Chapter 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.

Let us begin with the Determinists. They are right in asserting the omnipresence of Cause and Effect. They are right in asserting that everything that happens is a necessary outcome of a preceding state of things. This is not merely the discovery and conclusion of the whole body of modern science. It is an inescapable necessity of thought itself. As Henri Poincare put it: "Science is determinist; it is so a priori; it postulates determinism, because without this postulate science could not exist." (1)

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.

But though we know there is some connection between body and mind, between chemistry and consciousness, we still do not know the precise nature of that connection or how it operates. Certainly we do not know enough about the relations of mind and body to leap into the assumptions of panphysicalism. We know very little even about the process by which new ideas arise out of previous ideas. We know practically nothing about the way in which ideas arise out of chemical or physiological processes. The gap between chemistry and consciousness remains unbridged. We still have not the slightest knowledge of how the one world is or can be transformed into the other. (2)

This is the view that is now being accepted by modern biologists. As Julian Huxley puts it in Evolution in Action:

The impulses which travel up to the brain along the nerves are of an electrical nature and differ only in their time relations, such as their frequency, and in their intensity. But in the brain, these purely quantitative differences in electrical pattern are translated into wholly different qualities of sensation. The miracle of mind is that it can transmute quantity into quality. The property of mind is something given: it is just so. It cannot be explained; it can only be accepted.... (3)

For a biologist, much the easiest way is to think of mind and matter as two aspects of a single, underlying reality -- shall we call it world substance, the stuff out of which the world is made ...? (1)

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. .

The problem of the apparent discontinuity between the two realms still remains. How a material body can be aware of sensations is perhaps the thorniest of all metaphysical problems. It is as hard to imagine how we get from one realm to the other, what is the connection between the world of things and that of thoughts and emotions -- as it is to imagine how one might manage to enter the mathematician's world of the fourth dimension. But . . . the physical body does think) and feel. Much as the physical scientist may hate to admit what he cannot account for, this fact he can hardly deny. The seemingly impossible is the most indisputably true. (5)

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."

Into all the fallacies in both of these arguments I shall not attempt to enter here. (6) Dissecting most of them would be an exercise in the realm of Metaphysics or Logic. But one fallacy they share in common is to take into account every force and cause and factor except the wishes, choices, and decisions -- in brief, the will -- of the agent himself. Either this is left out, as if it counted for nothing, or it is assumed that every other force and factor is active, and only a man's will is nonexistent or passive -- something that is acted upon, but that acts upon nothing.

The fatalistic philosophy can do immense harm. Fortunately nobody acts on it consistently. We are told of the Turk who will sit down and calmly watch his house burn without making any effort to extinguish the fire, because, if it is the will of Allah that it shall be burned down, it is useless for him to struggle against it; while if Allah wills that it shall be saved, Allah does not want his assistance. (7)

No doubt there have been and still are a few cases as extreme as this, but not many. Few persons would need a more rational Determinist to point out to them that the question whether or not the fire was extinguished would depend at least in part upon whether or not they turned a hose on it, and that this in turn would depend upon what sort of person they were -- and perhaps especially upon whether or not they were fatalists! For the quiescent Turk is in fact assuming that it is the will of Allah that his house shall burn down, and not the will or expectation of Allah that the Turk himself will put forth his utmost effort to save it. For somewhere in the expectations of most Fatalists there lurks the assumption that they are somehow privy to the intentions of Fate. Their own passivity and inaction help to bring about the very misfortunes they fear. This is revealed in many of their pronouncements. " 'Tis vain to quarrel with our destiny." (8) "The event is never in the power of man." (9) "Who can control his fate?" (10) "We are little better than straws upon the water: we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along." (11) "The age, the actions, the wealth, the knowledge, and even the death, of everyone is determined in his mother's womb." (12) "Before a child comes into the world, it has its lot assigned already, and it is ordained and determined what and how much it shall have." (13)

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.

It is of the first importance, therefore, to distinguish between Activistic Determinism and Fatalistic Determinism. Activistic Determinism, though recognizing that every change is the result ofa cause, "is a call to action and the utmost exertion of a man's physical and mental capacities," whereas fatalistic determinism "paralyzes the will and engenders passivity and lethargy." (14)

3. Causation Is Not Compulsion

If we ask, now, whether the will can be free, the answer depends upon what we mean by "free" in this context. Free from what? Certainly not free from causation. In this sense Spinoza is correct when he declares: "There is no free will in the human mind: it is moved to this or that volition by some cause, and this cause has been determined by some other cause, and that again by another, and so ad infinitum." (15)

But what is relevant for practical ethics is not an impossible freedom from causation, but freedom to act, freedom to aim at definite ends, freedom to choose between alternatives, freedom to choose good from evil, freedom to act in accordance with the pronouncements of our reason, and not as the mere slave of our immediate passions and appetites. And what is both ethically and politically relevant is freedom from outside coercion, freedom to act "according to one's own will instead of another's." (16) And these two kinds of freedom -- from compulsion by momentary appetite and from outside coercion -- most of us can have.

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.

The practical consequences of a belief in Determinism or in Free Will, respectively, depend on how we understand these terms. Practically we do act, in our social life, on the assumption that the actions of others are predictable because of their pre-established habits and character: "The life of man in society involves daily a mass of minute forecasts of the actions of other men." (17) To that extent we are all Determinists. And to the extent that we are Determinists, also, we will tend to regard punishment as preventive rather than retributive. (18)

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....

But according to the doctrine of liberty or chance . . . action itself may be blamable; it may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion: but the person is not responsible for it; and as it proceeded from nothing in him that is durable or constant, and leaves nothing of that nature behind it, it is impossible he can, upon its account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. According to the hypothesis of liberty [Free Will], therefore, a man is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crimes, as at the first moment of his birth.... It is only upon the principles of necessity [Determinism] that a personacquires any merit or demerit from his actions, however the common opinion may incline to the contrary. (19)

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 heis able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will 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 ....

Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do: which, because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man's will, and every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continual chain . . . proceed from necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those causes, the necessity of all men's voluntary actions would appear manifest. (20) [His italics.]

I hope I may be forgiven if I supplement these by at least one modern quotation, for it seems to me that there has been a convergence of the best modern philosophic thought toward the conclusion that, when both terms are correctly understood, it is perfectly possible to reconcile determinism with freedom of the will. The quotation is from A. J. Ayer's Philosophical Essays (1954): "That my actions should be capable of being explained is all that is required by the postulate of determinism. . . . It is not . . . causality that freedom is to be contrasted with, but constraint." (21)

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?

Notes

1. Dernieres pensees (Paris: Flammarion, 1913), p. 244. See also Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 73-83; the same author's The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962), passim, and Moritz Schlick, Problems of Ethics (Prentice-Hall, 1939; Dover, 1962), Chapter VII.

2. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, pp. 77-78.

3. (New York: Harper & Bros, 1953), p. 75.

4. Ibid., p. 77.

5. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), pp. 120-121, 122, 124-125.

6. An excellent analysis of some of them only touched on here will be found in John Hospers, Human Conduct (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), "Determinism and Free Will," Sec. 24, pp. 502-521.

7. The example is from Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, II, 330.

8. Thomas Middleton

9. Robert Herrick.

10. Shakespeare.

11. Mary Wortley Montague.

12. The Hitopadesa, (c. 500) intro.

13. Martin Luther. Cf. H. L. Mencken, A Dictionary of Quotations.

14. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, p. 178.

15. Ethics (1677).

16. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 73.

17. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, p. 53.

18. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

19. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1740), Book II, Part III, sec. II.

20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Part 2, Chap. 21. (Many editions.)

21. Pp. 282, 278. Ayer's whole discussion of the subject is excellent. I am especially happy to call attention to it after my harsh criticisms of his moral positivism. Other excellent discussions of the determinism and free-will controversy, which arrive at a similar conclusion, can be found in Moritz Schlick, "When Is a Man Responsible?" Problems of Ethics (1931, English translation, 1939), Chap. VII; F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 71-78; and John Hospers, "Moral Responsibility and Free Will," Human Conduct, Chap. 10. (The latter book contains an extensive bibliography on the subject.)

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