7.1 Free Will, Determinism and Choice

okay the basic problem of free will comes down to the notion of moral responsibility we think of people as morally responsible for what they do freely we don't blame them for what they're forced to do or at least we blame them typically a great deal less then we will often say they're not free they have no choice in the matter so that's a very commonsensical way of thinking about things you can only be morally responsible for what you do freely of your own choice but then with the rise of science it becomes more and more plausible to see ourselves as causally determined that what we do actually has underlying causes in our brains etc but such that a a being who knew everything about us would be able to predict in advance exactly what we were going to do well if what I do is causally necessary can I properly be blamed for that am i in effect not free if I'm determined so determinism is the thesis that all events are determined by prior causes so take any event let's call it e given the causal laws that govern the universe whatever they are given the prior state of the world the state of everything in the world before he occurred then he was inevitable that's one way of understanding the the notion of determinism so here's a quotation from Humes inquiry it is agreed that matter in all its operations is actuated by a necessary force and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it so Hume there is saying that this is something that philosophers generally agree when it comes to the behavior of physical things material object but Hume wanted to argue that it's also true of human actions and that is the thesis of universal determinism that it's true not only of things in the physical world but things in what one might call the moral world the world of people and actions well there are a number of different positions here and it's very important to understand how they fit together so first of all we need to ask is the thesis that we have genuine free will compatible with determinism now when I say genuine freewill what I take that to mean is the kind of freewill that is required for moral responsibility is that compatible with determinism well some people say no some people say yes if you say no then you're an incompatible issed and it follows that that most one of the two theses can be true of course neither of them might be but that most one of them can be so those who say that we do have free will of the morally significant kind but the determinism is false they are called libertarians so if you hear the word libertarian in the context of the freewill debate that's what it means someone who thinks that free will is incompatible with determinism but we do have free will and that therefore determinism is false on the other side you get hard to determine it so a hard determinist is someone who says everything is determined and it follows from that that we are not free that we don't have morally significant freedom so that's one side of the debate now you might think of the libertarians and hard determinists as being fundamentally opposed but actually in some ways their positions are quite close together because they agree on the conceptual point that determinism and freedom are incompatible and that's a pretty fundamental agreement between them they simply disagree on as it were facts of the matter whether determinism is true or not so on the other side of the debate are compatible ists and compatible ist's say that we can have free will at what even if determinism is true determinism and free will are compatible now you can be a compatibilist without being a determinist you can that I'm probably fall into that position myself I think free will and determinism are compatible but actually I don't believe in determinism because of things to do with modern physics but those who take a compatibilist position and are determinists which is certainly the vast majority of compatible assists down the ages they are called soft dieter ministers now the consequent argument is a very well-known argument particularly pushed by peter van inwagen an argument for the claim that determinism is incompatible with free will then it goes like this if determinism is true then all human actions are causally determined consequences of the laws of nature and prior conditions that's just what determinism says hence I cannot do otherwise than I actually do accept by falsifying the laws of nature or changing past conditions if what I do inevitably comes about given those initial conditions and given the laws then the only way I could do something different is by changing the prior conditions which obviously I can't there pass they're gone all by changing the laws and I clearly can't do that either but if I can't do otherwise than I actually do then I don't have free will so if determinism is true we lack free will I've given it there in a very sketchy form of course it can be filled out in various ways but it looks quite a persuasive argument the the fundamental thrust of it is that if everything I do was as it were inevitable from before I was born how can I possibly be said to be free there's nothing I could have done different well the traditional way of opposing this kind of argument not just the consequent argument in its modern formulations but generally the idea that that freewill is incompatible with determinism on the ground that I couldn't do otherwise if determinism is true the standard way is to interpret I could do otherwise or I couldn't do otherwise differently so being compatible astiz saying that i can only be said to do to be able to do otherwise if it's causally possible in that exact situation for me to do otherwise so being in compatibilist wants to say that I'm only really free if put in that exact situation with the state of my brain and everything being exactly what it was something different could have happened otherwise I cannot be said to be able to do otherwise now the compatibilist will take a quite different view the compatibilist will prefer something like this it would be possible for me to do otherwise in a similar but not identical situation in which I chose to do so so the compatibilist says well I chose icecream rather than fruit it was a free choice I could have done otherwise I could have chosen fruit of course in that situation where I had a preference for ice-cream it was inevitable that I was going to choose the ice-cream sure but had I preferred the fruit I would have taken the fruit so I was entirely free to do as I chose so that's a very different reading of could do otherwise now Harry Frankfurt has argued that quite apart from this issue of interpretation freedom doesn't even require the possibility of doing either doing otherwise in either of these sentences so that's a rather more radical way of opposing the incompatibility position so here's an example suppose I go through door a maybe I'm I need to get out of the building maybe there's some emergency or something like that and there's two doors door a door B I choose to go through door a now that is a free action I freely chose door a rather than door B but suppose in fact door B is locked suppose in fact had I tried door B I would have found I couldn't go that way and had to go through door a anyway in that case we have an example where I had in a sense I had no choice it was inevitable that I would go through door a I couldn't do otherwise but yet in the circumstances where I chose to do door a remaining completely ignorant about the state of door B I it seems plausible to say that I've done it freely so therefore it's possible to do something freely even when you couldn't have done otherwise and this illustrates that what makes an action inevitable doesn't always bring it about what makes this action inevitable is that door B is locked so in those circumstances it was inevitable I was going to go through door a rather than P but door B is being locked didn't actually bring it about that I went through door a and Frankfurt give some other examples the usual kind of mad scientist crops up somebody who is able to predict in advance what I'm going to choose and this person decides that if I choose to do what he doesn't want me to do then he's going to interfere with my brain in some clever way and make sure that I actually do what he wants now suppose in those circumstances I actually freely do what he wants me to do anyway in that case he doesn't have to take any action I do what I do freely but in fact I couldn't have done otherwise I couldn't have done otherwise because he would have intervened well there's a lot of interesting discussion about these cases I mean just to make one obvious objection one can say well okay maybe it was inevitable that I went through door a rather than B but I did actually have a choice I could have done otherwise I could have tried door B before going through door a and that would be doing otherwise than I did in the case of the the evil scientist I could have embarked on the course of thought that would have led me to action B in which case he would have intervened but that would have been me doing otherwise than I did which was quite freely to choose a so the argument as you can imagine can get quite complex well a couple of times in talking about freedom the word choice has naturally appeared I've been talking about choosing one thing rather than another choosing freely and so on and I suspect that this close connection between freedom and choice lies behind the the intuition that is the the natural thought that to be free it has to be possible for you to do otherwise in cases like the Frankfurt examples with door a and door B you can see that I do make a choice I choose to go through door a though in another sense I don't have a choice I don't have a choice which door to go through because in fact door a is the only one that I could go through so you can see that there are subtle nuances here in the notion of choice the notion of choice is also slippery in other ways suppose for example I'm walking along the road my phone goes I pull it out of my pocket and then some apparently agitated guy comes up to me with a gun holds the gun to me and says give me your mobile phone or I'll shoot you right do I have a choice a case where it's absolutely blindingly obvious what I'm going to do I'm going to give him the mobile phone you could it's tempting to say I don't have a choice on the other hand you can see that there's a sense in which I do have a choice I could if I thought he was bluffing or I thought his gun was just a replica gun or something like that or if I felt suicidal I could refuse to give him the phone so there's a sense in which I have a choice a sense in which I don't suppose we're having some growl and perhaps in some in some laboratory where I'm wired up and some clever neuropsychologist is deliberately putting me in a situation where I get very angry he's able to look at the brain scans and say Millikan's going to hit him well suppose he can suppose he can predict that does it mean I don't have a choice well you could say in a sense maybe it does but in another sense it doesn't maybe the neuropsychologist can say ah Millikan's going to choose to hit him in which case he's predicting that I will choose well doesn't that mean that I do have a choice so the notion is very slippery it's very easy for the word choice to be bandied about in these discussions with no clear concept of choice in play so be very wary when you come across discussions in the freewill debate do not allow words like choice to be used without clarification of exactly what is meant by it so let's distinguish various ways in which one night or various things that one might intend in saying I had no choice well one could mean that what happened was in no way dependent on my decisions or actions one could mean that my actions were physically forced on me I had no choice but to open the door he was holding my hand and forcing it we could mean that my actions were predetermined in some way by non factors perhaps drugs perhaps brainwashing we could mean that my actions were predetermined by my own desires and consequent reasoning now that's a very odd since have I had no choice if in fact what I do is determined by my own desires and reasoning I work out what I want to do I work out how to achieve what I want and then I'm make the decision based on those preferences and that reasoning it's very odd to say there that I had no choice but you will find that some people will say that finally it might mean it was blindingly obvious what I should do I suppose in the first round of the F the third round of the FA Cup say Manchester United are playing some very weak team that amazingly has managed to get through and you might say it was no contest 20 nil it was no contest you don't actually mean it was no contest you mean it wasn't a meaningful contest in the same way sometimes it can be so obvious what to do as in the case of the mobile phone and the gun that we say I had no choice actually what we mean is I had a blindingly obvious choice now an argument that can be brought to bear here I think quite powerfully is called the paradigm case argument this is an argument that was extremely popular in the heyday of Oxford ordinary language philosophy it's far less popular now but I think in this particular case it has very considerable force let's ask what we mean by a choice how do we learn the use of the word choice well typical example might be as a child your mother offers you a choice of puddings ice cream cake fruit which would you like you make a choice that's how we learn the meaning of the word choice don't we go on dear it's up to you you choose that's where we get the notion of choice from now if that's right if that's as it were a paradigm case a standard example of choice the kind of case that we use to learn the meaning of the word then how can it possibly be said that in such a circumstance we don't have a choice it's very peculiar to say that now all this does is sort out meanings of words I mean anyone who claims that this kind of argument can settle deep philosophical issues it's probably deluding themselves so my aim here is just to say it isn't or at least to suggest that it's an abuse of the word choice if you deny that that kind of circumstance involves a choice you're detaching your use of the word choice from its normal meaning so far that it's hard to use it and keep any grip on what we mean by it

Channel: University of Oxford

Views: 132,340

Keywords: oxford university, lecture, student, Peter Millican, philosophy, free will, freedom, determinism, hume, hobbes, frankfurt

Id: XT6DKn6ZJso

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2011