Think it through
If we are to save free will, it would be quixotic to try to deny both the findings of neuroscience and the fact that the world is governed by laws of physical cause and effect. A better strategy is to think again about what free will means. If we do that, we can see that the voluntarist account is highly suspicious.
Having voluntarist free will would mean being entirely capricious
Take the assumption that we would be robbed of an essential human capacity for choice if our decisions were in any sense inevitable. But imagine what would need to be true for your choice not to have been inevitable. It would mean that you had the power to override your settled preferences, personality and life history, and could decide to do something that is not determined by these but only by something we call your ‘free will’. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself. Is pure caprice really a form of free will worth wanting?
To take a trivial example, we don’t want the capacity to choose any flavour of ice-cream but the one we think we’ll most enjoy. We don’t want the capacity to vote for any political party but the one that we think will most advance our values. Our freedom to choose matters precisely because it reflects our personalities, preferences and values, not because it can override them. Our moral and political commitments would mean nothing if they were things we could choose to change at will.
The constraints upon our choices allow for the concept of character
As David Hume argued, it is both inevitable and desirable that every choice we make will be the one that, at the time, best matches our motivations, conscious and unconscious. We would have no moral character if we did not strongly feel that there were things we could simply not do, and others we felt we must. Human society depends upon the fact that we can expect people to behave with the same kind of regularity and predictability as the rest of nature. Were that not so, you’d never know what gift to give to a friend or have any reason to commit to a long-term relationship, since you would have no idea if the person in question was going to change their tastes or lose their lovable features.
Praise and blame don’t depend on absolute freedom
The idea that we need the concept of voluntarist free will for praise and blame, reward and punishment is also highly questionable. The major philosophical justifications for punishment are retribution, deterrence, reform of the offender and signalling societal disapproval. Of these, only the first requires voluntarist free will for its justification, and many find the notion of retribution repugnant in any case.
A rethink of free will requires not the abandonment of the idea of responsibility but its reform. No one is ultimately responsible for who they are, nor therefore for what they have done. But responsibility does not need to be ultimate to be real. Responsibility is not given out whole and complete at birth but is something we learn to take more of. To accept that one has done wrong and take responsibility for it is to resolve to try not to do it again and to put right anything that went wrong. We evidently do have the capacity to do this, and that is all that matters. Whether at some fundamental level these responses are inevitable is beside the point.
It’s useful to feel you could have done things differently, even if it’s a fiction
To the extent that the idea of free will involves some fictions, this could be a good thing, as long as we are aware that they are fictions. Take the idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’, so central to the free will debate. There is a sense in which this is never literally true. But the thought that we could have done otherwise is neither meaningless nor useless.
In his book Freedom Evolves (2004), Daniel Dennett illustrates this with the example, borrowed from John Austin, of a golfer who misses an easy putt, and then thinks: ‘I could have holed it.’ If you think this means that, were time to be rewound to the moment the golfer played the shot, then she could have played it differently, you’d be wrong. The golfer herself probably doesn’t mean that either. Rather, she means that holing the shot was well within her skillset, and that this was the kind of shot she would usually pull off.
The thought ‘I could have holed it’ does not therefore serve to inform us of an alternative reality that didn’t come to pass. It is to focus the mind of the golfer on the mistake so that she doesn’t repeat it next time, perhaps by making her think about what it was that made her slip up.
All ‘could have done otherwise’ thoughts have a similar value and function. It is only because we reflect on the things that could so easily have been done differently if conditions or our frame of mind had been slightly different that we learn to take responsibility and do better next time. Such helpful thoughts differ from others when we could not have done differently in any comparable situation. There is a sense in which the golfer could not have done otherwise, whether she missed an easy shot or an almost impossible one. But whereas it makes sense to think about the easy miss as something that could have been avoided, it serves no purpose to think about the impossible shot in the same way.
So even if we don’t have what has traditionally been called free will, that may not be as disastrous as it sounds. Our actions should flow from the beliefs, desires and personalities that we have, otherwise they would not be the actions of people with consistent characters and values. Reward and punishment are still important because we need to encourage ourselves and others to do the right things. And even thoughts like ‘I could have done otherwise’, although not literally true, are necessary for self-monitoring and improvement.
Don’t reject the concept of ‘free will’: rethink it
In giving up the voluntarist conception, we don’t have to throw out the notion of free will altogether. Free will isn’t an illusion, it’s just that the voluntarist conception of free will is flawed and untenable. It understands the free/unfree distinction to hinge upon whether our beliefs, desires and choices have causes or not, which is ridiculous, since obviously everything is caused. What we need is a ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will, one that reconciles human freedom with the causal necessity of the physical world.
Such a conception is hiding in plain sight, in the ways in which we distinguish between free and unfree actions in real life. We rarely, if ever, ground this distinction in a metaphysical thesis about causation. Rather, we distinguish between coerced and uncoerced choices. If no one ‘made me do it’, I acted freely.
Worries about free will tend to shift these coercive forces to within us, most obviously when people say: ‘My brain made me do it.’ But ‘your brain’ can’t make ‘you’ do anything, unless ‘you’ is something separate from your brain. If your brain is part of you, ‘my brain made me do it’ makes no sense. After all, if your brain wasn’t key to your decision-making, what else could be? Your immaterial soul? It is telling that almost everyone who defends voluntarist free will answers ‘yes’ to this ostensibly rhetorical question and has a religious belief in such souls. For those of us who accept the materiality of human animals, this option is a non-starter.
Achieve a free will worth having by aligning your first- and second-order desires
It is not quite enough, however, to say that, as long as choices are not coerced, they are free. Bees are not forced to spread pollen at gunpoint but their behaviours are too automatic to be classed as free. Similarly, highly automatic or unreflective human behaviours, such as addictive consumption, don’t seem to be genuinely free either. So what elevates some human choices to the genuinely free rather than the merely unforced?
The best answer to this remains Harry Frankfurt’s influential theory about the difference between first- and second-order desires. Our first-order desires are the ones we just have: for a piece of cake, to have sex, to scratch our itching skin. Second-order desires are desires about these desires. I may not want to want to eat cake, because I’m trying to eat more healthily. I may not want to want to have sex because the object of my desire is not the person I am in a monogamous relationship with.
Frankfurt says that we have the kind of free will worth having when our first- and second-order desires are aligned and we act on them. When we choose to do something that, all things considered, we don’t want to do, we have failed to exercise our free will and have behaved compulsively. If we haven’t even thought about whether we desire a desire, we are not exercising our free will if we unthinkingly act on it.
Second-order desires do not escape the chains of cause and effect. At bottom, they are the result of a series of events that we did not choose. But nothing we can do can be freely chosen ‘all the way down’. No one can choose the things that most fundamentally shape them: their genes, society and family. Not even God would be free to change its nature, if it existed.
Recognising the free will we do have requires accepting that complete freedom is an impossibility. To have free will is no more nor less than to be free enough to choose for ourselves on the basis of reasons that we endorse on reflection.
