Intro Mind Notes, Week 14: Free Will
("Freedom and Necessity" by A. J. Ayer)

A. The Significance of the Problem of Free Will

1. People have free will when they are in control of their actions. People who are not in control of their actions are not morally responsible for what they do. So treating people as moral agents worthy of praise or blame for what they do requires that they have free will.
   
2. Cognitive science proposes to explain all human action as the result of the activity of the brain. If you adopt this naturalist point of view, then it seems that there is a direct conflict with what is required for free will. If all I ever do is the result of brain events subject to the laws of nature, then those laws are responsible for my actions, not my will; and if my will is not responsible, I am not responsible for my actions.
   
3. There seems to be a fundamental conflict here between morality and naturalism. Morality requires freedom of the will while naturalism appears to require determination by natural law. It seems that something has to give - morality or cognitive science.
   
   

B. The Shape of the Problem of Free Will

1. Libertarians believe: Human actions are the result of free will.
   
2. Determinists believe: Human actions are determined by natural law.
   
3. It would seem that Libertarian and Determinist ideas are incompatible. However, Compatibilists believe: Free will is compatible with determinism. They hope to find some way to preserve both morality and naturalism at the same time.
   
   

C. Strategies for Solving the Problem of Free Will

1. Deny Libertarianism. One tactic is simply to give up on free will. Skinner takes this view in Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Although it seems to us as though we have free will, we are mistaken. Our belief in free will is due to our ignorance about how we work. Since we do not understand the natural laws that fix our actions, we assume that we (and not they) are really in control. But we are fooling ourselves. Free will is an illusion.
   This idea is supported by two kinds of evidence from cognitive psychology. First, the left hemispheres of split brain subjects confabulate (make up stories after the fact) about why they were in control of actions of their right hemispheres. Maybe normal brains confabulate freedom in the same way. Second, timing studies of decision making suggest that we are conscious of our making a decision only after the action decided on is well underway. Our conscious mind may confabulate stories about why the body is doing what it is doing, without really being in control at all.
   
2. Deny Determinism. Science may not have an explanation for everything, especially when it comes to what people do. Some events may not be controlled by physical laws. Ayer points out, however, that denying determinism does not get us out of the problem of free will. Suppose that some events in the physical world are not determined. Then if you are a naturalist, they must be due to chance. Now chance actions are still not in our control. We are no more responsible for accidental events than we are responsible for ones that are determined. So the problem is to find room for freedom in a natural world where events are determined by chance and natural law. Chance is not what we want for freedom. What we want is control by us . So what it seems that one needs to deny is that free actions are controled by either natural law or chance. So all our free actions cannot be explained by any conceivable science. To put it another way: free actions are miracles.
   
3. Compatibilism. Denying Libertarianism and denying natural explanation seem harsh conclusions. Many philosophers have hoped to resolve the free will problem by showing how the two views are both right. Compatibilists believe that freedom is possible even if all events are the result of natural law and/or chance. Ayer discusses and objects to one brand of compatibilism that asserts that freedom is the consciousness of necessity. This view says that we are free when we come to accept our destiny. The problem with this, says Ayer, is that freedom is defined in a strange way. What is needed is a way to explain why freedom as ordinarily understood is compatible with natural law and chance.
   
   

D. Ayer's Compatibilist Solution to the Problem of Free Will

1. Ayer begins his solution by asking: what is the opposite of freedom? People think the opposite of being free is being determined or caused. Ayer suggests that is wrong. The opposite of freedom is constraint not cause. Think about situations where we would say that a person's actions weren't free - where the person was not in control of his/her actions. In cases like this, the person is threatened, or hypnotized, or brainwashed. In general, a person is under constraint when their actions are not determined by their rational decision making abilities.
   
2. A person is free of constraint when he/she would have acted otherwise if he/she had decided otherwise. Such a person is not acting from a compulsion or an addiction or reacting to threat from another person. Being free in this way is perfectly compatible with the existence of causal mechanisms in the brain that would allow us to predict and explain every one of our actions. In fact causal connections between my decisions and my actions are a requirement for free action.
   
3. It is a mistake to think that freedom requires that my actions not be caused, or that they not be predicted or explained. Part of the problem may be that by taking the metaphor of causality too seriously we confuse causality with constraint. We think a cause is something like a person threatening us or making us do something, forgetting that causal mechanisms are actually the foundation of our abilities to act freely.
   
4. It might be objected that we can never be free if all our actions are determined at the beginning of the universe. How can I be free if molecular action will inevitably fix what I do? Aren't I then a "helpless prisoner of fate" (Ayer, p. 22). Ayer replies that determinism does not entail that I am a helpless prisoner. What matters to my freedom is whether I exercise my decision making abilities to the fullest - whether if I had decided otherwise I would have acted otherwise. If we discover that these conditions are met, then my action is no less free for being ruled by natural law.