Topics Freedom

Question It seems to me that people are strangely concerned that determinism means that they don't have free will. Could you explain why this view is common? Even if a decision is a result how the universe was before they made someone makes their decision, part of the universe was them. So if they are the person who wanted to make the decision, how can they believe that they didn't have a choice. They did have a choice, they just made the one they wanted, because they didn't want the other choice. In short, why is determinism seen as so incompatible with free will?

Accepted:
November 20, 2008

Comments

I think this is a very interesting question, one that has inspired some of my recent research. It has been said that it is just obvious that determinism rules out free will. Here is Robert Kane:

In my experience, most ordinary persons start out as natural incompatibilists. They believe there is some kind of conflict between freedom and determinism; and the idea that freedom and responsibility might be compatible with determinism looks to them at first like a ‘quagmire of evasion’ (William James) or ‘a wretched subterfuge’ (Immanuel Kant). Ordinary persons have to be talked out of this natural incompatibilism by the clever arguments of philosophers. (1999: 217)

Like you, I have been curious why philosophers have taken incompatibilism to be the commonsense view. So, the first thing I did, along with my co-authors, was to test whether non-philosophers actually take determinism to rule out free will and moral responsibility. Our studies suggested that most people (between 2/3 and 3/4) do not think they are incompatible. Here is a paper discussing the motivation for these studies, the results, and the implications: http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/papers/Is_Incompatibilism_Intuitive.pdf

Assuming it is not so intuitive that determinism rules out free will, the next question to ask is why has it been taken to be intuitive. I think your explanation for why determinism need not rule out free will also offers an explanation for why it seems to. My view is that many people interpret determinism to suggest a sort of reductionistic, mechanistic view that says the physical world pushes around our decisions and actions and makes our minds (our selves, our desires) irrelevant. If we start with some non-physicalist intuitions about our minds, then it's easy to think that a complete explanation at the physical level means there's nothing left for the non-physical mind to do. Hence, I think the free will question is motivated largely by the mind-body problem.

Having offered this error theory for incompatibilist intuitions, I should point out that the traditional way of motivating incompatibilism is this basic sort of argument (van Inwagen 1983):

If determinism is true, then everything that happens is a consequence of the state of the universe in the distant past and the laws of nature. But it's not up to us what happened in the distant past or the laws of nature. So nothing that happens is up to us.

There's a lot to say about this sort of argument and a lot of it has been said. But I think that whether free will is compatible with determinism depends on how one understands determinism and its consequences, as well as free will itself.