In Philosophy Now this month, we are told by Dr John Shand of the Open University that our willingness to accept that we deserve praise, blame or punishment is evidence of the existence of freewill. In its absence, he says, such willingness makes no sense. We would be blindly following a previously determined course and so cannot be praised or blamed for what we do. However, the possibility that that praise or blame is an integral part of what determines our subsequent actions is not considered.

Perhaps though we should start by asking what exactly is freewill? For my action to be ‘free’ and not determined, there can have been no prior conditions which will have made me act in that way. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out many years ago, however, the description of an uncaused, unpredictable event is that it is random – something not normally suggested as an explanation of freewill by its proponents.

So a conundrum - we ascribe moral weight to our actions, but seemingly have no reason to do so. Of course, as beings who seek explanations for our actions in the here and now, rather than on geological time-scales, it is easy to understand why we see our decisions as resulting only from the last few steps in our thinking process, rather than as the product of an infinitely long deterministic process - even if that is the reality.

The more so where we have made a decision on an instinctive basis (that ‘fast and slow thinking’), and then changed our minds and come to a different view. The making of that revised decision based on our reasoning would be seen as an example of freedom of will - even though actually determined by our unique fund of accumulated knowledge, our circumstances, emotional state and capacity to reason.

Although there are people like Dr Shand who, without being able to define it adequately, actually believe that freewill must somehow exist, there are others who are more cautious. They say that freewill may possibly exist because science is unable to prove that it doesn’t exist. Just as we cannot prove the non-existence of unicorns or the yeti, so we cannot prove the non-existence of freewill. We should therefore give freewill the benefit of the doubt. But there is a radical difference between the existence or not of a physical object somewhere in the world and a statement which stands or falls on logic. Neither science nor explorers have anything to do with the logical incoherence of freewill.

But what is morality in the absence of free choice? We have many times noted that morality is a moving target. It morphs according to circumstances, including social conditions and our knowledge of how the world works. There are far fewer witch trials these days as we have (mostly) come to understand that black magic is not real. As we have developed a state enforced legal system, so the justification for taking direct action against people who have harmed us has diminished.

But from an individual point of view? When abandoning my earlier Christianity, this was an interesting problem for me to solve. Clearly there was no god to enforce morality, so I concluded that it had to be a useful myth from a societal point of view. In turn, this meant that if I could get away with not acting morally while all around me did, then that could work to my advantage.

Of course the flaw in that argument is that you have to be able to act immorally – i.e. not in line with society’s requirements – and not be detected. Easier said than done. I came to the conclusion that the safer and less anxiety inducing path to tread was to feign belief in morality as a coherent code coming from, well, who knew where, and normally follow its requirements – except when I thought that the morality du jour was actually harmful, for instance the extremism of trans rights.

But some academics seem to have more complicated ideas. There is a school of thought which says that, in the absence of a belief in freewill, we are likely to do the bare minimum to get by. If our actions can all be predicted, at least in principle, then why bust a gut working hard to achieve things? What will be will be. But this is fatalism and not determinism.

I spent rather a lot time and effort studying to be a solicitor and then in keeping my knowledge up to date in the hope of having a well-remunerated and interesting job. I could just have done nothing, in the fatalistic hope that things would turn out well. From experience, however, I knew that action was required on my part to get anywhere in life.

Greek fatalists used to argue over the point of calling the doctor if you are ill. But the act of calling the doctor is itself part of the chain of cause and effect which helps you to recover. It is driven by our wish to preserve ourselves, our emotional reaction to being ill.

One of the big names in philosophy though, John Searle, stated that even a determinist must act on the supposition of freedom; a determinist in a restaurant would not say to the waiter: “Look, I’m a determinist and so I’ll just wait and see what I order”. But determinists recognise that part of the chain of events prior to acting is the drive to make the decision which leads up to it. And it means that I personally am more likely to order lamb than beef.

But there are also many non-believers in the world of social science. And for them there is a more troubling question. There has for a very long time been a debate about whether people should be told of the non-existence of freewill or simply allowed to get on with their lives on the basis that freewill exists.

After all, most people believe that, in the absence of madness, we are responsible for our actions. This is modified to admit that nature and nurture affect our decisions, but very few would see this as doing away with our moral responsibility altogether. And denying the existence of moral obligation might lead to anarchy. So should we not trouble their minds with such questions? Or do we, paradoxically, owe them a moral duty to fess up?

Why do I even use the word ‘duty’? Let’s face it, there are not many people who are interested in philosophical problems, people willing to spend time thinking about the hard questions. And when the philosophical world is divided as to what freewill is all about or whether it exists, then giving a comprehensible explanation would be virtually impossible. It would be like getting the agnostics and atheists together with the leaders of all the different faiths, and asking them to explain what religion is all about. Not much hope of a coherent view emerging.

And is society actually disadvantaged by what I see as a major misconception? Of course, the Judaeo-Christian religions need freewill so that we can be blamed for our sins. Many Eastern religions place an emphasis instead more on Karma – that fatalism - but still depend on freewill for making people responsible for their day to day decisions. And all religions produce tension and conflict.

This means that insofar as freewill encourages the existence of religion and its many divisions, it ought to be the case that persuading people to abandon the idea of freewill would be a good thing. But I suspect that would be an uphill struggle.

We may have simply to accept that there is a widespread meme that has encouraged us to believe in the misconception that we have freewill, with its concomitant praise and blame. After all, by definition, natural selection of the meme will only have promoted its spread and acceptance if it produced an outcome favouring its spread.

And I have to admit that responsibility for our actions through ‘freewill’ has a superficially simple attractiveness. It makes us appear to be masters of our own future. It is certainly simpler than one based on a deterministic view of the world as this essay shows. And it is a straightforward basis for the making of laws tending to produce a stable and productive society.

Might this then account for our belief in the magic of freewill? Is it simply a religion by any other name?

4 November 2024

Paul Buckingham