Free Will Determinism Vs. Indeterminism Moral Responsibility

left Baron d'Holbach Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will. This is the doctrine of incompatibilism. Incompatibilists generally claim that a person acts freely (has free will) just in case the person is the sole originating cause of the act and the person genuinely could have done otherwise. This kind of free will is (at least allegedly) incompatible with determinism. If determinism is true, and everything that happens is completely determined by the past, including events that preceded our births, then every choice we make would ultimately be determined by prior events that were not under our control. Our choices would be just another outcome determined by the past. So if determinism were true, then we would be trapped by the past and free will would be an illusion. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. " Libertarians", such as Thomas Reid and Peter van Inwagen , are those incompatibilists who accept free will, deny determinism, and instead believe that indeterminism is true. (This kind of libertarianism should not be confused with the political position of the same name.)

thumb Thomas Hobbes Other philosophers hold that determinism is compatible with free will. These "compatibilists", such as Hobbes, generally claim that a person acts freely just in case the person willed the act and the person could (hypothetically) have done otherwise if s/he had decided to. In articulating this crucial proviso, Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains". Compatibilists often point to clearcut cases of someone's free will being denied — rape, murder, theft, and so on. The key to these cases is not that the past is determining the future, but that the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his or her own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what nullifies free will. In other words, determinism does not matter; what matters is that our choices are the results of our own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or even internal) force. To be a compatibilist, one needn't endorse any particular conception of free will (one need only deny that determinism is at odds with free will), but the positions canvassed here are typical of compatibilism.

Furthermore, it is often held that the phrase "free will" is, as Hobbes put it, "absurd speech", because freedom is a power defined in terms of the will, which is a thing--and so the will is not the sort of thing that could be free or unfree. Some compatibilists argue that this alleged lack of grounding for the concept of "free will" is at least partly responsible for the perception of a contradiction between determinism and liberty.

2 Moral responsibility

We generally hold people responsibleIn moral philosophy, the word responsibility has at least two related meanings: The obligation to answer for actions. Often this means answering to some specified authority. The recognition that in order to achieve one's purposes, one must act oneself ("t for their actions, and will say that they deserve praise or blame for what they do. However, moral responsibility is believed by many to require free will. Thus another important issue is whether we are ever morally responsible, and in what sense.

Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. After all, how can you hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from the beginning of time? Hard determinists say "So much the worse for moral responsibility!" and junk the concept — Clarence DarrowClarence Darrow ( April 18, 1857 March 13, 1938) was the lawyer who defended Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murder and defended John T. Scopes in the so-called "Monkey Trial", opposing Fundamentalist prosecutor William Jennings Bryan. He remains famo famously used this argument to defend the murderers Leopold and LoebNathan Leopold, Jr. November 19, 1904 August 29, 1971) and Richard Loeb ( June 11, 1905 January 28, 1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb were two wealthy Jewish University of Chicago students who murdered Bobby Franks and received life sentences — while libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!" This issue appears to be the heart of the dispute between hard determinists and compatibilists; hard determinists are forced to accept that we often have "free will" in the compatibilist sense, but they deny that this sense of free will truly matters — that it can ground moral responsibility. Just because an agent's choices are uncoerced doesn't change the fact that determinism robs the agent of responsibility.

Compatibilists often argue that, on the contrary, determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility — you can't hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something (this argument can be traced to Hume). After all, if indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. How can you blame or praise someone for performing an action that just spontaneously popped into his nervous system? Instead, they argue, you need to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences — the person's character — before you start holding the person morally responsible. Libertarians sometimes reply that undetermined actions aren't random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This move is widely considered unsatisfactory, for it just pushes the problem back a step, and further, it involves some very mysterious metaphysicsMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy, and related to the natural sciences, like physics, psychology and the biology of the brain; and also to mysticism, religion, and other spiritual subjects. It is notoriously difficult to define, but for purposes of br.

3 Compatibilist theories of free will and the could-have-done-otherwise principle

Many claim that, in order for a choice to be free in any sense that matters, it must be true that the agent could have done otherwise. They take this principle — van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities" — to be a necessary condition for freedom. For instance, if a scientist puts a machine in Bob's brain that makes him kill the President, his action was not free, for Bob couldn't have done otherwise. Incompatibilists often appeal to this principle to show that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. "If a decision is completely determined by the past," they ask, "how could the agent have decided to do something else?" Compatibilists often reply that what's important is not simply that the agent could have done otherwise, but that the agent could have done otherwise if he or she had wanted to. Moreover, some compatibilists, such as Frankfurt or DennettDaniel Clement Dennett (born 1942) is an American philosopher, and a leading figure in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is presently ( 2003) employed as Aus, argue that there are clear cases where, even though the agent couldn't have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free: what if Bob really wanted to kill the President and the machine in Bob's brain would only kick in if Bob lost his nerve? If Bob went through with it on his own, surely the act would be free. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that what Bob "wanted" was determined before Bob was conceived. See also Elbow RoomElbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting ( 1984) is a book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, which discusses the philosophical issues of free will and determinism. In 1983, Dennett delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford on the t, a book by Dennett that presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will.

More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered. A free action may require not only liberty from external coercion (according to some), but also liberty from internal conflicts. Compulsive behaviors and the actions of the insane are thus not free. Moreover, our common sense conceptions of free will also demand the possibility that an agent could act rationally or irrationally with equanimity. In either case, what we mean by free will could be that an agent can claim ownership of his or her will despite external or internal influences.

4 The science of free will

Throughout the history of science, attempts have been made to answer the question of free will using scientific principles. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic, and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. While not mechanistic in the same sense as classical physicsClassical physics is physics excluding quantum theory and occasionally excluding relativity as well. Roughly taken, the scale of classical physics is the level of isolated atoms and molecules on upwards, including the macroscopic and astronomical realm., most current scientific theories are also deterministic, by necessity — it is a basic assumption of all scientific endeavors that the future can be predicted. It is also difficult, if not impossible, to write the mathematics for a non-predictive science.

Various interpretations of quantum mechanics may suggest that the universe, when viewed as a single system, is deterministic, as there is no outside entity capable of making observations, aside possibly from God. It is far from clear, however, that microscale interpretations of quantum mechanics can be applied to large systems in this way, and whether quantum mechanics ultimately describes a universe governed by laws of cause and effect or by chance is hotly debated both by physicists and philosophers of science.

Like physicists, biologists have also frequently addressed the question of free will. One of the most heated debates of biology is that of " nature versus nurture". How important are genetics and biology in human behavior compared to culture and environment? Genetic studies have identified many specific genetic factors that affect the personality of the individual, from obvious cases such as Down's syndrome to more subtle effects such as a statistical predisposition towards schizophrenia. However, it is not certain that environmental determination is less threatening to free will than genetic determination.

It has also become possible to study the living brain and researchers can now watch the decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, wherein he asked subjects to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he watched the associated activity in their brains. Libet found that the brain activity leading up to the subject flicking their wrist began approximately one-third of a second before the subject consciously decided to move, suggesting that the decision was actually first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision." A related experiment performed later by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone involved asking subjects to choose at random which of their hands to move. He found that by stimulating different hemispheres of the brain using magnetic fields it was possible to strongly influence which hand the subject picked. Normally right-handed people would choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, for example, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely.

5 In theology

The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will. After all, if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, how can one's choices be free? God's already true or timelessly true knowledge about one's choices seems to constrain one's freedom. This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea-battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea-battle. If there will be one, then it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur. This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths — true propositions about the future. (However, some philosophers hold that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.)

In Christian theology, God is described as not only omniscient but omnipotent, which implies that not only has God always known what choices you will make tomorrow, but actually chose what you would choose. That is, by virtue of His foreknowledge He knows what will influence your choices, and by virtue of His omnipotence He controls those factors. This becomes especially important for the doctrines relating to salvation. Most Christians find ways of avoiding the conclusion that God predestines who will be saved and who damned, but Calvinists embrace it. Arminians believe that humans always have free will, but God's prevenient grace is always calling them.

Some philosophers believe that free will is equivalent to having a soul, and thus that (at least some) animals don't have free will. This is also the position of Jewish philosophy, which stresses that free will ( Hebrew: bechirah chofshith) is a product of the intrinsic human soul (neshama). There is some controversy on the contradiction between God's omniscience and free will; this was first debated between Maimonides and his critic Abraham ibn Daud (Raavad III), e.g. in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah Hilchoth Teshuva 5:5.

6 See also

Metaphysics

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1 Determinism vs. Indeterminism