Vindauga

I started teaching again and I begin to wonder, yet again, about free will.So, what’s motivating this line of thought today? Ethics is the study of how people should behave not how people will people (that’s psychology). There are a lot of folks out there that believe that the scope of ethics should be limited by what it is possible for human to actually do. This makes sense; we cannot hold someone responsible for failing to hold their breath for 20 minutes because humans cannot hold their breath for 20 minutes. I cannot hold you morally responsible for failing to stand on the ceiling because humans, without some fancy freak out glue, cannot stand on the ceiling. I cannot say that you are wrong or bad because you failed to do something that you cannot do.

So far I have provided only physical examples but proponents of moral psychology want to include things activities that humans cannot do. Like, for instance, certain kinds of self-interested behavior. Some folks (Ayn Rand) actually try to turn self-interest into a virtue but moral psychologists say that certain behaviors cannot be avoided and we shouldn’t hold folks responsible for that. The fight or flight response is ingrained and so, in certain situations, we cannot hold folks responsible for doing either; they have no control. Again, there is something about this that seems correct.

But, it becomes problematic when it means that we ought not hold serial killer responsible for his actions; he couldn’t help it, his psychology is such that he had to pursue these ends. But this is, for the most part, a straw man of the the moral psychologist’s position. The moral psychologist isn’t really concerned with what individuals are capable of but rather what humans qua humans can do (I hate that I just used qua it just means “as,” which somehow isn’t good enough). But, I’m not happy about even this.

What if it turns out that humans are born to violence, that we are prone to it, that it is part of the being of humanity. What if given the right circumstance, everyone will turn to violence. There is a good movie staring Gary Cooper called Sergeant York. Its about WWI, you don’t see all that many movie of WWI, which is really too bad, this war is poorly understood by most Americans and overshadowed by WWII. But it has had a profound impact on who we are, plus the ethical issues raised by it are great (and lets not forget that the whole 1920’s flapper thing is a direct result of the experience of that war). Now, you need to overlook that this movie is clearly meant to convince folks of the need to become involved in the conflict raging over the ocean but if you do you’ll see the story of a conscientious objector who becomes convinced of the need to fight and kill others; his justification is that he is that by killing he is saving lives. Given the right circumstances we might all be willing to turn to violence. You want a literay reference? Take Lord of the Flies. You want real world examples? Take any example of mass activity, riots after football games (American or World football), book burnings, genocides. It is well documented that ordinary humans can be easily brought to horrendous levels of violence when they are caught up in hysteria (please forgive the use of that word).

I still want to hold folks responsible for how they behave, even under these circumstances. Sure, these might explain why the person behaved the way that they did. It might even give me reason to believe that he is unlikely to do it again, but he is still responsible for what he has done. If he bashed in the head of another, it might be explained by the hysteria brought on in the wake of a city flooded and without power but that explanation does not justify the behavior. Is it hard to resist some of these natural urges? Yes, most definately. But is the point. Ethics is about what we should do, not what we will do. What is the best kind of person to be? If that kind of person were easy to be, we wouldn’t really need to have this sort of convesation, would we?

Now, what does this have to do with free will? It might obviously seem to tie in with the whole ‘capacaty of human nature’ thing but really I am more concerned with the decision to act at the moment. It is a response of students, and others, that ‘you always have a choice’. In any situation we are always free to behave one way or not that way (even when we are not free to behave some other way); faced with an attacker, I can attack back or not. This is generally enough for most people to say that we should be held responsible for our actions. Whenever you could have done otherwise, you are responsible. it reminds us of the old debate between Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes thinks that we are at liberty when we are not impeded; as long as nothing stops you from acting, you are free to act. When a madman tells you to kill your daughter or he will kill every other member of your family you are still at liberty, you are responsible for the choice made. Its how he gets from the whole State of Nature to the Soveriegn without folks being able to cry duress. Locke, on the other hand, thinks its madness to say that not being impeded means being free; you are unimpeded, says he, when the bridge breaks below your feet but you are not free to not fall.

But, and here is what I am wondering about, in what sense are you free when, or just before you make a decision? Certainly, you are in a position in which it seems that several possible outcomes are available and so it seems that you are free. But, in the case of deciding, of deliberation, how are you free to choose one or the other. The very word, deliberation, means to remove liberty; its de-liberate. the idea is that as you run through the reasoning in your head, various options become untenable or unchoosable until, at the end, you have only one option remaining. If the process is good, then, in theory, you should come to the same conclusion every time. You should not be able to choose some other way. This might seem to only be the case when we consider really important questions, like whether or not to murder our neighbors, but to be of little consequence when we consider other things, like which flavor of ice cream to eat. But, seriously, if ice cream flavors become the subject of moral reasoning then the decision should matter, and should not be prone to easy changes in response.

There might be freedom of choice when options are chosen randomly, but again, it doesn’t seem that you are actually choosing anything in that case; where is the free choice, in something that you haven’t chosen. Similarly, there might be some argument for choices not subject to rationality, that is choices which do not follow a strict premise-premise-conclusion but irrational choices are not really free choices are they? Or, if they are, do we really want these choices to be the ones that we consider to be the ones about which those liberties that we hold dear are concerned? The most free, the most reveling in their consitutional rights are those that act most irrationally?
Choices might depend on if/then type statements, like if we are running late, then we should speed. But in that case it is not the decision of what to do that is free and open, instead the outcome of the decision is dependant on some other clause. It remains as fixed as any other deliberative response. Given either condition there is a fixed response.

What am I saying? It seems that any moral decision that you make, provided you did it right, isn’t free. You could not have done otherwise. Any decision which you could have done otherwise, isn’t really a decision about which ethics is concerned. To say that someone has free will, in terms of ethical choices, then seems to be saying that they are allowed to screw up not that they can make a free decision (it wouldn’t be a decision, if it were free). So, if this is right, and I am not sure that it is, then we hold folks responsible for their ability to reason, to deliberate themselves. We hold folks responsible, not for their freedom but for their ability to make themselves unfree.

let me see if I can give an example. You are canoeing with your child, your canoe tips over. At the same time, a nearby canoe tips over and the two lone children in that canoe go into the water. All three children are drowning but you can only get to one group in time to save them (I don’t know, there is a waterfall or something). Either you save your child, or you save the other two children. Let’s assume you have time to actually deliberate. What should you do. And lets have none of this “this is what is right for me” nonsense. That might work really well for whether or not you should cheat but we are talking about the lives of others here. Any decision you make will, necessarilly, affect others. Your decision is one that you will have to live with but it also affects who else lives. Later, you will have to justify your actions to others (your family or theirs). It won’t be enough to say “this is what was right for me.”

There is a lot of discussion about this in the literature of ethics; its called “special obligations” and its meant to defend saving your own child. I don’t really want anyone to provide an argument here. What I want to point out is that, given your initial assumptions, you shouldn’t be able to come to multiple answers. You might reason one way (from those initial assumptions) and come to one answer, and then reasons another way and come to another answer but that would mean that one of the times you reasoned, you did something wrong (left something out, perhaps). You could go greatest happiness for the greatest number and decide to save the two kids because two is better than one. But then you might think it through again and decide to save your own kid because your family has more total people. You’ve got two different answers but the reasoning process is different in each. You would be in real trouble if the exact same reasoning process presented two different answers, you’d be irrational. And here we are, now you see the problem. In what sense are you free?

Even the ‘choice’ to adopt the meta concept “Greatest Happiness Principle” should be subject to deliberation. It could be whim, but this kind of random behavior doesn’t really match our notion of freedom, does it? So, if you deliberate about what rules to use to make future decisions, then you should, in theory, be in the position of coming to the same conclusions here as well. You aren’t even free to choose which principles to live by (and I haven’t even gotten into the problems of indoctrination of social construction).

Maybe Hobbes is right then, maybe he makes more sense; we aren’t stopped from doing anything else even though our reasoning provides a channel for us that we must follow. And maybe Locke makes a little less sense; we cannot do anything but follow our reasoning but that doesn’t make us unfree.