The Freewill Question

97 Pages·1971·4.43 MB·English

by  William H. Davis (auth.)

THE FREEWILL QUESTION
THE FREEWILL QUESTION
by
WILLIAM H. DAVIS
Auburn University
MARTINUS NI]HOFF I THE HAGUE I 1971
© I97I by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint oft he hardcover Js t Edition J9 7 J
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-I3: 978-90-247-5101-3 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-3020-5
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-3020-5
CONTENTS
Preface V
I. The Problem Introduced I
II. Our Intuition of Freewill 6
III. The Principle of Sufficient Reason 9
IV. Habit and Freedom I4
V. Freedom and Spontaneity . I7
VI. Is the Physical World Really Mechanical? 20
VII. Determinism and Predictability 28
VIII. The Radical Consequences of Freewill 3I
IX. Self-Transcendence 46
X. Self-Deception and Auto-Suggestion 60
XI. The Moral Sense and Its Relation to Freewill 63
XII. The Relation Between the Will, the Reason, and the Good 71
Conclusions 86
Index 89
PREFACE
This book is the result of a discontent on my part with (r) the super
ficial and offhand way many determinists set forth their arguments,
without the slightest hint of the difficulties which have been raised
against those arguments, and (2) the fact that the chief and best argu
ments of the libertarians are scattered allover the literature and are
seldom if ever brought together in one package.
Mostly this work may be taken as an effort to gather into one place
and to express as cogently as possible the arguments for freewill. So
far as I know all of the arguments we treat have been made before.
Only toward the end of this work do I attempt to elaborate a point
not heretofore emphasized. That point is that freedom of the will is a
concept intimately entangled with the human power to reason, so
that if one of these powers goes, the other must also go. Moreover,
both the will and the reason are intimately tied up with our moral
sensitivities, so that no one of these phenomena is intelligible without the
others. Hints of these ideas abound, of course, in the literature, and the
degree of originality claimed is minimal. The interconnections, however,
between these three basic concepts of the will, the reason, and the good,
are of such great importance and are so usually ignored that I feel our
short statement of the situation warrants the reader's sympathetic
attention.
Some other important points raised in this work are as follows:
(r) Men are self-transcending creatures, able to stand apart from
themselves, evaluate themselves, change themselves, deceive them
selves, "love their loves and hate their hates." Man's ability to stand
outside of himself and to control himself is clearly involved in the con
cept of freewill - nearly identical with it, in fact - and when examined
closely this ability appears surpassingly strange.
(2) The notions of association and habit, which appear on the surface
VIII PREFACE
to support the determinist position, are really very compatible with the
libertarian position; in fact, necessary to it.
(3) Determinism, though it says the future is already laid out, is
incompatible with our ever being able to predict the future, since such
predictions themselves would and do become new causal determinants
acting in the present and hence altering after the fact what was supposed
to have been already determined and foreseen.
(4) Even before the advent of the new physics there was never any
philosophically satisfactory reason for supposing that physical nature,
much less man's mind, was under the sway of iron-clad mechanical
laws.
Other points are raised in the following pages, but we believe these
points especially are of primary importance, and deserve far more
elaboration than they have received historically. This book aims to
make a contribution toward that end.
I can only express the hope that anyone who candidly and openly
considers the various points raised will find the libertarian position to
have at least as much intellectual warrant as the alternative view. This
book is a collection of the chief considerations which seem to support
the notion of freewill. If all of these considerations, taken seriously and
considered with some sympathy, fail altogether to incline the reader's
mind toward the doctrine of freewill, then I at least know of nothing
else to say. I have openly admitted many of the difficulties which face
the libertarian position. If the determinist is willing in his own mind
to face the difficulties raised against his view, and if he finds those
difficulties either refutable or weak, then he must of course remain
where he is.
CHAPTER ONE
THE PROBLEM INTRODUCED
Very few persons interested in freewill as a philosophical problem will
have any great need for an introduction to the points at issue. Indeed,
the problem of freewill must surely be one of the most popular of all
philosophical and religious issues. It must occur to most everyone to
wonder whether his life and actions are altogether fated or not. "What
will be, will be," is a popular saying expressing one side of the issue.
Soldiers will say of a fallen comrade, "His number came up," express
ing again what is conceived to be the inevitability of certain events.
It is well known among educated laymen that many of the results of
modern psychological studies are such as to suggest that men are so
moulded and impressed by their heredity, training, and environment
that their actions and reactions are scarcely, if at all, in their conscious
control.
Nor is this doctrine that our life and actions are predetermined sup
ported only by folk sayings or by an infant science which tomorrow
may renounce the "firmly established" conclusions of today. There are
very strong and very cogent philosophical reasons, considerations of
the most general nature, which incline the mind to the determinist's
position. Chief among these is the argument that it is all but impossible
to conceive of a man doing what he less wants to do. If a man does
something, we automatically know that, at least in some sense, he
wanted to do that more than he wanted to do anything else. Perhaps
indeed the decision was close. Perhaps he also very much wanted to
do something else. Perhaps he agonized over the decision. Grant all
of this. But then he did what he most wanted to do. Indeed his action
verily defines what he most wanted to do. And, besides, in what sense
can we understand the assertion that a man sometimes may do what
he less wants to do? Suppose a man very much desires to see a certain
moving picture. But he says to himself, "I am a free agent. Just t
prove that I am a free agent, I will purposely refrain from seeing this
2 THE PROBLEM INTRODUCED
picture. That will demonstrate that at least in one case I have done
that which I less wanted to do." But of course there is a glaring fallacy
here. Involved in his decision was the desire to make a certain philo
sophical point. And that desire was a contributing motive strong
enough to prevent him from going to the show. Therefore, he did what
he most wanted to do, and did not succeed in making the point he
hoped to make.
Strangely enough, it may be that this line of argument which seems
so marvelously airtight proves in fact too much. And by proving too
much it suggests, not necessarily a solution to the problem, but rather
a different way of posing the question at issue. The argument was that
man always does what he most wants to do, by definition. But it may
be that this in fact proves too much, because it makes everything a
mere matter of words, a matter of definition, and thus has no real bear
ing on the factual question at issue. If we merely define what a man
does as that which he most wanted to do (and we may perhaps have
no objection to this) we have not touched the real issue. And the real
issue is, could he have done something else? Or, to put it another way
and a much more helpful way, could he have desired more strongly to do
something else if he had wanted to? That is, if we grant that a man's
action shows us what he most wants to do, the freewill controversy is
merely put off one step. If it sounds absurd to say that a man might
do what he overall less wants to do, then we must press the issue back
and ask, is a man responsible for his desires being what they are, or are
his desires completely bound by his past? This moving of the issue back
one step is helpful at least in a very small way by acknowledging what
common sense admits: that a man's outward mode of life expresses a
state of inner character and inclinations. Common sense and general
experience tell us that a man may sometimes pretend to be something
he is not, as when we all strive to put our best foot forward for special
occasions. But over the long haul our true character inevitably (inter
esting word here) manifests itself.
N ow, of course, every~ne can see that by merely pushing the question
one step back, we have not by any means solved the problem of free
will. The determinist may say, indeed has every right to say, that a
man desires what he desires because of his prior experience. Even our
desires, says he, are determined. For example, here is a man who
passionately desires to hoard gold bars in his closet. Almost certainly
a clever psychologist could uncover certain experiences, certain types
THE PROBLEM INTRODUCED 3
of fears in this man's past which, to a large extent at least, account for
his present passion for gold. Perhaps indeed the man well understands
himself and can tell us about some boyhood experience with money
which impressed itself deeply upon his mind, and to a large extent
moulded his future behavior. We could understand very well how a
vivid experience might print itself into the mind of a little boy, so that
in his adulthood he might very well manifest this hoarding symptom.
Noone denies that our desires themselves are influenced by our hered
ity and environment, perhaps even by the food we eat, the condition
of our various glands, and even drugs we may take. The determinist
has not retreated to weaker territory; only to territory that is a bit
below the surface, a bit deeper. All of the arguments are the same. The
same principles of causal influence still hold. And all reasonable men
must admit all of this. But still, the ever present nagging question:
granting all of the past causal factors, could he yet have behaved
differently, or was his fate out of his hands?
We must recognize the speculative nature, the inevitably speculative
nature of the freewill question. The question is speculative if for no
other reason than the simple fact that human beings are such surpass
ingly complex creatures. Two brothers, raised together in virtually
identical environments may grow into altogether different personalities,
but there may be a perfectly simple explanation for this upon determin
istic principles. Perhaps one brother read a book, one sentence of which
made a profound impression upon him, and the effect of this sentence
was to set his approach in life at a slightly different angle to his brother's.
And at the end of twenty years, what at first was only a slight diver
gence will have grown into a wide gap. Thus, the divergence of life of two
people raised in practically identical circumstances does not by any
means prove the existence of freewill, but only shows that little events
may have wide repercussions. In effect this means that for the fore
seeable future we will have no means for gathering experimental evi
dence on the question of whether given exactly similar circumstances (a
problematic notion itself), human behavior will always be exactly the
same. Probably such evidence will be forev~r beyond the capacity of
science, although it is much more likely that science will someday be
in a position to show us the wrongheadedness of such a question. (I don't
mean to imply that in our present state of ignorance the question is
inappropriate - only that it may someday appear so.) As a simple
matter of fact we do know, of course, that men react to similar circum
stances in different ways, even though trends may appear. Strangely
4 THE PROBLEM INTRODUCED
enough, we know that even we ourselves sometimes respond differently
to what is apparently the same situation exactly. Faced with temptation
we may on one day resist, and on another day, facing exactly the same
temptation, we yield. We cannot say whether this proves that we
changed our minds and wills or whether the difference was due to some
minute difference in the causal situation, say that we had slightly more
of some chemical in our blood on the one day rather than the other.
Thus the sheer complexity of the human mechanism stands as an ef
fective barrior to our answering this question experimentally.
But there may be another far more fundamental reason why the
problem of freewill must remain speCUlative. And that is: nothing that
happens, no matter how wild and unexpected, can ever prove or even
have any bearing on the question of whether something else could have
happened. Our question is about the future, while all of our experiments,
when completed, are in the past. William James expresses this point
very well when he says: " ... how can any amount of assurance that
something actually happened give us the least grain of information as
to whether another thing might or might not have happened in its place?
Only facts can be proved by other facts. With things that are possibili
ties and not facts, facts have no concern."! Thus, even if, as modern
physics suggests, we will never be able to make exact predictions about
the future behavior of men or atoms, we will still have no clue as to
whether what in fact does happen was inevitable or not.
Now we see ourselves led back full circuit to our original point. We
can always say that whatever happens was the only possible thing that
could have happened. But the question is not settled one way or
another by a mere arbitrary proclamation. The crucial point seems to
be that we want to know if the future contains more real possibilities
than one, and there is no possible experiment we can imagine which
will bear on the question. Even so the question is real. It makes perfect
sense, can be formulated clearly, and the answer we give to it may have
enormous implications for our life and conduct. Although the question
is speculative in the sense of being a matter of interpreting the world
rather than scientific in the sense of suggesting tests we can perform
on the world, it is yet a real and vastly important question.
In summary, then, what is the problem of freewill? Probably the
most philosophically accurate way of expressing the problem is to ask:
does the future contain more real possibilities than one? In human
terms this asks if a man's whole life and behaviour is fated or if rather
1 "The Dilemma of Determinism," The Will to Believe (N. Y.: Dover Pub., I956), p. I52