INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE, Phl 340 / Hms 410

The topic of this course is whether there is true human inner freedom. Most of us assume there is, at least in some sense. Otherwise, how could we ever be held responsible for our decisions? But many hard-headed thinkers point out that the usual notion of free will treats our free choices as though they were somehow an uncaused element in our thoughts, a state of mind that just somehow happens without being determined or caused to happen in that precise way. Ordinarily we do not believe in uncaused events. Why do we believe in free will?

The purpose of this course is not to arrive at a final answer about whether there is true inner human freedom, or whether some form of determinism is indubitably correct. Many a philosopher has done thorough work on the topic. Daniel Dennett, for example, in his excellent 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having (MIT Bradford Book), reviews the alternatives in vivid detail, so well in fact that I am sure that I will be unconsciously stealing from him at many point. So let me give him credit at this point for many images or ideas that will pop up without my remembering their source, but without blaming him for any distortions I create.

The purpose of this course is to examine closely an extensive list of major determinants at work in any person's life, that lead a person to make certain kinds of choices. The sections will each dwell on some aspect of being human that drives us towards one kind of decision or another. The further goal is to show that, in the end, a fully deterministic notion of human choice-making might include what we mean by "freedom" after all. That sounds contradictory, of course. But there are precedents. You will eventually be introduced to various forms of this position under either the name "compatibilism" (Freedom is compatible with determinism) or the name "soft determinism."

One older precedent is the analysis by the 13^th century theologian, Thomas Aquinas. He did not argue that we have free will, which seems an odd position for a Christian theologian to take. How are people to be held responsible for their sins, how can they be guilty or innocent of anything, if they have no free will. Aquinas' analysis, however, does argue for free "choice." The analysis begins with some philosophical and theological ideas that are perhaps not essential to know, but nonetheless may stave off some questions that might otherwise arise. The theology goes something like this: The human soul possesses the power of intellection and will. Other living things have souls also, animating principles that provide life and motion and sensation. But the human soul is different from all other souls. It was made by God to be open to eternal happiness with the infinite and eternal God. Thus it has a capacity that is open to the infinite. This is manifested in the kind of thinking that humans can do. Human thought can reflect upon itself, upon its own thought, upon its methods of thought, upon itself as the self thinking about its thoughts. Similarly the human will is different from the innate desires that other animals have. The human will was created by God with a capacity to love God. The ultimate object or goal of this will, therefore, is not something finite like food or sex or comfort. The object of the will is the infinite God; the ultimate purpose of the will is to love God as perfect Good. 

But the human will is also the driven to love anything that is good in any way. This can include food and sex and comfort. It can also include friendship and family. It can include a desire to help others who are strangers. Many things are good, even if they are not Goodness itself. The will is not really "free." Its very nature is to desire the good. It cannot help itself. Whatever it finds to be good, it desires. 

The problem for the will is to know what in fact truly is good. The will is not the knowing power of the soul. It is the "appetitive" or desiring power. Only the knowing/thinking power, called the intellect, can look at things, analyze them, and decide what is good. For Aquinas, as a Christian theologian, the intellect is a "fallen" intellect, dimmed by original sin. Similarly, the will is a fallen will, disoriented by original sin. But by baptism the will is reoriented to the good, ultimately to God. Now the question is whether the intellect can get things right in letting the will know what is truly good and what is not. The intellect needs help. It needs the help of God's grace, in Christian theology. It also needs instruction, education, guidance. It furthermore needs intellectual habits, long-lasting tendencies that help a person recognize what is truly good and what not. These are tendencies like habits of reflection before acting, or of seeking objective answers rather than follow subjective impulses. These empower the intellect to recognize the good and accept it as good. Whatever the intellect determines to be good, the will automatically desires it. This is free "choice," with the intellect doing the choosing.

This analysis by Thomas Aquinas is a precedent for the general notion that we do not have free will; rather we have the power to make choices with a consciousness of the possible consequences of those choices, in the light of certain consciously held values. Thus among the various determinants of our choices is a conscious awareness of values, consequences, and the relation between the two. This brings us back, however, to questions about our ability to predict consequences, about the extent to which we are in the habit of doing so, about how that habit developed, and about how we came to hold the values we do. Many and various influences or determinants are at work here. 

This course will review a wide range of determinants, from the biological through the cultural and social to individual development. The goal will be to arrive at some reasonable understanding of the extent to which human beings really can "choose," how they can develop their ability to consciously choose, and how they can hold themselves responsible for their choices. 
 

WHAT IS AT STAKE?

There are some obvious practical issues at stake in the arguments over free will. Why do human beings sometimes do great evil? If it is mainly a matter of a radically free will, then perhaps there is no answer, except the claim that some people are just evil. If, however, human evil deeds are mainly or even exclusively the result of the various determinants at work on a person, then restructuring the human ecology - the basic social, economic, and political elements of life - may restructure major aspects of the patterns of human activities. Explicit or formal education is also part of the human ecology. Restructuring education is an aspect of restructuring the environment. And the social, economic, and political context also `educate' people. A solution to humanly-caused evil, therefore, is education (Socrates would approve of this approach.), especially in the broad sense of restructuring the whole human ecology to educate people into helping rather than harming one another..

This does not take into account, however, the various genetic influences at work on us. If the evolutionary psychologists are correct, we are inclined by our genetic makeup to act in certain ways under certain conditions. Sexual interest, habits that tend to promote survival, degrees of aggressiveness or kin favoritism, all have been identified as products of genetic inclinations. We will eventually look at a number of claims along these lines.

Unless we suppose a perfect outcome of such environmental restructuring, and a perfect accommodation to our genetic heritage, however, there will still be individuals whose actions harm others. At present we often throw them in prison. Is this fair to do if their actions are the results of various determinants rather than free choice? Perhaps prison functions as a sponge, to soak up those individuals whose life training makes them a danger to others. In this case life is, once again, not fair. Through a lack of good training - not through simple free choice - some have ended up not making the choices that will keep them out of prison. We will return to this conundrum.

For many religions, the issue of free will is important because of its relation to God's justice (or to cosmic karma, or to any other basic power that rewards good and punishes evil). If a person's decisions are entirely determined by the sum of all the forces working on a person during the person's life, then it would seem unjust for God ever to punish a person for the person's decisions, no matter what those decisions are. Religious thinkers have wrestled with this question for many hundreds of years. We will have a chance to reflect on whether they have clear and cogent answers. 

In Christian theologies, an implicit aspect of the free will dispute is the existence of the spiritual soul. In Aquinas' view, as we saw briefly, the will is a power of the spiritual (non-physical) soul. Intellect and will are 'higher' powers which can and should guide the person in all decisions. The determinist position today, on the other hand, is often called a reductionist position. Determinism says that a person's decisions can finally be explained as the sum total outcome of a variety of causes or forces that operate on the person. In this sense, a person's decisions can be 'reduced' to the sum of these causes. It turns the person into a sort of human-like robot, so craftily constructed and so well guided by a superior computer program that it acts as though it were making free choices. But in fact all of its choices are determined in advance by the creator of the robot and its software.

There is an obvious escape from such a mechanical image of human choices. We could argue that the thought and decision process of the human person are so extraordinarily complex that their outcome is not predictable. In practice no one will ever be able to fully 'reduce' any given human decision to a set of determinants. If we use the software analogy, we will have to say that the software programs the organism in such a way that there are endless numbers of determinants all exerting some degree of influence, in such a complex interplay that the result is often going to be somewhat surprising, original, and creative (or destructive).

But this escape from the mechanical image does not rescue everything that is at stake in the discussions about free will. While it says that the outcome of the interplay of determinants is not fully predictable, it does not assert that there is some center of freedom in addition to all the determinants. Without such a center of free conscious choosing, can a person be held responsible for the interplay of determinants, can a person be called innocent or guilty in any meaningful sense?

So we have come back around to the problem we started with: in what sense is a person free and therefore able to be held responsible for the person's decisions and behavior? It will be interesting to see what judgments you make on this by the end of the semester, after we have reviewed in some detail both the various positions that have been taken on this over the centuries and also the different new sources of information about human mental process and development. Enjoy the tour.

Mike Barnes, January 10, 2000