(Author's note: This is an excerpt from an old term paper I wrote. It used to be on an old blog of mine and surprisingly my most popular post by far.)
Free Will is a fundamental topic in Philosophy of Mind, Ethics and Morality, Theology, and Neurophilosophy. The nature of free will, according to David Hume, is “the most contentious question of metaphysics”. But like most questions in philosophy, we have no definitive answers; only many lines of argument, and many, many debates.
Possibly the simplest way to think about free will is as ‘the ability to exercise control over one’s choices’. It has been addressed in Western and Eastern Schools of Thought in very different ways, but phenomenologically, all humans seem to have a sense of control over their choices and subsequently, their actions. This makes free will a very intuitive proposition. The existence of free will is favored by some due to the need to assign agency to actions, and to hold agents accountable for them. Accountability and moral responsibility are highly debatable ideas and therefore, claiming that free will exists in order for moral responsibility to exist is a very weak line of argument.
Contemporary philosophy has thus converged upon various stances with respect to free will. Perhaps the most significant of them is Determinism. According to determinism, the world is governed by a set of natural laws such that any two possible worlds with the same natural laws which are alike at a given point in time are also alike at every other point in time. One of the many types of determinism is Causal or Nomological Determinism, which is “the thesis that only one continuation of the state of things at a given moment is consistent with the law of nature” (van Inwagen, 1983). If the present and future are dependent purely on the events of the past and laws of nature, it seems to leave no room for free will. That is the Incompatibilist stance- that no deterministic world is a free will world. Compatibilism, on the other hand, proposes that that is not the case and that determinism and free will can exist in the world together and go hand-in-hand. To support the incompatibilist position, van Iwangen gave the Consequence Argument. The argument is based upon a principle known as the No Choice Principle:
Suppose that p and that no one has (or ever had) any choice about whether p. And suppose also that the following conditional (if-then) statement is true and that no one has (or ever had) any choice about whether it is true: if p, then q. It follows from these two suppositions that q and that no one has (or ever had) any choice about whether q. van Inwagen, Peter, 1983, An Essay on Free Will
Combining this principle with the argument that no one has any choice about the events of the past or laws of nature, if we assume that determinism is true, no one has any choice about the events of the future, either. In other words, in a universe where determinism is true, free will cannot be true. Source: Think-Liberty
All scientific inquiry has been devoted to uncovering laws that would explain how the past led to the present, and allow us to predict the future. However, it is impossible, at least with our current resources to possess the intellect that Laplace postulated (Laplace’s Demon); we do not have access to all data that is necessary to make accurate predictions about the future. This inaccessibility is made up for by probability – using the data that is available, scientific laws make predictions that are stochastic in nature. Some have argued that the decision-making network (and the human mind in general), like quantum and chaotic systems, could be intrinsically stochastic. And it is this stochasticity that causes us to think of ourselves as independent, free-willed creatures. If that were true, by the definition discussed in the beginning, free will requires control, a component lacking in random events. In the absence of determinism and conscious control, can we really call our decisions as ones made with free will? If we were to take the libertarian stance and say that cognizing agents are non-deterministic (or, not wholly deterministic), it would imply that these agents are able to control their choices by assigning different weights to priors from the past and to free will. The mechanism of such a process, as well as the distinction between free will and random events, is uninvestigated. The claim about the non-deterministic nature of cognizing agents is also one that is difficult to support empirically, given the mechanistic, rule-governed nature of theories of cognition.
What about moral responsibility, then? The possibility that humans lack free will and that the actions of each individual are pre-determined leads to the question – who is responsible for these actions?
Modern philosophy has posited that the key requirement for moral responsibility is sourcehood. For the agent to be the source of her action, she has to be the first element of the causal chain leading up to the action. The causally deterministic, incompatibilist view that has been defended so far does not, in principle, allow this type of agent-causation. Even a libertarian stance would have a difficult time explaining agent causation of this sort- if the action came about due to a random event, the randomness was the initiator of the causal chain, not the agent herself.
The idea of morality itself has been assessed critically within Ethics. Nietzsche is a leading source of these arguments, but others such as Bernard Williams have also challenged moral philosophy (by constructing an ‘amoralist’ persona). Much like the rest of philosophy, debates about Morality and Ethics may never reach a conclusion, but from a societal perspective, it is clear that morality, or at least a belief in it, is necessary to prevent anarchy and disorder within social structures. The moral values propagated by culture and society form a part of the individual’s past; the priors that cause decisions. The indispensability argument from philosophy of mathematics also comes in handy here – we should believe in the abstract concept of morality because of its indispensable nature.
When free will is defined in terms of causation and control, it becomes necessary to elaborate upon the mechanism of this control. On the other hand, if it is defined as randomness, it has to be separated from the sense of control humans experience. Due to this dichotomy, event causation and determinism seem like attractive alternatives, but questions about where the event causal chain begins, who carries out actions and who is responsible for them remain unanswered. It may suffice to take a naturalist position and assert that human beings are governed by natural laws, but we are far from providing evidence for this, or any other, stance.