By Keith Tidman
It’s probably fair to say that most people believe free will and determinism cannot exist side by side. The notion is counterintuitive, even a little odd. Why? Well, the argument is that these two notions of how things happen in the world necessarily cancel out one another. The thinking goes that out of commonsense, you’ve got to pick one or the other.
But there’s a different way to look at it that says “not so fast,” and instead argues that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. According to this approach, free will and determinism coexist, interlaced with one another — a school of thought referred to as compatibilism, or soft determinism.
Yet, according to the first group — those who assert incompatibility — hard determinism necessarily precludes free will of any kind or any degree. Where free will is purported to be an illusion. Such that, in reality, if any action transpires, it is impossible it could not have happened; nor could it have happened any differently than it did.
Such arguments attempt to have one’s cake — unbridled free choice — and eat it too. Meaning to keep hard determinism. For me, however, they are unconvincing. Thomas Hobbes’ comment that free will is “the liberty of the man [to do] what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do” seems to shed little to no light. Nor does the approach embraced by Immanuel Kant, contending that we are free when we exercise reason.
Unenlightening, too, is John Stuart Mill’s proposal that a person is free when “his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs.” The line may be catchy, but offers little to support free will. The same could be said about A.J. Ayer, for circularly proclaiming that “to say I could have acted otherwise is to say I should have acted otherwise if I had so chosen.” These are just some of many instances of the so-called weakening of free will, to opportunistically fit the case that free will and determinism can unify.
So what is at the nub of such thinking? Well, start by remembering that the concept of personal agency says that when a person acts of his own free will, he or she could readily have acted otherwise. So, for example, if he takes his dog for a walk or eats a fig or invests in tech stocks, such a person could instead have lounged with their dog on the sofa or baked themselves fresh bread or invested in cryptocurrency.
Yet, are we really so free in our daily choices? What if, instead, all our decisions and all our actions are baked into our lives by two consequential factors: the sequence and paths of all past happenings, taking in the whole universe, back to its beginning, where one thing follows another; plus the irresistible laws of physics and other natural laws that animate and describe the universe? Here, decisions and deeds are determined by a river of ceaselessly branching causes and effects.
With that river in mind, let’s return to Hobbes’ support of compatibilism. The English philosopher ventured, metaphorically, that:
“Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water [a river] that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel.”
However, the picture Hobbes paints seems woefully incomplete. After all, the river’s flow is determined not only by channel banks, which Hobbes pointed out, but also by tree roots, rocks, tributaries entering the river, erosion over time, floods and droughts, dams, gradient of the slope, climate, soil type, industrial activity — and more. In short, the river’s flow is determined by many influences.
The same complex dynamic applies to the flow of human decisions and deeds. The flow of behaviors becomes deterministically set in myriad ways — chiseled in time (the when), place (the where), and manner (the how) — whereby whatever happens at this moment in time or happens later become unalterable. The paradox is that the past, present, and future are equally explainable in deterministic terms. That is, even if we were to attempt changing events to ostensibly exercise free choice, such behavioral change would itself happen deterministically.
Let’s look at an example. Given that natural law impinges upon probability — such as, for instance, with the rolling of dice — the outcome of each toss is predetermined. It depends on the uncountable variables and constants, subtle and blatant, that describe the initial conditions and the paths along which the caste dice travel. These cause-and-effect conditions deterministically impinge on the toss’s result.
To be specific, the interplaying conditions include the force with which the dice are thrown, the material the dice are made from, the effects of gravity and air resistance, the weight distribution, the release angle, the friction of the table surface, the centrifugal force, sweat on the palm, and other factors that perturb the roll. In short, many predetermining elements ungovernably affect the toss, even though we remain largely oblivious to them.
Yet, societies’ institutions need at least the illusion of free will out of expediency, to hold citizens accountable for behaviors that breach legal norms. Retributive justice requires laws, calibrated to align with belief in free will, for two reasons: to hold people responsible for their adjudged deeds, and by extension to prevent society unraveling into disorder. Both are noble goals on behalf of accountability and justice.
There’s also moral, not just legal, accountability — again aimed to marshal order. To these ends, individuals and communities (social, cultural, religious institutions) establish codes of ethics and social standards. Our language includes words like ‘benevolence,’ to capture behavioral expectations. All the while, determinism puts moral responsibility in peril. Duly, even just a degree of free choice serves the purpose of compatibilists (those who believe free will and determinism coexist). Their purpose is this: to be behaviorally free enough to have done otherwise, at least in some instances.
The preceding phrase, ‘at least in some instances,’ is tellingly how some compatibilists specify why marrying free will to determinism might work. However, calculatedly tinkering with free will so as to link it to determinism invariably dilutes commonsense notions of free will — as the writings of Hobbes, Mill, Kant, and Ayer, to mention just a few, show.
The takeaway is that compatibilism — no matter how free will may offhandedly be redefined and weakened to compel a partnership with determinism — seems not to work. Instead, it appears that determinism alone defines destiny.
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