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| From the graphic with Oliver Burkeman's article in The Guardian |
His credentials are important in assessing the state of affairs with regards our ability to continue to recognise that free will is a human capacity that differentiates ourselves from the animal world. Many big names have used findings in neuroscience or from their philosophical probing to reject the view that humans can rise above whatever other influences on them there might be to decide what to do - or not do - and how to live. They see the person, because of activity of the brain when responding to stimuli, acting fully and only in a way beholden to causes going back to the Big Bang.
Burkeman turned his attention to the state of play with regards free will with a long article in The Guardian of April 27, 2021. He first presents the case for the rejection of free will and concludes with might-be deniers' all-encompassing view: "If you’d been born with Hitler’s genes, and experienced Hitler’s upbringing, you would be Hitler – and ultimately it’s only good fortune that you weren’t."
Furthermore:
“For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts, a collection of dialogues with his fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett, “it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”
However, that argument is, in fact, held by a only minority of philosophers:
According to a 2009 survey, conducted by the website PhilPapers, only about 12% of them are persuaded by it. And the disagreement can be fraught, partly because free will denial belongs to a wider trend that drives some philosophers spare – the tendency for those trained in the hard sciences to make sweeping pronouncements about debates that have raged in philosophy for years, as if all those dull-witted scholars were just waiting for the physicists and neuroscientists to show up.
In one chilly exchange, Dennett paid a backhanded compliment to [Sam] Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience, calling his book [Free Will] “remarkable” and “valuable” – but only because it was riddled with so many wrongheaded claims: “I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves.”
Dennett is suggesting that many scientists are positing much more than their findings support. On the other hand, Burkeman goes on to describe how "... most of those who defend free will don’t reject the sceptics’ most dizzying assertion – that every choice you ever make might have been determined in advance". Instead, "they think determinism and free will are compatible". Accordingly, adherents to this line of thought are termed “compatibilists”. As well:
There are many other positions in the debate, including some philosophers, many Christians among them, who think we really do have “ghostly” free will; and others who think the whole so-called problem is a chimera, resulting from a confusion of categories, or errors of language.
After I have highlighted the features of Burkeman's scrutiny of the free will debate I will explore how Christians have used their intellectual firepower through millennia to come to an understanding of how free will is, indeed, part of the God-given capacities that reflect the dignity of the human person.
So Burkeman reports criticism of free will deniers:
“Harris, Pinker, Coyne – all these scientists, they all make the same two-step move,” said Eddy Nahmias, a compatibilist philosopher at Georgia State University in the US. “Their first move is always to say, ‘Well, here’s what free will means’” – and it’s always something nobody could ever actually have, in the reality in which we live. “And then, sure enough, they deflate it. But once you have that sort of balloon in front of you, it’s very easy to deflate it, because any naturalistic account of the world will show that it’s false.”
A doctrinaire free will sceptic might feel obliged to argue that a person hypnotised into making a particular purchase is no less free than someone who thinks about it, in the usual manner, before reaching for their credit card. After all, their idea of free will requires that the choice wasn’t fully determined by prior causes; yet in both cases, hypnotised and non-hypnotised, it was. “But come on, that’s just really annoying,” said Helen Beebee, a philosopher at the University of Manchester who has written widely on free will, expressing an exasperation commonly felt by compatibilists toward their rivals’ more outlandish claims. “In some sense, I don’t care if you call it ‘free will’ or ‘acting freely’ or anything else – it’s just that it obviously does matter, to everybody, whether they get hypnotised into doing things or not.”
To those who find the case against free will persuasive, compatibilism seems outrageous at first glance. How can we possibly be free to choose if we aren’t, in fact, you know, free to choose? But to grasp the compatibilists’ point, it helps first to think about free will not as a kind of magic, but as a mundane sort of skill – one which most adults possess, most of the time. As the compatibilist Kadri Vihvelin writes, “we have the free will we think we have, including the freedom of action we think we have … by having some bundle of abilities and being in the right kind of surroundings.”
The way most compatibilists see things, “being free” is just a matter of having the capacity to think about what you want, reflect on your desires, then act on them and sometimes get what you want. When you choose the banana [from a fruit bowl] in the normal way – by thinking about which fruit you’d like, then taking it – you’re clearly in a different situation from someone who picks the banana because a fruit-obsessed gunman is holding a pistol to their head; or someone afflicted by a banana addiction, compelled to grab every one they see. In all of these scenarios, to be sure, your actions belonged to an unbroken chain of causes, stretching back to the dawn of time. But who cares? The banana-chooser in one of them was clearly more free than in the others.
To get to the crux of another part of the debate - neural activity and decision-making - Burkeman presents this retort from free will defenders:
Like everything else, our conscious choices are links in a causal chain of neural processes, so of course some brain activity precedes the moment at which we become aware of them.
Further:
We need only ask whether someone had the normal ability to choose rationally, reflecting on the implications of their actions. We all agree that newborn babies haven’t developed that yet, so we don’t blame them for waking us in the night; and we believe most non-human animals don’t possess it – so few of us rage indignantly at wasps for stinging us. Someone with a severe neurological or developmental impairment would surely lack it... But as for everyone else: “Bernie Madoff is the example I always like to use,” said Nahmias. “Because it’s so clear that he knew what he was doing, and that he knew that what he was doing was wrong, and he did it anyway.” He did have the ability we call “free will” – and used it to defraud his investors of more than $17 billion.
Burkeman displays a great deal of wisdom in his thoughts concluding his article:
I personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life. Yet even if only entertained as a hypothetical possibility, free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone – and that you’ve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail. It’s a reminder that accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.
Of course, the Christian knows that we are influenced as an individual by our genes (and the history of those genes); by the character of our parents and the material circumstances of our upbringing. That's why perhaps Christians most of all will inquire, in the case of a young person seeking a job reference, as to the standing in the community of the hopeful's family and about the good character of that young person him or herself. Has the young person developed good habits rather than bad habits, both of which can affect their decisions?
To borrow from Christian teaching, an individual's freedom is rooted in reason and will, which allows a person to perform deliberate actions on their own responsibility. "By free will, one shapes one's own life".
Yes, we can have psychological problems or be manipulated by people and the cultural "ocean" we live in, often without our realising it. Therefore, we need to cultivate habits and practices that allow us to listen to our heart - our conscience.
In this, moral theology is rich with all that can diminish a person's ability to be responsible for their sins. (The priest's role is to help discern the degree of culpability). More broadly, the Christian is accustomed to being warned to avoid the occasions of sin - if your companions think it's smart to shoplift, don't go into a shop with them. In addition, there's the saying to the effect that the sin is committed in the bar, not later with a "friend" in the hotel room.
What this all means is that our decision-making, here meaning our ability to exercise free will, can be influenced in many ways. But the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person is that each person, by using their reason and will, which is the capacity to stand above contending choices, is free in the ultimate sense, and is responsible for their life journey, which is accomplished by cooperating with the grace of God.
As to the "luck" that Burkeman refers to, we can respond as in the old Chinese tale: "What is good luck? What is bad luck?" Where Burkeman sees each person as having to contend with "luck", the Christian knows that God is with us in whatever happens that is beyond our control and that we have the power to cooperate with Him to ensure we succeed on the journey to our final destination, which is to be with Him.
Sam Harris should give his practice of Buddhism away and delve into the Christian tradition for more success in reading the reality of human nature. From the Catholic Catechism (dating from 1994) he will find these insights:
Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments and other psychological or social factors.
But we are not victims in life. Personal freedom, the ability to exercise our free will, can grow:
Freedom makes a person responsible for their acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and self-discipline enhance the mastery of the will over its acts.
This is our challenge - to give more respect to our ability to control our decisions as to right and wrong; to understand that our freedom can be limited and riddled with mistakes if we are not careful; to use self-discipline in order to avoid the slavery of self-imposed blindness. Finally, the more a person does what is good, the freer they become. May we all be free as we should be!
[] Oliver Burkeman - The Clockwork Universe: Is Free Will an Illusion?
[] See some reader responses here
[] Catechism of the Catholic Church Online
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