Topics Freedom

Question If I had a device that could manipulate people's wants (like make them want to give me free money for no reason) would that take away their free will?

Accepted:
August 23, 2008

Comments

Your question taps into a big discussion in the current free will debates. First, your thought experiment can be used as a response to a very straightforward definition of free will that says: a person acts freely just so long as she acts on her desires. But your case suggests this definition is too simple (other problem cases include acting on desires that one acquired through hypnosis or brainwashing or desires one doesn't really want to have, such as addictions or compulsions).

In the face of these problems, philosophers have developed more sophisticated accounts of free will. For instance, we might say that a person acts freely just in case she acts on desires that she accepts, or would accept, having. Some people presumably do not accept their addictive or compulsive desires, so on this account they would not be free when those desires drive them to act (against their will, we might say). And the "would accept" part of the definition might allow us to avoid the other problem cases. Were we to know about them, we would not accept most desires that were put into us without our knowledge and against our will. So, if I act on a desire that I have only because of hypnosis or brainwashing or your device, then I am not acting freely. (Of course, I might ask to be hypnotized to influence my desires--e.g., to reduce my desire to smoke--in which case the hypnosis seems not to undermine my freedom. Interesting case: are we free if we freely join a cult knowing we may be brainwashed to want (crazy!) things we do not know about before we join?)

At this point in the dialectic, philosophers start worrying about a device like yours that can induce people not only to have certain desires but to want to have them and act on them and even to accept them on rational reflection. And they also argue that such massive manipulation of people's overall psychology (to make them rationally accept the desires they act on and control themselves to act on them) is no different in principle from determinism. So, they conclude, determinism is incompatible with free will. These "manipulation arguments" (see, e.g., recent work by Derk Pereboom or Al Mele) are, in my view, the strongest recent arguments for incompatibilism. I think they are mistaken, but it's not easy to see why (one could, for instance, just stipulate that manipulation by another agent threatens freedom in a way that causation by natural forces does not, regardless of the fact that we cannot ultimately control the influence of either; one could also bite the bullet and say that if the device really makes us rational agents, then we are free despite its influence on us).

So, I think the right answer to your question is yes, your proposed device would take away people's free will. But it's less clear what to say about more complex devices. In any case, you've brought up a hot topic in the recent philosophical debates about free will and moral responsibility (and I haven't even mentioned the connection to the famous Frankfurt cases).

A footnote to Eddy Nahmias's very helpful answer. What should we learn from all the complexities of the debates which he touches on?

We could say: The ins and outs of the debates just go to show that our concept of "free will" is a very complicated and sophisticated one, although one of which it is difficult to command a clear view. We need to do more careful analytic work to explore how this pivotally important concept works.

But another line is: We can now begin to see that talk of "free will" muddles together quite a variety of different things we might care about (such as the capacity to act on our desires, the capacity for self-control, having desires we reflectively identify with, absence of interference by others, etc.). There isn't a unitary concept here, and undifferentiated talk of "free will" isn't very helpful.

Some of us incline to the second line, taking our cue from e.g. Daniel Dennett's provoking and characteristically very readable 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.

Question If I had a device that could manipulate people's wants (like make them want to give me free money for no reason) would that take away their free will? Accepted:August 23, 2008

Question If I had a device that could manipulate people's wants (like make them want to give me free money for no reason) would that take away their free will?

Accepted:
August 23, 2008