What is meant by free will? To start with, of course, it's a metaphysical concept: it is an idea that we humans have conceived. It is, however, a concept behind everything that we do; it is based on the belief we have a choice: our free will allows us to choose one action over another. Providing we have not been coerced by an outside force. we are free agents so that when we take a particular action that it is our choice. Whether, though, we are entirely 'free' and our actions not determined by unconscious motivations, a divine source or natural laws has been a really important debate for humanity throughout history. When homo sapiens became a conscious creature and we were aware of our actions the question arose was it our individual ability to choose that motivated us or was some other driving force determining our choices.
The concept of free will has been a constant conundrum for philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, psychologists, and now neuroscientists as to whether we have 'real' choices or are our thoughts and actions determined by our nature or some natural laws, yet to be fully explained, that govern the universe? It is, in reality, a subject that is relevant to everyone because, intuitively, we all believe our behaviour is a matter of choice and we have free will but is that really true?. You will have made a choice to read this blog. I certainly hope no one forced you but you may decide it was a mistake, not persevere and leave the site, it is your choice but does that prove you have free will? Could it be that your actions are determined by circumstances, past experience, psychological traits, or some outside agent you are not fully conscious of so that it appears you have free will but are actually being driven by hidden or unconscious forces?
This fundamental question,' does free will exist?' has haunted humans throughout history and the dilemma can be traced back in the earliest literature. The heroic Sumerian figure of Gilgamesh in the Akkadian epic poem of the 2nd millennium BCE wrestles with the knowledge of his mortality and eventually has to come to terms with his destiny - a fate which is not of his choosing. Humans, like all life, are going to die and usually we have no choice over this event. It is our fate. Fate, then, can appear to us to be arbitrary, or is it driven by some mysterious hand? The theme of fate being driven by supernatural forces outside human control is also echoed in the literature of Ancient Greece: Homer, writing in the 8th century BCE in both his epic poems: the Iliad and, in particular, the Odyssey, constantly refers to an external force, called fate, that determines the future of his characters.
For the Ancient Greeks, it is the pantheon of gods that command fate and exert their arbitrary and wilful control over humans. Divine powers interfering with human actions are perceived as the explanation of historical consequences at both the personal and collective levels. Perhaps the most alarming example of the curse of fate is the story of Oedipus. The god Apollo announces to Oedipus, “You are fated to marry your mother, you will bring a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see - and you will kill your father, the one who gave you life!” (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, lines 873-875). There is no escape for Oedipus from this pernicious fate, as, although he appears to make conscious choices, all the time he is being driven by predetermined forces, orchestrated by mysterious supernatural divinities. This thread of divine power exerting control over all actions, both natural and human, runs through history. Every culture that anthropologists have ever studied accord to supernatural authorities, as an explanation, those consequences that appear beyond their control.
Therefore, though we individually may be confident in our free will, how do we know we are not being directed, like Oedipus, by some unknown forces? The problem of 'knowing', for each of us, whether we are being directed and our actions predetermined is an ontological question (about our very being) as our individual consciousness and reasoning are inevitably subjective. We may believe in Existentialism (a philosophical theory that argues people are free agents who have control over their choices and actions) but our consciousness is limited to ourselves alone so we have no way of knowing if our individual behaviour has some elements of hidden and, apparently, unknowable external causation. We may say to ourselves 'I am making a free choice', but is that choice predetermined by our environment, culture, psychological state and so on. When I think of external influences upon individual behaviour I always recall the song, Gee, Officer Krupke, from Leonard Bernstein's musical Westside Story. The song is sung by members of a street gang, the Jets, who excuse their bad behaviour to the police officer Krupke by iterating the societal forces that affected them: essentially they argue they are the victims of their upbringing and environment because "Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks", and so forth. So, it wasn't their choice to be villains but it was determined by their circumstances and that is what made them the way they were!
Though the ancient world ascribed fate to their unpredictable and, arguably, mischievous gods the monotheistic religions of the Middle East perceived their god as morally 'good' and both omniscient and omnipotent. In early Christianity, this led to a debate about humans' ability to have free will and then why evil existed. The problem was if the Christian God was all-loving, all-powerful and could determine the future, why did bad things happen, why did natural disasters and evil human behaviour take place? The monotheistic religions laid down codes of behaviour that required their adherents to exercise moral responsibility. The early Christian thinkers came from the tradition of Ancient Greek philosophy, where the field of ethics, moral principles that govern a person's behaviour, had been developed.
Aristotle wrote about ethics in his tract, Nichomachean and in Book 3 tackled the issue of free will. He is slightly ambiguous about the notion of totally free will but he does argue that because humans have rationality, we are able to think through our behaviour and come to a conclusion that will determine our actions. The importance of rational thought in determining human behaviour was pursued by Roman philosophers and the Stoic, Epictetus, confirms this idea, which is particularly interesting as he had been a slave who was given freedom so had known coercion in his earlier life. However, as a Stoic, he was less interested in how individuals made decisions or what determined their actions than in how they reacted to fate: in that whatever happened to you there was a need to put your emotions aside and deal with good and bad fortune in a rational and calm manner.
The early Christian theologians, following the Classical philosophers, recognised the importance of human rationality as a key component in free will. This created the problem of divine intervention in the world and Christianity could not relegate the totality of God's omnipotence and omniscience thereby creating the phenomenon of double causation: God consistently predicts and controls human actions but people are still responsible for their own choices because as rational beings they exercise free will - in Latin, liberum arbitrium. An important theologian who grappled with this issue was St Augustine of Hippo in North Africa (354 – 430 CE). As free will allowed humans to behave badly, to sin, he saw sin as impairing free will which could only be restored through God's grace - a divine and unknowable influence that can restore sanctity.
At the same time, Augustine tried to solve the problem of theodicy: why does an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God allow evil to exist. Following St Paul's writings, Augustine came to the conclusion that it was Adam and Eve's free will, their choice to eat the fruit from the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden that brought evil into the world and this original sin was passed on to the next generation through concupiscence (sexual intercourse) - the sins of the father inherited by each generation. One of his proofs that this was so was the fact that babies appeared to cry for no reason and therefore were demonstrating inherited bad behaviour. It was, according to Augustine, only God's grace, that unknowable fate bestowed upon individuals, that could save humanity from this inherited evil. This idea helped shape the practice of infant baptism.
Augustine did get into a grave argument with the British theologian Pelagius (360 - 420 CE), who believed that humans could save themselves for a heavenly afterlife through their behaviour on earth. Pelagius advocated an ascetic lifestyle that followed a righteous path as he preached that moral purity would open the door to heaven. Augustine countered his position by claiming that humans could not save themselves as this was determined by God's grace and it was only God who could ameliorate the original sin. Augustine still advocated good behaviour but he argued that could not be the determining factor in human fate after death as God's grace was bestowed in a way that was beyond human comprehension and without God's grace nobody could attain heaven. Augustine's position was the one that the Church subsequently accepted as it dealt with the paradox of theodicy by explaining how evil could exist without compromising God's omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.
In my student days, I was shocked by Augustine's illiberal, determinist intellectual stance and dogma on original sin. I think the trend of the times, especially in anthropology, was to think of the human mind as a tabula rasa (blank slate), which was then fashioned by cultural inputs. This opposed the ideology of inherited, social advantage, determined by birth that has reinforced the class system. However, the science of genetics and the discovery of DNA has swung the pendulum in the 'nature versus nurture' debate back towards inheritable traits. Of course, Augustine wasn't looking for scientific truth but was attempting to explain a theological conundrum.
As mediaeval society began to become more enlightened, rationality rather than superstition influenced the thinking about free will; for example, Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher and theologian, argued that because the intellect is able to deliberate, consider, and reconsider reasons for choosing various courses of action open to an individual it enables a person to act freely. However, this requires the intellect to be free to make or revise judgements so that the will is free - this is an interesting psychological question, which I will come on to later.
The Enlightenment of the 17th century developed the Aquinian idea of free will further, so that it was argued each individual was in control of their destiny and were not the victim of some deterministic inherited or environmental forces beyond their understanding. At the same time it raised questions about motivation: Why do we do one thing and not the other? What is influencing us? How do we make good judgments or why do people make bad judgments? These questions are not only philosophical but have very practical consequences as motivation is a key element in the dispensation of law in many societies; take, for example, a capital offence where emotional, reactive behaviour is often treated very differently from a premeditated and calculated crime.
At the end of the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume believed that the causes of actions - motivations - could be both the consequences of a form of determinism - laws of nature - but also the result of choices made by a free will. This position became known as compatibilism. It is the idea that free will and determinism are mutually compatible without that necessarily being logically inconsistent. Hard determinism on the other hand argues that there are natural laws that not only govern the universe but also individual behaviour: these are laws of cause and effect: though humans may believe they are using free will to choose actions their behaviour is actually predetermined by natural evolutionary biological phenomena that control their psychological state and therefore their behaviour in the way there are laws of motion. Because we are unaware of these forces it feels like we are making choices but these have already been determined by a series of causes that are not available to our consciousness.
In the 1980s the work by the American physiologist Benjamin Libet appeared to provide evidence against the existence of a free will. He conducted experiments that demonstrated that the brain physically registered decisions about a movement before a person actually consciously decided to make the move. Further developments in neuroscience seem to have confirmed Libet's results that there is no conscious control of the start of the action and this has led to the conclusion among many scientists that free will doesn't actually exist.
There is another view: rather in the way Einstein's relativity challenged Newtonian determinism about the universe, does the property of fuzzy randomness of quantum mechanics suggest free will does exist? Could it be the random appearance of quantum objects are exercising some form of free will? The counter to this argument is that although particles might appear to act in a random manner they are, in fact, governed by some hidden variables which we're not yet aware of.
Steven Pinker, the Canadian-American, the cognitive psychologist, linguist, who advocates evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, sums up a determinist position:
“I believe that decisions are made by neurophysiological processes in the brain that respect all the laws of physics. On the other hand, it is true that when I decide what to say next when I pick an item from a menu for dinner it’s not the same as when the doctor hits my kneecap with a hammer and my knee jerks. It’s just a different physiological process and one of them we use the word free will to characterize the more deliberative, slower, more complex process by which behaviour is selected in the brain.”
To conclude even if we do not think that free will exists it is likely that humans will still believe they are morally responsible for their choices and actions in life.
(This blog has come out of a 'Cathedral Talk' ( 9th June 2021) I gave which was based around a conversation I had with Nina Vinther)