Topics Freedom

Question This question is about free will: When I write this sentence I am not quite sure what I will think of to write next. Every word just seems to pop up into my head just a fraction of a second before I write it. It seems that I do not control what it is that I will write. It seems however that it is possible to not write something that pops into my head - but, then again, that counter-urge not to write a word also seems to just pop into my head. If performing any kind of action is like writing, can I be said to have a free will?

Accepted:
October 5, 2006

Comments

It sounds as though you take the model of a free and controlled action to be one over which you have deliberated like a judge at a tribunal. This is a bit surpising, because some have taken the sort of spontaneous, apparently unforseen actions you describe to be indeed more paradigmatically "free"--free from the allegedly constraining influence of prior reasons and thinking.

Now, an incompatibilist thinks that any actions caused by past events cannot be free--not even the more spontaneous ones, for these are simply caused by something other than conscious deliberation.

However, a compatibilist thinks that actions caused in the right way are free---that what it is for an action to be done freely, for you to be in control of it, is for it to be caused in a certain way by aspects of you (for instance, by your reasons, your thinking, and your deciding).

So your question should really be directed to the compatibilist: a lot of actions seem quite unpremeditated, and to that extent do not seem to be caused by deliberative manipulation of reasons; so how can such actions be free?

To answer this question the compatibilist has really a lot of options. They might claim that these relatively spontaneous actions in fact are caused in the right way. Perhaps, they will claim that reasons do play the required causal role here (such as reasons for writing, or even reasons for randomly deciding to write or not to write as a philosophical experiment). Perhaps they will claim that what makes even the most haphazard actions free is that the cognitive system that produces them, while going with the flow at the moment, stands at the ready to intercede when reasons so dictate. Perhaps they will consider the sort of automatic behavior that is involved in writing and talking as rather like a case of delegation of authority: you delegate control over your choice of words to a sub-conscious subsystem; but like a CEO, you are responsible for so-delegating and for not interceding, and that helps to explain how the action really is in your control despite its sources not being available to your conscious scrutiny.