Free Will

4. Can Philosophy Save Free Will?

Can PhilosoPhy save Free Will? Unlike psychologists and neuroscientists, most professional philosophers believe in free will. And most of them endorse the same response to the anti-free-will arguments. The view that these philosophers endorse is known as compatibilism . It’s a very old view that goes back at least to the ancient Greek Stoics. And it was made very famous and popular by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In a nutshell, compatibilism is the view that there is no incompatibility between free will and determinism. To help us get a better picture of this view, let’s go back to your decision to order chocolate ice cream, and let’s assume for the sake of argument that this decision was completely caused by prior events. In fact, let’s assume that determinism is true, so that it was already settled that you were going to order chocolate ice cream 13 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang took place. Compatibilists like Hume 4 46 Chapter 4 think that even if this is true, it still makes perfect sense to say that you decided to order chocolate ice cream of your own free will. At first glance, this is likely to seem completely insane, so let me do my best to make it seem believable. According to Hume, we need to start by asking what it means to say that you chose of your own free will. Hume thinks it can mean only one thing, namely: You did what you wanted to do. Butwhatdoesitmeantosaythatyou“didwhatyouwanted to do”? Well, one seemingly reasonable thing to say about this is that if your desires (or your “wants”) generated your action, or your decision, then you “did what you wanted to do”—and hence, according to Hume, you acted freely. If this is right—and Humean compatibilists think it is— then we’re led to the following result: If in general your decisions and actions are caused by your desires, then you have free will. Now, in a way, this sounds very reasonable. In the case of your decision to order chocolate ice cream, let’s suppose that your choice was caused by your desire to experience the rush of joy that always follows on the heels of the ingestion of chocolate and/or chocolate substitutes. Then it Can phIlosophy save Free WIll? 47 would seem that you did exactly what you wanted to do, and so it seems reasonable to say that you chose of your own free will. But now notice that if Hume is right about this, then free will is perfectly compatible with full-blown determinism . Let’s suppose that every event is completely caused by prior events, so that once the Big Bang happened, it was already determined how the entire history of the universe would go. In particular, it was already determined that you were going to order chocolate ice cream when you got to the front of the line. Still, it’s not as if the Big Bang directly caused your decision. It caused your decision indirectly, by means of a long causal chain. The Big Bang happened; and that caused another event to happen, call it E2; and then that caused a third event to happen, E3; and so on. Eventually, 13 billion years later, at the end of the causal chain, something caused you to have a desire for a certain heavenly chocolaty sensation. And then, finally, that desire caused you to order chocolate ice cream when you got to the front of the line. It was all completely caused. But still, your decision was caused by your own desire. And so you did what you wanted to do. And so, according to Hume, you were free in the only reasonable sense of the term. This might make compatibilism seem a bit more plausible than it does when we first hear it. But still, at the end of the day, most people find this view pretty hard to swallow. 48 Chapter 4 Now, as I said before, compatibilism is actually very popular among professional philosophers; indeed, a recent survey showed that 60 percent of professional philosophers endorse compatibilism. But as soon as you leave the philosophy department, it’s hard to find people who take the view seriously. When nonphilosophers hear about compatibilism , their response is usually to dismiss the view as obviously false and, indeed, borderline psychotic. The...