In the Pink | Mises Institute

[Free Will: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Pink (Oxford University Press, 2004; x + 134 pp.)]

Do we have free will? If, for example, you have decided to read my article, was it up to you whether to do so, or was your decision determined by forces beyond your control? Most people think we do have free will, but there are some influential philosophical arguments that claim we don’t. The situation is quite complex; some philosophers argue that we have free will but are also determined.

Thomas Pink is an important analytic philosopher who taught for many years at Kings College London, and his book is a very useful guide to sorting out some of the complexities of the debate, although I can’t say that I have understood completely his own solution. But readers will have to assess that for themselves. After all, they are free to do so (or maybe they aren’t). Pink is especially strong in presenting the history of the debate.

You may think making a decision is up to you, but isn’t whatever happens now caused by what happened just before the decision was made? And wasn’t what happened then determined by what happened before it, and so on, back to a time before you were born? In that case, it appears that you don’t have free will.

You might try to escape by denying that the past fully determines the future; to whatever extent it does, it leaves room for you to make a decision. But this raises a new problem: If your decision isn’t caused by anything, doesn’t that make it random, a matter of chance?

The worry goes deeper. It is not simply that undetermined actions look no better than random. It seems that if what we think of as our actions were undetermined, they would not really be actions at all—they could be no more than mere blind motions.

This problem has led many philosophers to adopt a position called “compatibilism.” It numbers David Hume among its distinguished ancestors, and it’s probably the most popular position among philosophers today. It holds that you are free as long as your choice is what you want to do. Nobody is forcing you, or threatening you, in order to get you to do it, nor is it the case that your “action” feels to you that it is happening independently of your will. In brief, you are free to choose, but you aren’t free to choose what you choose.

At this point, some readers may be tempted to invoke an argument that has attracted many philosophers in the Kantian tradition, though it isn’t confined to them. Suppose you say, “I’m not free to act.” Your very saying this shows that you are free to act. If you weren’t free to act, then you wouldn’t really be saying anything. You would be making certain noises that were caused by other noises in the past. The fact that you say that you aren’t free to act entangles you in what our own Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls a “performative contradiction.” Is this argument correct? Rather than examine it, I shall say that, if HHH endorses it, that ought to be enough for us.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t solve the problem of free will. The trouble is that our problem concerns actions, not statements about actions. Even if you can’t say without contradicting yourself, “I’m not free to act,” that doesn’t show that your actions are free, with the possible exception of the action of uttering that statement.

One way out of the problem that some people have suggested is to argue that we need a new conception of how we choose to act. We have been talking so far about desire as a cause of action. The picture we have is of a desire pushing you to act. But maybe we should identify reason rather than desire as the cause of action. You decided to read this article because you thought that this was the best choice available to you. It was the choice that, at the time you made it, seemed the best. Since it is your deliberation that led you to act, didn’t you act freely?

This was a very popular approach in the Middle Ages, Pink says, and Kant also adopted it, although in his case rationality held only for the “noumenal” self. I won’t try to explain what this means; suffice it to say that most people don’t find it plausible and, in any case, it doesn’t show that we are free in the everyday, “phenomenal” world. In fact, Kant thought we are not free in the phenomenal world, and it’s a big problem in his system to reconcile noumenal freedom with phenomenal unfreedom.

Pink says that this approach won’t work. What is wrong with it is that, since it identifies freedom and rationality, you are only free when you act rationally. But this is untrue to the facts. You can recognize that something is the rational thing to do but do something else instead. You might judge correctly that eating a lot of junk food is bad for you, considering all your interests, but continue to eat a lot of junk food anyway. “Freedom,” unless we’re just changing the subject, includes the freedom to go against reason, at least within certain limits.

Another option is to deny that we have free will, acknowledge that compatibilism doesn’t work, but to say it doesn’t matter that we don’t have free will. We can get along perfectly well without it. Pink says that we would be giving up too much of our view of the world if we adopted this idea. It’s basic to our worldview that we hold people responsible for what they do; we praise them and blame them. But if people aren’t free, it doesn’t make sense to do so.

It’s time to get to Pink’s own solution, which I’m not sure I understand. What he says is that all the options we have looked at rest on a false assumption: they conflate explaining an action with specifying the cause of the action. But, Pink says, these are different concepts: “I do not exercise my freedom to cause my decision. Rather my freedom is exercised in the taking of the decision itself. That decision is what immediately constitutes my exercise of my control.”

If you understand that, I wish you would explain it to me.