2 Moral Responsibility And Free Will — Arguments For And Against

How often do we ask ourselves, “I wish I had done otherwise”? But would that have been possible? We are accustomed to thinking that there is a cause for every event and given all the causes and causal conditions at a given time, the result must occur. For example, if one plants an acorn in good soil with sunlight and moisture and no adverse conditions occur (e.g. a squirrel eats the acorn, or a steam roller crushes it), then an oak tree will grow. If we go to a doctor and are diagnosed with an unknown disease and we ask the cause, we will not expect a good doctor to tell us “There is no cause.” We may accept, however, his response that he does not know what the cause is.^[1]

It should be the same with actions. Given the causes and conditions present at time 1, then a given action will occur at time 2.

This argument may be put in the following way:

Every event has a cause.
Causes and conditions bring about their effects necessarily.
Actions are events.
Therefore, actions occur necessarily.
What occurs of necessity is not free.
Therefore, actions are not free.

This is the argument for hard determinism, a view proposed by Baron D’Holbach in the eighteenth century. For D’Holbach, free will was an illusion. He likened the illusion to someone swimming downstream in a strong current, mistakenly believing he could turn around and swim upstream. But that is impossible. D’Holbach compared our daily choices to a scale. Our strongest desires would determine what we chose. (For a modern example, if James Bond is abandoned in a Saharan desert at high noon and Dr. No lowers a canister of icy cold martinis, shaken not stirred and labeled ‘poison’, poor James must weigh fear of dying with the pain of thirst.) D’Holbach would have argued that he would decide whether or not to drink the poison, depending on which was more tolerable, the fear or the pain of thirst.

This issue concerning the causes of actions was debated in the middle ages via an example attributed to the philosopher Buridan (c. 1295–1356), called the case of Buridan’s Ass.^[2] Imagine a hungry donkey standing in a crosswalk, in a situation that is exactly symmetrical left and right. On its left and right are bales of hay. If there is no extra causal factor on either side to result in the donkey turning left or right, it would seem that the donkey would starve to death, unable to eat the hay. One might try to argue that this is never the case. There would always be a slight difference between the sides. But for the sake of argument, we are allowed to assume that the situation is indeed the same on both sides and we do not have either a right hoofed or left hoofed donkey for the example.

One might argue that in the case of intelligent sentient beings the choice could be made independently of causality. Indeterminists argue that free actions are not causally necessitated. There are many forms of indeterminism. William James (1842–1910) argued that an uncaused choice could be made if there was no overriding motive. If he, a professor at Harvard, could go home either by Divinity Street or Oxford Street, he would be able to decide to take either route.

But then what would prevent us from describing the event as random? Perhaps one could appeal to the consideration that in the case of equally desirable outcomes, the best choice is to choose either one. And even if events were not caused, they would be random. What is random is not free. For example, if while I was teaching a class, and something randomly happened to me (e.g., I turned into a rabbit) that would not be something I did. Therefore, it would not be a free action. Charles Goodman following C.D. Broad and Peter van Inwagen, put this point very well: “After all, if what you do is caused by some random quantum-mechanical event in your brain, how can you be responsible for it?”^[3] However, if an event is intended, a hard determinist would insist that the intention was just another cause in a long chain of causes.

A modern variety of indeterminism would limit the use of the word “cause” to what is statistically predictable. Causal laws are in fact just those generalizations about the past that reflect “invariant concomitance,” one type of event always having been found to follow another. But human action is often unpredictable. So, we have no evidence that it is always necessitated by causes. The determinist might argue that future findings in science might make it possible to predict the outcome of all choices. But the indeterminist would reply that to say this would be to beg the question; that is, to think there is a hidden cause when it is the very existence of a cause that is in question. The determinist might accuse the indeterminist of assuming there is no cause and is also begging the question. This is a dead-end. No wonder this has been a subject of debate for thousands of years!

Although most of us are convinced that every event has a cause, the view that all we do is determined and not free makes many uneasy. It would seem to follow that no one has control over his or her actions, and that no one can be blamed for anything. People who like to blame others, and themselves, for their bad actions find this disquieting, while others find it to be the basis of compassion. It used to be said, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and in more contemporary terms, ”There but for a different set of genetic and environmental conditions go I.”^[4]

There is another theory about free will called ‘soft determinism’. Before explaining it, I would like to recount a little story from my childhood. I was told as a small child that Santa brought my presents every year. I began to doubt this, so to reinforce my belief, my mom put Pyrex bowls of oatmeal on the windowsill for the reindeer on Christmas Eve. This was rather dangerous since we lived in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment overlooking the street. I assumed she would just wash the bowls to make it look like the oatmeal had been eaten. But when I woke up, it looked like the oatmeal had been licked out. I couldn’t imagine my mother doing this, so I believed in Santa a bit longer. Finally, after I spied presents on the top shelf of the closet, I confronted my dad. He said, “There is no old man with a beard on a sleigh. The real Santa Claus is the feeling of love we have for one another at Christmas time.” Notice what he had done, substituting a fantasy for something believable.

In my view, that is what the soft determinist theory of free will has done. Hard determinists and indeterminists agree on how free will should be understood. A free action must 1) be motivated, and 2) be uncaused. They disagree because the hard determinists claim that free will is impossible and the indeterminists say that it is possible. Just as my father changed my understanding of Santa Claus, the soft determinists (such as the philosopher Nowell-Smith), say that a free action is uncoerced by external forces (such as having a gun put to your head, or mental disease such as kleptomania, dementia, etc.). They do not claim it is uncaused. Rather it is caused by motivations that are rationally acceptable. Note what they are giving up here, avoidability in the strictest sense (that one would have had the choice to do otherwise). If you are willing to ‘bite the bullet’ on the idea that your actions could never have really been different than what they were, that may solve the problem for you. Many people are not. They are deeply disturbed by the possibility that nothing they have ever done could have been determined by anything other than free will.

To return to Buridan’s Ass, even if it is possible for a sentient being to make a random choice between two alternatives that are equally appealing, this may only be true for the class of actions labeled by philosopher John Hospers, “vanilla-flavored acts.” Hospers argued that most of our acts are actually compelled. Only the comparatively “vanilla-flavored” aspects of our lives (obviously, Hospers didn’t like vanilla very much), such as our behavior toward people who don’t really matter to us, are exempt from this rule.^[5] For the non “vanilla-flavored” acts (choices made with a strong motivation), we would really value a choice. In summary, just in case the argument of for or against free will is undecidable, what is the non-philosopher to think? My best guess is that we should opt for compassion rather than blame because we can’t be sure if the person committing the fault could have done otherwise. Of course, we need to protect ourselves and others from evil actions, but we can hold people accountable for bad actions without implying that they could have done otherwise.