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Note: The following is a summary of our side of a recent debate with Roy Baumeister on free will, held at the annual convention of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology last February in Tampa, Florida. Read More
thank you for summarizing
thank you for summarizing simply the scientific or psychological reasoning behind such a concept. I have been unnerved by the idea of free will since a moment in my early 20s when i knew i was out of control and it hit me that it must only have been an illusion that i ever was in control. but yet an "intellectual" illusion, exactly as you say, that as humans, we don't seem to be able to do without. Perhaps it is something to do with the paradox of reconciling monism (loosely say: it's all good) with dualism (such as good having no meaning without evil). Do you know what i mean?
My experience led me to an entirely different worldview where i began to see the most "evil actions" in terms psychological or pathological: that no one "in their right mind" would be homicidal, kleptomaniacal, addicted, sociopathological, narcissistic, unempathetic, abusive, megalomaniacal, pedophile - all those big words that refer to traits in people we're still calling criminal - as if someone could really "choose" to do something so at odds with the evolutionary need to maintain human connection and promulgate the species.
i think we just don't have the understanding, power, or cures, and we are all understandably hurt and angry when these sicknesses come into our spheres, so we, in our own defensive mechanism (which we must maintain to survive) punish, judge and jail the worst offenders, the sickest people.
I welcome any thoughts. This is the first time I have sought out this subject to discuss - i don't seem to find many people (except for older teenagers, who, thankfully, seem to be intrigued by my ideas) who will engage me on something i find so crucial and yet wholly dismissed.
free will and the problem of evil
Elena, thank you for the several interesting points you raise. I'll respond here to the first of them, and to the others in upcoming posts.
As Elena intuited, the intellectual history of the free will concept is indeed caught up in the problem of evil, or as she put it, does the existence of good require the existence of evil? Theologically, the problem of evil is simply the problem of the sheer existence of evil in a cosmos where God is all powerful and also all good. If God is all powerful, why does He allow the existence of evil? If He does allow it, then He is not all good; if He does not allow it, then He is not all powerful (because it exists despite His wishes).
In the early years of the Christian church, a particularly influential solution to the problem of evil was offered by Mani: God is all good but Evil also exists as a separate cosmic force (i.e., Satan). Ultimately the leaders of the Church rejected this compromise as a heresy because it held that God was thus not all-powerful. St Augustine was originally a Manichean, but believed he found a different solution to the problem of evil and hence rejected the Manichean heresy. He argued that free will had to exist because otherwise God would have no basis for the final judgment upon each of us. That is, God detests evil and is not its origin but He gives us free will to do good or evil so that we can earn our eternal reward in heaven. If we did not have the power to do evil, and could only do good, then God would have no basis for judging our lives and rewarding or punishing us. So, according to Augustine, God must permit the existence and occurrence of evil as a kind of necessary though unwanted side-effect of giving us free will.
So Elena definitely seems to be on to something here when she relates the notion of free will to the question of whether good can exist without the concomitant existence of evil. And in making that connection, she reminds us that the concept of free will was originally a religious construction, a solution to a particularly thorny early-Christian theological conundrum.
For more on the early history of the free-will concept and the problem of evil, see my 2008 chapter "Free will is un-natural" at www.yale.edu/acmelab/publications.html and also the highly recommended treatments by Susan Neiman in her book "Evil in modern thought", and by Hannah Arendt in "The Life of the Mind".
i'm honored and excited to
i'm honored and excited to hear more. This is akin to having a private course. You won't keep me from happily debating and discussing these issue as soon as I have a contention.
Nice thoughts
Some nice thoughts. Very interesting to read. Thanks for the good work and waiting for more.
Professor Bargh, you write,
Professor Bargh, you write, "The folk notion of free will is laden with the concept of a soul, a non-physical, unfettered, internal source of choice-making--in other words, an uncaused causer." I presume you think this claim about ordinary people's understanding of free will (and its relation to the soul and the idea of being an 'uncaused causer') is an empirical claim, one that is in principle testable. Do you have any empirical evidence for it?
If it is false that most people fit your characterization, then your claims about what psychology is showing about free will are likely mistaken, since your claims depend on the 'folk notion' being what you assert it is. And if people do not understand free will to involve super-natural powers (or even if they also assume it also includes a lot more, such as the 'natural' powers of self-control and conscious deliberation), then telling people they don't have free will would be misleading and could lead to bad consequences. I suspect many people do not understand free will in the way you say they do, and I think the initial attempts to obtain evidence about folk intuitions about free will (such as my own) indicate as much. (It certainly is false that most philosophers understand free will in the way you propose.)
belief vs reality of free will
Dear Professor Nahmias, thank you for your note. To clear up this apparent confusion, I am not making any claims about ordinary people's understanding of free will. Any claims I would make about "what psychology is showing about free will" have to do with the reality of an uncaused will, rather than what people believe about free will. In the sentence you cite, what is meant is that there is a (most likely implicit) overlap between the concepts of free will and of the soul -- historically as I noted in a recent reply here, but probably also in terms of the content of the concept, and the psychological/affective functions they serve for the individual. In harmony with your thrust here that people do not understand free will to involve super-natural powers (I certainly agree with this), I don't think that people are aware of or realize this analogical similarity at all. But I think that discovering and highlighting the seeming similarities are intriguing, and could be revealing about the underlying motivations that might support both beliefs. Bottom line: research on what people believe about free will is not the same as research on the actual freedom of the will; my research focuses on the latter, not the former. We do not make any arguments about the actual existence of free will based on the content of folk or lay beliefs about free will. Our lab's version of 'experimental philosophy' has focused for many years now on the question of whether conscious awareness and intent are necessary to produce the higher mental processes -- e.g., judgment, motivation, social behavior. We do experiments on the underlying mechanisms of the will, addressing the issue of the freedom of the will directly, and that is the body of empirical evidence from which we make all claims or conclusions.
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