The Foundations of Morality
27. Free Will and Determinism
1. The Fallacies of Materialism
It is possible to write a book on ethics without referring to the immemorial problem of Free Will vs. Determinism. Many modern books on ethics omit any discussion of it. I should myself be happy to do so, if it were not for a still widespread belief that the answer we make to the question may have crucial practical importance. “If all a man’s actions are determined,” ask those who hold this belief, “and if his will is not free, how can he be held responsible for his actions? And if he cannot be held responsible for them, what justification can there be for reward or punishment, praise or blame? Is there any point at all in the study of ethics?”
I have put the question in this crude and extreme form because it may help to emphasize some of the more frequent confusions and fallacies that occur in its discussion.
As such confusions and fallacies have existed on both sides of the controversy, we need to examine carefully what is right and what is wrong in the arguments both of those who call themselves Determinists and those who call themselves Libertarians.
By the same reasoning, the Libertarian concept of a person or “self” or an individual “will” that stands outside the chain of causation, uninfluenced by the previous state of affairs, is wholly untenable.
But there is a common confusion of Determinism with Materialism. The Materialistic Determinists press on from the inescapable assumption that every effect has a cause to the arbitrary assumption that all causation, even in human action, must be physical or chemical causation. They assume that all thoughts, values, volitions, decisions, acts, are the product of physical, chemical, or physiological processes going on in the human body. In such a view the human mind or will can originate nothing. It transforms outward pressures and forces, or inward chemical changes, into ideas or acts, or the illusion of “volition” or “free will,” much as a dynamo automatically transforms motion into electricity or an engine automatically transforms steam, electricity, or gasoline into motion in a fixed determinate ratio. In this view, moreover, the “self” or the human “will” hardly has even as much physical existence as the dynamo or the engine. The “will” is merely the name for an automatic and predictable process. Everything acting on it is a cause, but it itself seems to be a cause of nothing. A man acts for the same reason that a mechanical doll may walk. The mechanism in the former case is merely more complicated.
Now there is doubtless some connection between body and mind or, say, between chemicals and drugs, on the one hand, and human actions on the other. This has been shown in recent times by the effects on mind and action of a multiplicity of drugs. Men have, in fact, known from time immemorial about the effects on mind and action of alcohol. It has yet to be shown, however, that these effects will ever be completely measurable, determinate, and predictable.
The chain of causation may also run the other way round. Worry, anxiety, disappointment, despair, may precipitate heart attacks and other diseases (possibly cancer), while hope and faith seem in at least some cases to have remarkable curative powers.
This is the view that is now being accepted by modern biologists. As Julian Huxley puts it in Evolution in Action:
The point is further developed by Joseph Wood Krutch in The Measure of Man. In the debate during the second half of the nineteenth century between the mechanists and the humanists, he writes, the humanists made the “egregious tactical error” of permitting the issue to depend on the existence of the “soul” instead of on the existence of consciousness:
This permitted the chemists to say, “I cannot find the soul in my test tube,” without exposing clearly the fallacy of his argument. If he had been compelled to say, instead, “I cannot find consciousness in my test tube,” the reply would be simple: “I don’t care whether you can find it there or not. I can find it in my head. Chemistry, by failing to find it, demonstrates nothing except the limitations of its methods. I am conscious, and until you show me a machine which is also conscious I shall continue to believe that the difference between me and a mechanism is probably very significant; even perhaps that what I find in that consciousness is better evidence concerning things to which consciousness is relevant than the things which you find in a test tube. . . . ”
Actually, of course, consciousness is the only thing of which we have direct evidence, and to say “I think therefore I am” is a statement which rests more firmly on direct evidence than the behaviorists’ formula “I act therefore I am.” After all, it is only because man is conscious that he can know or think he knows that he acts. What he minimizes really comes first and on it everything else rests. What the mechanist disparagingly calls “the subjective” is not that of which we are least, but rather that of which we are most certain. . . .
2. The Confusions of Fatalism
Of even greater practical importance than the fallacy of Materialism is the fallacy that confuses Determinism with Fatalism. The doctrine of Determinism merely asserts that nothing happens without a cause, that every state of affairs is the outcome of a preceding state of affairs. Without this assumption all prediction would be impossible and all reasoning would be futile. But the doctrine of Determinism, while it does necessarily assert that the past was (in one sense) inevitable, given the physical, social, and individual forces, actions, choices, and decisions that actually took place, and while it also asserts that the future will be determined in the same way, does not assert that this future can necessarily be known in advance. Nor does it assert that a given event will take place regardless of what you or I may do to promote or prevent it. Yet this is the assumption implicit in Fatalism.
People slip into this fallacy either through confused theological assumptions or confused causal assumptions. Their theological argument runs something like this: “God must have existed before the Universe that He created. He must be both omnipotent and omniscient. If He is both omnipotent and omniscient, He must have both foreseen and intended everything that has happened from the beginning of time and everything that will happen into eternity. It is all written in the Book of Fate. Nothing that I can do can change it.”
The Materialist Fatalist argument is curiously similar to this. “Because everything that happens has a cause, and because everything is interconnected with everything else, the future is necessarily already contained in the present. Whatever will be, will be. Even my own ‘Will’ is an illusion. My choices and decisions are as foreordained as anything else.”
The tendency of all such pronouncements, if they were taken seriously, would be to make us all quietists and inactivists, rejecting and despising all ambition, all determination, all struggle and striving, all exertion and effort. Fatalism may be harmless enough as a retrospective philosophy; it will never do as a prospective philosophy.
But fortunately, as I pointed out earlier, no one acts on this doctrine with complete consistency. Even the legendary Turk who calmly watches his house burn down with no attempt to put out the fire would never have lived beyond infancy if (on the assumption that if any of these things were the will of Allah, Allah would do them for him) he never bothered to get up in the morning, to dress himself, to work for a living, to build himself a fire for warmth, to jump out of the way of a falling rock or a speeding car, to take his meals, or to lift his food from his plate to his mouth. Those who profess to hold the doctrine of Fatalism seem to reserve it only for special crises in life. In the day-to-day routine of living, they in fact assume that the future is for the most part in our hands, that we help to shape our own destinies and that how we live and what we become depends upon what we will and what we do.
3. Causation Is Not Compulsion
Determinism in the true sense does not exempt anyone from moral responsibility. It is precisely because we do not decide or act without cause that ethical judgments serve a purpose. We are all influenced by the reasoning of others, by their praise or blame, by the prospect of reward or punishment. The knowledge that we will be held “responsible” for our acts by others, or even that we will be responsible in our own eyes for the consequences of our acts, must influence those acts, and must tend to influence them in the direction of moral opinion.
In fact, it is possible to reverse the common argument of the Libertarians and to contend that only on the assumptions of Determinism can moral responsibility have any meaning. This was the position of Hume:
Nay, I shall go further, and assert that this kind of necessity [Determinism] is so essential to religion and morality that without it there must ensue an absolute subversion of both, and that every other supposition is entirely destructive of all laws, both divine and human. It is indeed certain that as all human laws are founded on rewards and punishments, it is supposed as a fundamental principle that these motives have an influence on the mind, and both produce the good and prevent the evil actions. . . .
And nearly a century even before Hume, Hobbes had also seen with brilliant clarity that there was no inherent contradiction between Free Will and Determinism—or, in the older vocabulary, between Liberty and Necessity—when the meaning of both was clearly understood:
Liberty, or Freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition . . . [of] external impediments. . . .
A Free man is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a wilt to . . . From the use of the word free-will, no liberty can be inferred of the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do. . . .
The question should be raised, indeed, whether the whole immemorial dispute between Determinism and Free Will does not rest on a misunderstanding—a simple confusion between natural laws, in the sense of rules of universal validity, and legal laws, in the sense of laws that impose a compulsion—descriptive laws versus prescriptive laws. All science presupposes the principle of causation. Freedom in the moral sense does not mean freedom from causation, but freedom from compulsion. A man is free from compulsion when he is not restrained or coerced by forces or persons outside of himself. He is free when he can follow his own desires, his own will, regardless of how that will may itself have come to be what it is. And in this sense, it is true, freedom is the presupposition of moral responsibility. When we ask who is responsible for an act, we mean in practice who is to be rewarded or punished for it, who is to be praised or blamed for it. And as we reward or punish, praise or blame, in order to improve moral conduct, the problem of determining moral responsibility is practical rather than metaphysical.
To sum up: There is no irreconcilable antithesis between Determinism and Free Will when both are rightly understood. Determinism simply assumes that everything, including our every act and decision, has a prior cause. But it does not assert or assume that every cause or force acting on us is outside of us. On the contrary, it assumes that our own character, which we ourselves have helped to form, our own past habits, resolutions and decisions, help to determine our present acts and decisions, and that these in turn will help to determine our future acts and decisions. And Free Will, rightly understood, means that we are not necessarily the slaves of our immediate appetites, but are free to make the choice among alternatives of conduct that we consider most rational. We are free to choose our ends. We are free, within limits, to choose what we consider to be the most appropriate means to our ends.
What more freedom do we really need?
