Quotes 2-18-2015
by Miles Raymer
“I think of free will as the capacity for free action. Free action means that the person could do different things in the same situation. In essence, the question of whether someone acted freely is a question of whether the person could have done something differently. This is highly relevant to moral judgment and moral philosophy. A moral judgment is essentially an assertion about whether someone should have acted differently, which presupposes that the person could have. Thus, if one establishes that an agent could not have acted otherwise, moral and legal judgments are substantially muted. Indeed, when people seek to minimize moral guilt for their actions, one common strategy is to portray their actions as something that they could not have helped or avoided (e.g. Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990).
Myriad metaphysical mischief has attended the notion that free will is the source of the multiple possible actions. That is, the concept requires the possibility that the person could act in different ways in a given situation, but is free will the basis of that multiplicity? More likely, I think, the circumstances present the person with multiple possible courses of action, and free will is a matter of picking among them. Put another way, free will is the result, rather than the cause, of the multiplicity of alternatives out in the world.
In my view, a scientific theory is a causal theory that invokes what is known about nature and culture. Hence a scientific theory will contain nothing that is supernatural or that implies exemption from causality. A scientific theory about a human faculty would almost certainly describe it as something produced in stages by evolution and natural selection, which again points to the need to think of freedom along a continuum rather than an absolute, all-or-nothing matter.”
–– “Constructing a Scientific Theory of Free Will,” by Roy F. Baumeister, Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, pg. 236
“The OASIS would ultimately change the way people around the world lived, worked, and communicated. It would transform entertainment, social networking, and even global politics. Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life.”
––Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, pg. 56
If we assume for a moment that the “choices” we make are derived from causal sources laid out long ago d/t our living in a material universe, which seems to be where the evidence points, then a person having “free actions” is still merely determined and not freely chosen at all. Just because it appears that one has multiple choices does not mean that one actually does in the moment of “choosing.” It seems more the case that a person has determined actions and could not have acted any other way. The concept of “free action” seems to just be a new way of saying, “you chose that, even if your choices were limited.” It seems a leap to say that one has free actions and thus free will when in reality there was only one choice all along masquerading as more.
Your claim is only true if you ascribe to a hard interpretation of determinism, which most authors in this volume don’t appear to do. I lean toward agreeing with you in a purely theoretical way, but more and more I’m becoming agnostic on the whole matter, finding it’s better to simply throw out the question of free will and talk instead about concrete ways to improve the human experience of self, agency, and community. You can still pursue those goals whether you’re a determinist or not, because they focus on how people think and feel about themselves as choosing creatures. The scientific foundations of that experience ought to be taken into account and factored into our moral judgments, but we can’t just discount the experience of choice because we can’t find a physical substrate for it. People are going to experience themselves as choosing agents whether that is the reality or not.