Free will

Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. The phrase "up to ourselves" is vague, and, just like free will itself, admits of a variety of interpretations. Because of this ambiguity, the utility of the concept of free will is questioned by some. Several logically independent questions can be asked about free will.

Compatibilist theories and the could-have-done-otherwise principle

Many claim that, in order for a choice to be free in any sense that matters, it must be true that the agent could have done otherwise. They take this principle — van Inwagen calls it the "principle of alternate possibilities" — to be a necessary condition for freedom. The literary critic Isaiah Berlin made much the same point.

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The claim is that, for example, if a criminal puts a machine in Bob's brain that makes him kill a stranger, his action was not free, for Bob couldn't have done otherwise. Incompatibilists often appeal to this principle to show that determinism cannot be reconciled with free will. "If a decision is completely determined by the past," they ask, "how could the agent have decided to do something else?" Compatibilists often reply that what's important is not simply that the agent could have done otherwise, but that the agent could have done otherwise if he or she had wanted to. Moreover, some compatibilists, such as Harry Frankfurt or Daniel Dennett, argue that there are stark cases where, even though the agent couldn't have done otherwise, the agent's choice was still free: what if Bob really wanted to kill the stranger and the machine in Bob's brain would only kick in if Bob lost his nerve? If Bob went through with it on his own, surely the act would be free. Incompatibilists claim that the problem with this idea is that what Bob "wanted" was determined before Bob was conceived. In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will. He elaborated further in the 2003 book Freedom Evolves. The basic reasoning is that, if we do not consider God (or an infinitely powerful demon) or time travel, then through chaos and pseudo-randomness or quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined concepts are "expectations". Thus, the ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since we certainly have the ability to do differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.

Related Topics:
Harry Frankfurt - Daniel Dennett - Elbow Room - Freedom Evolves

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The philosopher John Locke also took the view that determinism was irrelevant. He believed, however, the defining feature of free will to be that we are free so long as we have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect upon the consequences of a choice.

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More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.

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William James, both philosopher and psychologist, gave the label soft determinism to the position nowadays known as compatibilism, and complained that soft determinist formulations were "a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered." But James' own views were somewhat ambivalent.

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He didn't believe in incompatibilism as formulated above, i.e. he didn't believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a requirement of moral responsibility. In his classic work Pragmatism, (1907) he wrote that, "Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories. But he did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief" -- it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may through our actions become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines that meliorism.

Related Topics:
Pragmatism - 1907 - Meliorism

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