Experiments in Philosophy

Thanks for the well-reasoned argument for optimism regarding humanity's ability to understand and benefit from the knowledge of our existence as fully natural creatures. My experience as a therapist is that it is indeed difficult for many people to accept their lack of free will, but I've witnessed a strong correlation between being able to do so and successfully dealing with the forms of guilt, contempt and blame which, far from making people act morally, are often the cause of people's most dysfunctional behavior.

There seems to be a bit of a flaw in the thread of the author's argument. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the debate about free-will in general, but it needn't be an issue of moral responsibility. I'm unclear as to how doing something that you "want" to do isn't an expression of free will. It would seem that if we don't have free will, we would be unable to make decisions like choosing not to have children. Monks who choose celibacy are violating the most basic biological urge--to procreate. How is that not an expression of free will? They may feel like they don't have a choice, that they are compelled by a heavenly power that is more powerful than their biological urges, but for an atheist, or an agnostic, that's not necessarily a relevant argument. The very fact that people can choose to disobey their biological urges because they "want" to, would seem like an expression of free will. Am I misunderstanding the definition of the term in this context?

Ken, thanks. That's interesting--do you use arguments against free will as a form of treatment? "Interested," Please don't misunderstand the purpose of this post. The goal was not to argue against free will, but rather to suggest that the implications of denying free will are not nearly as bad as most people think. To respond briefly to your questions: It seems to me that wanting to do something is only an expression of free will if you have some control over the desires you have. As for your Monks example, the free will denier will say that the existence of monks is only evidence that cultural forces play a large role in determining behavior. No free will denier believes that genes completely determine behavior. The claim is that our heridity in conjunction with our environment determines our behavior. And we don't freely choose either set of determining factors.

Where to start?

With Ken I guess, I hope you warn your patients that you hold some unusual philosophical views before you treat them (free will scepticism is still a minority though growing view), otherwise I suspect that you might do them considerable damage, and I say that as someone who has twice nearly had breakdowns because of temporary doubts about free will.

Saul Smilansky is right, society couldn't run without a belief that we are morally responsible. If Tamler and co don't run riot ethically it's at least partly because in Smilansky's terms they are still to some extent 'illusioned', as a result of their upbringing and can't practically live with the consequences of their views, something Tamler himself admits in his interview with Galen Strawson mentioned above. (BTW it's bizarre to be such a sports fan and free will denier when sport is a paradigm example of something whose interest lies in an undetermined outcome, and the admiration of human skill allied to effort- something again acknolwedged in the Strawson interview). We have no idea what a society which had abandoned the moral responsibility paradigm would look like, how our children's children would behave if Tamler's 'truth' became more widely 'known'.

The question about free will denial is whether it's really possible to live without praise or blame, not whether everything becomes nihilistic as Tamler suggests. Smilansky says not, and I agree. Tamler's argument about people not currently being concerned about being morally responsible isn't relevant, they never consider the possibility of not being so, most people simply don't doubt at any point that they are praise or blameworthy for their actions, and don't ever really question the empirical basis for such praise or blame.

Fortunately, you don't have to give up the idea that we are morally responsible and worry about 'living a lie to stay sane'. There are plenty of people who will argue that determinism is compatible with free will, Daniel Dennett, John Martin Fischer and Harry Frankfurt are three worth checking out on this compatabilist side.

Determinists like Tamler are also claiming victory too early in this argument. Consciousness seems to be integral to our free will, yet we have no agreed theory of consciousness yet. Neither can philosophers agree a common understanding of causation. There also seems no way that we can test whether or not determinism is true at the level of emergent complexity in our brains (nor can we even say that determinism and indeterminism are exhaustive categories.)

One of the key problems with Tamler's views is at the bottom he thinks that it is impossible that something can be partly caused rather than wholly caused, influenced rather than wholly determined. This leads to one of the most bizarre claims that you will see if you do go to naturalism.org; that free will is a disempowering fiction because it doesn't allow you to see that your behaviour is caused (and that if you believe in it it is implied you must be a deluded medievalist, right wing idiot), and therefore take action on those causes (using your self reflective free will???). Well, I can see that my upbringing and all sorts of other factors have influenced me, and the same for other people, which is part of why I treat them with compassion, but I never feel the need to say that neither I, or they have any responsibility for what we do. (On naturalism.org. by the way, it's a desperately confused site, with someone maintaining it who thinks we need to give up the idea of selves as well as souls and celebrates that fact! He also seems to be very certain about what science, whose essence is to test falsifiable hypotheses will decide in the future about free will).

There are also a range of views on free will which think that we do have free will, and that we can choose otherwise. Libertarians, none of whom depend on ideas about immaterial souls, worth checking out are Robert Kane, Timothy O Connor, David Hodgson and Helen Steward. For a view that suggests there is room for something immaterial in the mind, see Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley the Mind and Its Brain.

Two other authors worth a look, who might be said to muddy the compatabilist/ libertarian waters are Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown, Did my Neurons Make Me Do It? and Alicia Juarrero.

Niclas: After eight hours of Law and Order my patients are usually fine! Seriously, I've never witnessed a reaction even remotely like the one you describe, and have witnessed the opposite so many times, relief from the burden guilt, blame-induced anger, etc. that I plan to carry on spreading my "unusual philosophy" without hesitation. Not everyone I work with accepts my ideas, and I certainly don't insist that they do. I do insist on behaving toward them as if they didn't have free will, in other words not insisting that they or those they interact with could have ever done otherwise. This is usually quite a relief in itself. Nor have any of them experienced the moral slide so feared by my fellow non-free-willist Saul Smilansky. Quite the opposite, as guilt and blame subside, so do anxiety and anger, which results in much better behavior.

We do have an idea what a society which teaches everyone that they are ultimately responsible for their actions looks like (a moral position which lets everyone else who might have contributed to the behavior in question off the hook), we live in such a society, and from my point of view things don't look so good...actually things seem to be going quite badly. I hope a worldview where the complexity of causality is acknowledged will serve us better.

Do you also teach your patients that they can have no real sense of pride or achievement in what they do in life as they have no responsibility for it?

If not, you are just another free will skeptic wanting to have your cake and eat it.

What I can't understand about the evangelism of some free will skeptics is that you just don't need to abandon belief in free will to achieve a compassionate society. All that is required is an acknowledgement of the constraints on our freedom, an awareness that life deals us cards that can be very difficult to play. The phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I' and its secular equivalents, do not require free will skepticism.

Some of the most successful societies on the planet, Norway or Denmark for example, seem to flourish fairly well within a 'human face'/ realistic free will paradigm.

You seem to want to iron out some basic human emotions. Yes, excessive anger, guilt and shame are deeply damaging to people, but in a more controlled form they can also be essential drivers for behavioural change.

Literature in health ineqaulities suggests that healthy individuals feel a sense of control over their lives. I agree with Tamler that free will skepticism does not equal fatalism, but the temptation to be fatalistic for a free will skeptic is there, and I can't but feel that it must reduce the sense of control that people feel.

One final point. If we reduce the extent to which we feel pride over our achievements we take away one of the main motor forces behind human progress. Even for those of us fortunate to do work that we feel has an intrinsic value, that sense of pride is part of what pushes us the extra mile, that makes a massive cumulative difference to the quality of human lives in the long run.

Not sure what you mean about "sense of achievement", that seems untouched by one's belief in free will.

Pride is not what motivates us, it's the pursuit of happiness, compared to which pride is just a faint little buzz. Happiness is entirely compatible with full causality. Happiness has to do with fulfilling our needs, not whether we could have fulfilled them or not.

I wouldn't worry about not having enough anger or guilt around even after people let go of free will. I've never known anyone, including myself, without plenty of both. I think at best our hoped-for worldview change gets rid of part of the excess of those emotions. As a species I think some anger, and some moral sense are built in, we're not in danger of losing those.

I prefer the word "consequential" to "responsible"; our actions have consequences, and we're motivated by that fact (it is a determinant) to behave in ways which result in the desired consequences. That all remains intact without the belief in free will. I even believe in places of incarceration (Consequentiaries) where people whose behavior has dangerous, harmful consequences go for compulsory, humane, treatment.

Europe has gone a long ways toward de facto rejection of free will doctrine, its new constitution recognizes the consequences of poverty, discrimination, and seeks to relieve them. Our government continues to view moves to alleviate poverty with suspicion, as we are committed to a view of radical individualism which blames poverty on the poor. Europe benefits from much lower levels of crime, healthier populations, etc.

People may be initially shocked and then accept, but Freud might say they would give into hysteria and become like crazy animals, evenutally...

Freud was a determinist. He studied verbal slips, memory mistakes, etc. to support his belief that mental events, like other events, have causes. By connecting a verbal slip to an identifiable fear, desire, etc., he showed the influence of the unconscious. More the route away from hysteria than toward it.

Ken,

I'm not sure that we do pursue happiness as such, I think we pursue love, achievement, the moral good, beauty, a decent bottle of wine, a good cheeseburger etc, and thereby become happy.

In relation to free will scepticism having no impact on one's sense of achievement, we will just have to disagree there. I find it literally incredible that you think a view that must reduce (if not annihilate) one's sense of authorship of one's life has no implications for one's sense of achievement.

A quick point on poverty. It's back to my earlier posts, I don't see that acknowledging the consequences of poverty or any other aspect of society entails denying free will, it merely requires one to acknowledge the limits under which human freedom is exercised.

That their views imply free will denial would also I suspect come as a great shock to the Christian and Social Demoncrat framers of the constitution.

Ken,

'The doctrine of free will blames poverty on the poor?' You still don't get that it is possible to believe in free will, of either compatabilist or human face libertarian stripe, and believe in there being causes of poverty. I know, I manage it everyday in my work on social exclusion. (On Rawls, A Theory of Justice does not have to be interpreted in a deterministic fashion, and as far as I am aware it is not clear that Rawls did so himself).

Your list of social democratic heroes is interesting, and to some extent inaccurate. Russell, like other liberal heroes Mill and Locke before him was a compatabilist. It is also the case that many European welfare States (and social democrats) have been deeply influenced by Methodism, Lutheranism and Social Catholic teaching, none of which would appear to explicitly denying of free will. (Even Marx is a more complicated case than you imply.) Many of those at the forefront of the battle for social justice in the US have come from similar moral traditions themselves.

In relation to the Christian comment, there was a missing dash, I was referring to Christian Democrats (a catch all term for the European centre right). Not quite sure what prompted the outburst, but I suspect very few intelligent Christians would be surprised by the idea that secular people can be moral too.

Marx: “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of 'free will' .... Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”

Russell: “Reforms in education have come very largely through the study of the insane and feeble-minded, because they have not been held morally responsible for their failures and have therefore been treated more scientifically than normal children. Until very recently it was held that, if a boy could not learn his lesson, the proper cure was caning or flogging. This view is nearly extinct in the treatment of children, but it survives in the criminal law. It is evident that a man with a propensity to crime must be stopped, but so must a man who has hydrophobia and wants to bite people, although nobody considers him morally responsible. A man who is suffering from plague has to be imprisoned until he is cured, although nobody thinks him wicked. The same thing should be done with a man who suffers from a propensity to commit forgery; but there should be no more idea of guilt in the one case than in the other.”

Rawls: “It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.”

To the extent a social worker, therapist, policy maker believes his or her target population's behavior is freely chosen, the true causes and cures of that behavior (in type and strength) will remain hidden.

Russell and Marx and to a degree Rawls all seem to be claiming that the doctrine of free will is keeping us from a proper understanding of social problems.

Haven't got time to trade quotes, to anyone else daft enough to still be reading this, Google can demonstrate pretty quickly that Russell is generaly viewed as a compatibilist not a free will skeptic, and Marx is often seen as having both deterministic and voluntaristic elements. On Rawls, I note the use of the phrase 'in large part' in the quote above rather than wholly.

If a social worker, therapist etc treats their target population as having no free will, they may be tempted not ignore that individuals act as self reflective agents, and will not be the passive receipients of intervention. Social policy and therapy are not matters of pullng levers on a machine.

For what it's worth, part of my own egalitarianism is based on the idea that the cards we are dealt are radicaly unequal in life, and that we cannot be held responsible for those cards. It impossible to know how much causal role we play in our lives, and how much is determined for us, that does not equate to denial that we have any free will.

Another source of my egalitarianism is based around my conviction that it is just ridiculous to claim in any shape or form that I deserve more money than my mother in law who worked for years as an assistant in a care home, just because I have a couple of degrees. I know who works and worked harder for their cash.

Actually, I don't think that we are entirely lacking in experience of societies that lacked a belief in libertarian free will. The Calvinists as part of their theology explicitly denied libertarian free will on the grounds that such freedom of the will was incompatible with God being omnipotent and omniscient, and yet societies where the Calvinists held sway, such as 17th and 18th century Geneva and colonial Massachusetts existed as functioning societies which while not lacking in serious problems, did not see people generally running amok either.

BTW the 18th century Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards wrote an interesting treatise on the free will issue, "Freedom of the Will," which is surprisingly modern in much of its argumentation. See:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/will.html

Calvinists explicitly did not deny the idea of moral responsibility. Ken and Tamler do.

There are many sorts of compatibilists, but none of them believe in contra-causal free will. Jeremy Koons' article on hard determinism as a form of compatibilism shows at least that the positions are not as far apart as some imagine, even if one doesn't accept his claim that they are the same thing.

Belief in free will isn't necessary to treat people as if their behavior contributes to their troubles. Let's say I'm a doctor treating a diabetic who refuses to stick to the insulin regimen prescribed. The doctor will surely point out that the patient is "responsible" in the sense that, if he doesn't inject himself properly, he may sicken and die. If the patient is able to look into the causes for his resistance to taking good care of himself (low self-concept, phobia of needles, entitlement, etc.) he may be able to address them. If on the other hand he thinks he's mysteriously "freely" choosing to use insulin poorly, he'll gain no ability to change that behavior. In fact, his self-concept may suffer (what kind of a fool would freely choose to damage themself?) and the cycle may deteriorate.

I imagine it's the same with social exclusion; the excluded's behavior plays a role in the dynamic. But if that person is convinced that he is contributing to his exclusion in some mysterious "free will" way, he's less likely to be able to analyze the real reasons he's acting that way, or in turn find a solution.

With the belief that all events are caused, we can dismiss with the either-or (either it's your fault or society's fault) dichotomy which blinds us to the complexity of behavior causation.

Ken,

Being a compatabilist also does not entail denying robust moral responsibility, see Fischer, Frankfurt et al.

My point about the impact of a disbelief in free will on the attitudes of policy makers etc was not to suggest that it is not possible as a free will sceptic to view an individual's behaviour as contributing to their situation, merely that it provided a temptation to ignoring their agency (though I have some sympathy with those who say that they really can't grasp how a free will sceptic preserves any concept of human agency). This of course reflects the temptation to moral hardness that can afflict libertarianism.

I'm glad you use the word dichotomy, as I think your entire position on the issue of the supposedly morally beneficial impact of free will scepticism depends on a false dichotomy, why cannot responsibility be shared between an individual's free will and society at large? Given the intuitive fit between this and our prereflective understanding, doesn't this offer a more productive way of viewing things for most people, allowing for a degree of self forgiveness, and forgiveness for others, whilst still owning our actions, and not sliding into exculpation?

That's where free will does the work, not so much in explaining human behaviour, the unpredictability of human behaviour could as easily be the result of our ignorance about starting conditions in a deterministic situation, but as a way of understanding our ownership of our actions. It really all comes down to your inverted commas around responsibility in your last response.

On the diabetic question, I am interested by your use of the phrase low self concept as a possible cause of the diabetic's non taking of insulin. Wasn't one possible interpretation of the original experiment that the passage on free will resulted in precisely that? Furthermore, the diabetic would surely function better by both understanding the influences on his behaviour, and having a robust sense that he, not the influences, is in control of the future (with perhaps just a wee smidgeon of guilt at not looking after himself better as a bit of extra motivation).

I guess I reject the term "robust moral responsibility" as a stand-in for "ultimate moral responsibility" or even Strawson's "deep moral responsibility" (I may be dissenting from Tamler's terminology here), since the type of moral responsibility I believe in is, at its best, very robust, and deep, meaning strong and effective. But it's not something everyone has, only those who are caused to have it. It's a bit like saying people have robust health; robust health is the goal, but everyone doesn't have it. Maybe "unconditional" or "absolute", implying there are no excuses whatsoever.

My ideal is for everyone to have deep, robust moral responsibility, which to me means the ability to behave morally even in very difficult circumstances. I'm not sure how treating people who lack this type of responsibility as if they had it but were freely choosing not to use it would be beneficial. Some people have frail, weak moral responsibility, and they need help.

Ken,

You do sound more like a compatabilist than a free will skeptic to me.

I agree that to have moral responsibility requires a range of psychological attributes, and I agree that building those up should be an aim of many caring professionals.

However, I don't think that the diabetic in your example is a paradigm case of someone without the psychological tools of moral responsibility, more generally I think there are dangers in viewing someone whose behaviour seems to us to be against their self interest (or even seems to them at certain times to be against their self interest) as not having the tools for moral responsibility, or being 'ill' in some way. That way lies disrespect for choice and worse.

Jim,

On Edwards, aside from the point that it would be difficult to draw too many conclusions from his deliberations about the beliefs of the wider society of his time, he did not abandon the belief in desert. More generally on Calvinism, Max Weber argued that it was a major force behind the growth of capitalism, as people fought to demonstrate that they deserved to be amongst the chosen as they believed their faith showed themselves to be.

I've never particularly liked that term (free will skeptic), it's like calling an atheist a god-skeptic. I'm convinced there's no contra-causal free will, I'm a non-free-willist.

People come to me as a therapist with essentially the same question: Why do I keep doing things that are not in my best interest, that hurt myself and/or others? The most irresponsible and unhelpful thing I could say is: you're doing these things of your own free will. People know full well that if they don't change, things won't get better. They want to learn to respond to the world in better ways, become more responsible. How can they do that while looking at the world through the foggy notion of free will? They want to understand the real reasons, knowing full well that many of those reasons lie within themselves.

I'm not sure how far apart my position is from some compatibilist positions. Jeremy Koons claims hard determinism is a form of compatibilism. He realizes that we hard determinists aren't planning on flinging open the prison bars and letting the murders and rapists out. I think many compatibilists are wrong about retribution, I don't believe it follows from their position (and I guess not all compatibilists believe in retribution). Also I think they're wrong to call what we have "free will" (since it's not what people have always called free will, contra-causal free will, and is therefore seriously misleading) or to say that people are responsible, as if it's something we could just exercise if we gritted our teeth hard enough) but other than that, we both believe in rewards and sanctions for behavior, neither of us believes in contra-causal free will, etc.

I hope you'll read Koons, I think he makes a lot of sense (except the part about retribution. There are non-retributive reasons to sanction people who kill their only relative for their money.)

Tom Clark (centerfornaturalism.org) calls himself a neo-compatibilist, I hope you'll read him too, his views are virtually identical to mine and he may allay your fears about those of us who don't believe in free will.

Ken,

I guess we're coming to the end of the discussion, which I have enjoyed, though I think we have gone round in circles a little bit.

I'm still more than a little uncertain about what you think the changes caused by generalised free will denial would be, sometimes you imply huge, other times you imply few. I come down on the major, and largely negative side, and don't see that changing any more than your views will.

I've read both Koons and Tom Clark, still disagree with them and you ;-)

In terms of therapy and so much else, I guess I think a realistic free will paradigm is the best way forward, understanding without complete exculpation, it allows us to both preserve our sense of agency, and tackle the drivers for our behaviour. You are right though in that I don't think a therapists' job is in any sense to judge their patient.

One example of some impressive therapy work done is the OCD work of Jeffrey Schwartz, explicitly using the belief in free will of patients to break their compulsive habits.

The discussion here is great! The Vohs (no "l") and Schooler paper was also explored in Matt Hutson's April 2008 article, "Giving Up the Ghost," in the print edition of Psychology Today (avail. here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20080321-000008.html).

For the full text PDF of their article, you can visit http://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/assets/91974.pdf

What about those who are involved in situations, such as drugs, alcohol, and sex? Some people, like me, choose not to abuse any of those, though presented with those opportunities on multiple occasions. Morally obligated? Possibly. Free-willed, completely. It's like someone who chooses to play a video-game instead of run a mile, even though they are an Olympic athlete. Or, why does a person stop to pick a dandelion or a tiger lily to hold and walk with? Is it because they are morally obligated to do that? Or is it just because they enjoy having the comfort of such a widely-available object? I did enjoy your article, Dr. Sommers, I just am unclear on how someone CANNOT have free-will, when evidence around us proves we do have it.

Why does someone climb a tree, or listen to a song, or use their cell-phone in the middle of class? I see people listen to their "iPod's" and their MP3 players during classes. Why would someone choose to be shy over open, or open over shy? Everyone has an opinion, it's a free-will to discuss it. My freshman year of high-school, I was a rather quiet person. And then, over the summer, I became a more openly expressed individual. Why? Probably because I chose to be heard and known, not because I felt obligated. "Wants" are fufilled by free-will, by choosing to do something over another, maybe of higher-importance.

Like I stated earlier, I don't understand how free-will cannot be existant, nor do I understand how someone can't have a soul, if the they think, if they philosophize about anything... or if they even think. I can understand instincts, but if someone had no soul, nor free-will, why would anyone have the ability to rule a country, or a city, or to make life-threatening or life-inducing decisions? How could someone act on-stage for an audience, singing and making a song their own? I know I'm asking so many questions, but I'm trying to make a point; the point is: people would have free will if they choose to do things... such as a child in the middle of an Honors English class typing out a response to an article of a half-way related topic while the rest of them do something productive on their own project.

Hi,

I just wanted to chime into the conversation and say that Tamler and Ken Batts are ABSOLUTELY right here, both metaphysically and psychologically.

Also, I thought I'd add another point regarding the impact on psychotherapy.

With respect to the experience of anxiety (both at the level of everyday people and those with clinical disorders), there is massive psychological research indicating that internal efforts to control and regulate one's own thoughts, feelings and urges has the ironic effect of making the underlying problem worse.

You can see this in the example of sleeplessness. You want to sleep, but you can't, so you try harder to sleep. Naturally, you try to avoid having unhelpful thoughts like "why can't I asleep right now?". But the result is that these thoughts start to occur more often, and the effort backfires.

If you were to say "F--- it, it's out of my control", then you actually might fall asleep. So anything that can get you to that point--i.e., rejection of free will or homunculus self-agency--is a good thing.

See Wegner on this point:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Ewegner/seed.htm

The goal is to teach the patient to let go of useless efforts at cognitive and emotional self-regulation--in other words, to encourage the patient to accept and allow the occurrence of unwanted thoughts and feelings, rather than to try to suppress them or squeeze them out of view.

Rejection of free will helps here because it shows them that ultimately they are not responsible for the content of their thoughts and feelings, nor must they try to regulate the automatic events of their minds. Their is no self with a joystick that controls these events, and therefore there is no need for anyone to assume moral repsonsibility for them (or try to suppress them or prevent them from happening).

The result is that they become more able to release and relax and accept whatever comes. Only then can the problem get better.