idea is advanced. See his A Different Universe (Basic Books, 2005).
Okay, we will not resolve the matter here and probably never reach any consensus on it, being as it is one of the most ancient debates. But consensus isn’t a requirement for truth. For my money, there is no reasonable doubt about it: human beings, unless crucially incapacitated, have the capacity to initiate some of their conduct. Which is what morality, law, art and even simple inquiry into the nature of things, requires.
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