Free Will and Compatibilism

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SUMMARY

People care deeply about having free will, but they also seem to have misguided ideas about what free will is or could be (like their misguided ideas about color and consciousness). Our decisions are not little miracles in the brain that violate the physics and chemistry that account for the rest of our bodies’ processes, even if many folk think this is what must happen if our decisions are to be truly free. We can’t conclude from this, however, that then we don’t have free will, because free will in this bonkers sense is not the only concept of free will. The law, according with common sense, contrasts signing a contract “of your own free will” with signing a contract under duress or under the influence of hallucination or other mental derangement. Here is a perfectly familiar sense of free will, a distinction presupposed by many of the practices and attitudes that comprise our manifest image, that has no demonstrated dependence on the bonkers sense.

For hundreds of years there have been philosophers who have insisted that this sense of free will is the important sense, the one we should care about, and it is compatible with determinism, with materialism, with physics and chemistry reigning unchallenged. The intuition pumps and other thinking tools in this part are designed to support and advance the understanding of this prospect, compatibilism. It has had many versions over the years, and is probably the consensus not only among philosophers but also among judges, lawyers, and others who have to make distinctions about who is responsible for what and who is excused because they didn’t have free will when they acted. Some scientists are now challenging this consensus, and they may of course be right to do so. Let’s take a hard look at the arguments.

Maybe science is teaching us something radical, even revolutionary: that nobody is ever responsible for anything they do, and there is no sound basis for distinguishing some acts as praiseworthy and others as blameworthy. But such a revolutionary conclusion needs a lot more conscientious attention to detail than it has so far received from the scientists declaring it. In the neurosurgeon thought experiment, the surgeon disabled her patient with nothing but a false idea; a mistaken view promulgated by influential scientists could rob people of a legitimate and life-enhancing variety of free will. Caution is called for, on all sides.

Compatibilism, for all its popularity among philosophers, has always provoked suspicion. Immanuel Kant famously called it a “wretched subterfuge,” and writers today often express doubts about the sincerity of those of us who maintain it. This is as it should be, actually. Science teaches us to be especially on guard against wishful thinking, and many of the rules of scientific investigation are specifically designed to prevent us from being taken in by our hopes when we think we are being convinced by the evidence. Imagine that some astronomers announce that a giant asteroid is going to strike our planet in ten years, obliterating all life, and then another group of astronomers claim that their reanalysis of the data shows that we can all breathe easily; the asteroid will miss Earth by a narrow margin. Good news, but how do we know the second group of astronomers aren’t deceiving themselves—or just deceiving us with a benign lie? Check and recheck their calculations; mount an independent attempt at replication; don’t just gratefully accept their conclusion because it doesn’t contain any obvious errors and it appeals to you. But also never forget that it is possible that they are right. Don’t make the opposite mistake of discrediting—on “general principles”—something that seems “too good to be true.”

Is compatibilism too good to be true? I think not; I think it is true, and we can soundly and roundly dismiss the alarmists, at the same time reforming and revising our understanding of what underwrites our concept of moral responsibility. But that is a task for the future, and it should be the work of many hands. So far as I can see, it is both the most difficult and the most important philosophical problem confronting us today. The stakes are high, the issues thorny, and emotions tend to cloud our judgment. We will need all our thinking tools and more, which we will have to make as we go along.

IX.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A PHILOSOPHER?

When we are too close to something, it is hard to see what it is. In recent years I have spent less time interacting with other philosophers than I used to, and more time interacting with scientists and other kinds of thinkers. I am still a philosopher (no matter what some philosophers say!), and I relish the task of explaining to non-philosophers why philosophy is worth doing. To those utterly outside philosophy, it often looks preposterous, the very paradigm of useless cleverness. They are missing something (recall Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crap; they are missing the 10 percent). Having spent fifty years inside philosophy, I am familiar with it; now that I spend so much time far away from philosophy, I can also see its strange side vividly. Some of my scientific friends and colleagues confess that they cannot for the life of them see why I don’t abandon ship and join them. The short answer is that I have managed, by straddling the boundaries, to have the best of both worlds. By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes. To quote one of my favorite Gershwin songs, it’s “nice work if you can get it.”

It seems to me that these days, happily, scientists are paying more respectful attention to philosophers than they used to, especially in my main area, the mind, where the phenomena that cognitive scientists study are almost exactly the phenomena that philosophers have been thinking about for centuries: perception, memory, meaning, volition, and consciousness. And philosophers—some of them—have earned the attention by informing themselves of the relevant science and coming up with useful proposals for clarifying and advancing the scientific research and composing better ways of explaining the results to the nonscientific world. There are still large failures of communication when the tribes try to interact, however, and I am going to address a few of the differences with the goal of achieving more mutual understanding in the future.

74. A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

For several years, I have been posing the following choice for my fellow philosophers: If Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come.

Some philosophers reluctantly admit that they would have to go for option (B). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. Like composers, poets, novelists, and other creators in the arts, they tend to want their work to be experienced, over and over, by millions (billions, if possible!). But they are also tugged in the direction of the scientists’ quest. After all, philosophers are supposed to be trying to get at the truth.

When I present the same Faustian bargain to scientists, they tend to opt for (A) without any hesitation—it’s a no-brainer for them. And then they shake their heads in wonder (or disgust?) when they learn that this is a hard choice for many philosophers, some of whom opt, somewhat sheepishly, for (B). But this reaction by scientists misses the important point made by Nicholas Humphrey (1987) (see chapter 48):

In Two Cultures, C. P. Snow extolled the great discoveries of science as “scientific Shakespeare,” but in one way he was fundamentally mistaken. Shakespeare’s plays were Shakespeare’s plays and no one else’s; scientific discoveries, by contrast, belong—ultimately—to no one in particular.

If Shakespeare hadn’t existed, nobody else would have written Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or King Lear. If Van Gogh hadn’t existed, nobody else would have painted Starry Night. This may be a slight exaggeration, but there’s something to it. On the one hand, there is an individuality to the contributions of great artists that seems to be not just rare in science, but positively beside the point. The famous priority disputes in science, and the races for one Nobel Prize clincher or another, are ferocious precisely because somebody else could make exactly the contribution you were striving to make—and you won’t get points for style if you come in second. These contests have no parallel in the arts, where a different set of goals reigns.

Some scientists aspire to reach large readerships, and to delight the readers they catch, and the best write works of surpassing literary value. Darwin’s books come to mind. But the goal of getting it right, of persuading the readers of a discovered truth, still comes first, as we can tell at a glance by comparing Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle with Melville’s Moby-Dick. One can learn a great deal about whales and whaling from Moby-Dick, but Melville didn’t write it to be an artful and persuasive compendium of whaling facts.

Bearing in mind the difference between the goals of science and the goals of art, then, here is a question for scientists that appropriately parallels the teaser I ask my philosophical colleagues: If Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose?

1. You win the race (and the accompanying Nobel Prize) for pinning down a discovery that becomes the basis for a huge expansion of scientific knowledge but that, in retrospect, epitomized Humphrey’s epithet, belonging to no one in particular. (Crick and Watson come to mind; there is scant doubt that if they hadn’t won the race when they did, Linus Pauling or somebody else would have done so soon.)

2. You propose a theory so original, so utterly unimagined before your work, that your surname enters the language, but your theory turns out to be mostly wrong, though it continues to generate years—even centuries—of valuable controversy. (I think of Cartesian dualism about the mind, Lamarckian theories of evolution, Skinnerian behaviorism, and Freudian views of everything from infant sexuality and neurosis to art, music, and literature.)

A better, though less well-known example of option (2) might be Descartes’s ambitious work on physics, which was so influential and so brilliantly wrong that it was a major provocation for Isaac Newton, whose world-changing Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (written in 1687) deliberately echoed the title of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (of 1644) to make it clear what worldview he intended to replace. And then there is Chomskian linguistics. It certainly passes the originality test. Like the victory of the America in the race that gave the America’s Cup its name, there was no second place anywhere in sight when Chomsky burst on the scene. In subsequent years the original theoretical seed—the “transformational” theory of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (published in 1957)—has been largely abandoned, superseded by descendant theories in several species as different from their common ancestor as ostriches, hummingbirds, and albatrosses are from the dinosaurs from whom they evolved. Was Chomsky fruitfully wrong in 1957, or did he rather (ding!) discover a great truth? “Yes” answers the question pretty well.

We honor scientists who are wrong in useful ways—recall Wolfgang Pauli’s insult about the theorist who “isn’t even wrong.” But forced to choose, would you trade being first and right for being original and provocative? Not quite so easy to decide, is it?