I have used quite a bit of space on this blog in search for the enigma that is “free will”. This isn’t a chemistry experiment. My aim isn’t to isolate a fraction of “essence of free will” to be resold for profit. Instead, I would just like to narrow down its purpose and meaning.
Wikipedia provides a straightforward, if altogether too generic, definition, stating that:
“Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors.”
It’s pretty apparent that the operative phrase here is certain factors. For example, if human choices are, in fact, tightly constrained and yet still remain free of the influence that arises from the reverse motion of Mercury, then I think it’s fair to say that free will becomes redundant. If astrology is the only outside influence that our choices are free from (“Phew!”), but otherwise our choices follow a whole host of physical laws, then it makes sense to resort to those laws in order to understand the causes behind human decisions.
On the other hand, if the concept of free will implies that human choice is free from the constraints of our underlying “physical reality”, then free will gains purpose and utility.
This is why I would define “free will” as a concept used to explain what causes human decisions to occur, above and beyond what can be explained through the application of scientific principles to our understanding of the world. My position is that free will represents a failed concept, because it cannot provide any such explanatory power. I can explain my own decisions and the decisions of others more effectively by discussing causal relationships than by referring to fuzzy notions of the will.
Not everyone agrees with this position.
A good example is the “eminent psychologist” Roy Baumeister, whose recent blip on the internet’s Slate attempts to serve up a platter of evidence to support the concept.
He proposes that free will is not inconsistent with causality, but represents “just another kind of cause”, that emerges from the laws of physics and neuroscience, and which “invoke[s] causes that go beyond them”. He further claims that “free will” is really just the colloquial concept that most of us accept, which involves “consciously making choices about what to do in the absence of external coercion, and accepting responsibility for one’s actions”.
While this verbal slight-of-hand appears superficially convincing, unless Baumeister identifies or describes some of these “causes” that go beyond physics and neuroscience, we are still left with a concept that lacks any additional explanatory power.
In fact, Baumeister continues by describing free will as a culturally-determined system for “following rules” that is essentially little more than the processes that underlie “self-control” and “rational choice”.
Self-control is one of Baumeister’s areas of psychological inquiry, but while this concept is useful for conducting psychological research, simply re-labelling free will in this way tells us nothing about what causes actually causes decisions to occur. In fact, Baumeister’s own research shows us that self-control is impaired when blood glucose levels decrease, which purportedly accounts for the grossly skewed legal decisions made immediately before lunch! So perhaps “self-control” is not such a useful out for free will, after all.
On the other hand, even if, as Baumeister asserts, culture and moral rubrics are the guiding forces behind free will, then it seems we are still stuck bending to the “external coercion” of social and institutional forces, contrary to Baumeister’s stated definition.
Thus, it seems that Baumeister is simply using “free will” as a stand-in for the wide variety of factors that social scientists have identified as playing important roles in human affairs. However, no respectable social scientist would propose that these factors are acausal, or indeed, that they lack coercive power.
I suppose there could be some confusion here about whether a person chooses to accept the cultural and moral precepts that influence human beliefs and actions, therein creating room for some version of free will. But, do any of us doubt that when we better understand the processes that explain why one person acquires a “strong moral compass”, whereas another follows the path to “moral degeneracy”, that we will begin to re-name these processes appropriately?
In fact, I would argue that social scientists, psychologists and geneticists are collaborating on these problems right now and that their incipient work has done a lot to replace this concept.
Thus, by shining the light of human inquiry upon the domain of “free will”, it simply disappears.
My belief? Free will is actually an anachronistic dodge. It was never intended to have explanatory power of the sort that we require in this modern era of scientific inquiry. Its function has always been to explain away causes and factors which earlier civilizations had no ability to investigate, let alone understand. Now that researchers like Baumeister are around to attempt this endeavor, its retention in the common vernacular has become a source for misunderstanding that impedes rather than informs our collective understanding of human decision-making and responsibility.
One of the most common misunderstandings is that our systems of law and ethics actually rely upon this concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. The utility of law and morality for ensuring the (relatively) fair and proper functioning of a health society cannot be understated. But, these systems lose validity when they rely upon imprecise and necessarily ambiguous concepts like free will. In contrast, even fairly simplistic concepts like “self-control”, or “orbitofrontal damage”, which respond fairly predictably to differing conditions within and outside the (neuro)psychology laboratory, provide far more insight into how and why people make the decisions that they do. Hopefully, with time will come a better understanding and greater precision than we have today.
Let’s do away with free will and let the historians rather than the philosophers deal with its story.
