One Possibility Remains…
“Without metaphysical freedom, the universe is just a divine puppet show. If there is to be any real creaturely goodness, any new and creative act of love, rather than the merely mechanical uncoiling of a wind-up universe, if there are to be any real decisions other than those made in the divine will, then there must be metaphysical freedom, and such freedom brings with it the possibility of evil as well as the promise of goodness.”
~Augustine of Hippo
Will the real free will please stand up?
The basic distinction between compatibilism (the focus of our last lesson) and libertarianism (the focus of the present lesson) is this: for compatibilists, it is sufficient for free will that one's desires, choices, and actions are in alignment (even if they're all determined by something else); for libertarians, free will requires that you actually cause things to happen—things that wouldn't have otherwise happened. This can get a little confusing. So, perhaps we should think of compatibilism and libertarianism as different types of free will. Compatibilist free will is the kind of free will that you have whenever you act on your desires. The philosopher Mark Balaguer (2014: 50-52) argues that it’s obvious we have this Humean-style compatibilist free will. Clearly, all adult humans have had a desired and then acted on that desire. In other words, we've all wanted a cookie, chosen to eat the cookie, and then eaten the cookie. That means that everyone has compatibilist free will. The metaphysically interesting question, then, is whether or not we also have Libertarian-style free will. That is, we want to know whether we can do more than just act on our desires; we want to know if we can cause things to happen that wouldn't have otherwise happened. The question is: Can we control our desires and truly make ourselves? When framed this way, libertarianism sounds like the "real" free will? Here is Balaguer on the subject:
“The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Humean compatibilism ‘petty word jugglery’ and a ‘wretched subterfuge’... And the nineteenth-century American philosopher William James said this: '[Compatibilism] is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered... No matter what the [compatibilist] means by [free will]... there is a problem, and issue of fact and not of words'... These are strong words. But notice that Kant and James are not saying that compatibilism is false. They’re saying it’s irrelevant. They’re saying that compatibilists are just playing around with words and evading the real issue... And that’s exactly what I’m saying” (Balaguer 2014: 53-4).
I'm not entirely sure that talking about the "real free will" is ultimately accurate, but I do think that it's helpful to distinguish these two types of free will in this way. Libertarian free will is, in a sense, special. It is, in a nutshell, the power to cause things. In this context, it is clear that when we use the notion of free will as a solution to the problem of evil, we are using it in the libertarian sense, not the compatibilist one. Thus, the question of whether or not we have libertarian free will is the important one. Our solution to the problem of evil hinges on the truth of libertarianism about free will.
Decoding Libertarianism
Soon to be forgotten?
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Lisa Feldman Barrett.
When libertarians, like Balaguer, accuse the compatibilists of just playing around with words, it makes it seem like libertarianism is the more dignified and serious approach. However, for all their clarity in their language, libertarianism has often been accused of incoherence, as we saw in the last lesson.1 For example, what even is a non-determined choice? What does it mean to "make yourself"? Is there any view of causation that even allows for these libertarian choices? The truth is that, even if the idea of libertarian free will can be made coherent, it's not at all obvious that we have it, as Balaguer (2012) speculates in his Free will as an open scientific problem.
We've already seen that views that have been around for millennia can be discarded. As we speak, there are movements in several fields that are attempting to dethrone established theories. For example, in the neuroscience of emotions, the classical theory of emotions, that the same basic emotions are built-in to all humans and that each emotion has a distinct pattern of physical changes in the face, body, and brain, is being challenged by the construction theory of emotion. For example, Lisa Feldman-Barrett (2017) argues instead that emotions are concepts that we learned from our caregivers and society, and these emotion concepts can be realized in multiple ways by the brain (using different combinations of neurons). This is contrary to the classical view which would suppose one dedicated neural structure for different emotions. More importantly, the findings seem to be on the side of the construction theory of emotion. We'll see what happens.
By the way, Barrett even calls into question the notion of trial by jury. Her basic point is that emotion isn't something that we recognize in someone, but something that we project onto them. Moreover, we are actually pretty bad at correctly predicting what someone's emotional state is. We are especially bad if they are of a different gender and/or race—which shouldn't be too surprising. This means that, in a court of law, juries are not very good at assessing key aspects of the defendant's emotional disposition, such as whether or not they are remorseful. Clearly, then, the perceptions and misperceptions of a jury can affect things like the verdict and the sentencing process. Barrett suggests that, since the Founding Fathers didn't know anything about 21st century neuroscience of emotion, they got key aspects wrong. And so, the whole idea needs to be reformed (see Barrett 2017, chapter 11).
Along with the classical theory of the emotion and trial by jury, might we see democracy go by the wayside too? Some are becoming less confident in the electorate's capacity to make good decisions about their elected officials. Brennan (2017), for example, makes the case that we should abandon democracy and replace it with an epistocracy, or rule by the learned. The basic idea is that voting is a privilege awarded only to those who have proven that they know basic things about American government—which unfortunately many people don't. Consider the following:
Even one of my favorite broadcasters, Dan Carlin, in a show titled Steering into the Iceberg, suggested that people that believe in too many conspiracy theories shouldn't be allowed to vote. This is surprising from someone who refers to himself as "a real 'We the people' kinda guy". What will become of democracy?
Will something similar happen with the idea of human free will? Some scientists think so. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist from Stanford University, believes that our notion of free will is outdated and that the criminal justice system needs to be reformed. The people who commit crimes really weren't able to help themselves. Although it is true that we should sequester those who are dangerous and make sure they can't harm people, he argues that it's not right to put them in inhumane prisons the way we are currently doing.
“People in the future will look back at us as we do at purveyors of leeches and bloodletting and trepanation, as we look back at the fifteenth-century experts who spent their days condemning witches... those people in the future will consider us and think, ‘My God, the things they didn’t know then. The harm that they did’” (Sapolsky 2018: 608).
The classical problem of free will was generated as Newtonian mechanics grew dominant and the belief in determinism grew common in intellectual circles.
There are three views related to the problem of free will:
- hard determinists, which claim that human free will and determinism are incompatible, accept the truth of determinism, and, thus, deny that humans have free will;
- libertarians, which claim that some human actions are not determined and thereby deny the truth of determinism; and
- compatibilists, which claim that human actions and determinism are not only compatible, but some sort of determinism is actually required for real human free will.
Determinism came to be questioned at the turn of the 20th century with the dawn of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics, however, does not itself seem to be compatible with libertarian free will.
Footnote
1. Balaguer even titles one of his papers "A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will". The adjective coherent wouldn't be necessary if there weren't a widespread assumption that libertarianism is incoherent. In fact, about 60% of professional philosophers are compatibilists according to a recent survey (see Bourget and Chalmers 2014). That same survey showed that belief in Libertarian free will and belief in God was one of the top ten highest correlations (see Table 6). This raises the possibility that some philosophers only believe in Libertarian free will because they need it to escape the conclusion of the problem of evil argument—a case of motivated reasoning. To further along the idea that this might be motivated reasoning, consider the following. It is the case that about three-quarters of professional philosophers are atheists and that most of the theists specialize in Philosophy of Religion (see Bourget and Chalmers 2014, section 3.3). In fact, the combination of theism and specializing in Philosophy of Religion is the highest correlation between a particular view and specializing in a particular field (see Table 10). It is definitely a possibility that theists only believe in libertarian free will because they have to in order to rescue their theistic beliefs.
