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Hilary Bok on free will

Posted by on April 2, 2012 4 comments

We come to the fourth of the six pieces in the recent batch in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Hilary Bok’s “Want to Understand Free Will? Don’t Look to Neuroscience.”

Before we get to that, recall that I’ve confessed to compatibilist leanings – but on the other hand, I’ve also wondered whether “free will” might be a term that we ought to abandon. I don’t say the latter because I think any particular conception of free will is incoherent, but I do think that the term is vague (vagueness is a very different thing from incoherence) and potentially confusing or misleading. So this series of posts is not from somebody who especially wants to go around saying to people, “You have free will!” … or from somebody who is especially keen to defend others who talk like that. On the other hand, people who go around saying, “You do not have free will!” also run the risk of conveying something that is misleading (e.g. that we never act freely or that there is some truth in fatalism). The safest thing to do, arguably, is forget free will talk, and try to make more precise claims about what abilities we do and do not have.

But with all that said, I think there’s much to agree with in Bok’s essay. She is surely right that these questions cannot be settled merely by establishing that determinism rules at the level of the brain (I’ve been assuming throughout my posts that it does). Although this may not be fully established, I’m happy to assume that it’s true – I’m not opposed to the idea temperamentally, have no contrary philosophical commitments, and think that the science is suggesting that the brain probably does operate deterministically, with any indeterministic quantum effects washing out on its scale. Even if this last bit is wrong, I’ll assume it for the sake of argument, as it is invoked against some of the points I’ve been making lately.

Even if we assume that determinism rules (at the required level), Bok seems to be correct in saying the following:

With the exception of those who work within a religious tradition, philosophers tend to be naturalists who see individual mental events as identical with events in our brains. When we say that a person’s choice caused her action, we do not mean that she swooped in from outside nature and altered her destiny; we mean that an event in her brain caused her to act. On this view, the claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it.

For compatibilists, therefore, the problem of free will is not that neuroscience reveals our choices as superfluous. It does not. Nor do compatibilists deny that our choices cause us to do things. The problem of free will for compatibilists is not to preserve a role for deliberation and choice in the face of explanations that threaten them with elimination; it is to explain how, once our minds and our choices have been thoroughly naturalized, we can provide an adequate account of human agency and freedom.

How can we reconcile the idea that our choices have scientific explanations with the idea that we are free? Determinism does not relieve us of the need to make decisions. And when we make decisions, we need some conception of the alternatives available to us. If we define an alternative as an action that is physically possible, then determinism implies that we never have more than one alternative. But since we cannot know in advance what we will choose, if we define “alternative” this way, we will never know what our alternatives are. For the purposes of deciding what to do, we need to define our alternatives more broadly: as those actions that we would perform if we chose them.

Quite so, and it won’t do to accuse compatibilists of being wrong because, supposedly, “free will” just means something like indeterminism at the level of the brain, or some mysterious ability of human beings to step out of what is otherwise a deterministic causal order. Most philosophers don’t mean anything like this when they talk about “free will”, and it’s far from clear that the folk do either – the evidence is ambiguous at best, and it by no means confirms that this is how free will is generally understood in the English language, as spoken by ordinary people (not philosophers or theologians). Someone who claims that we don’t have free will, while defining “free will” in such a manner, is merely knocking down a straw man.

If anything, Bok undersells the compatibilist case. She says:

… when we make decisions, we need some conception of the alternatives available to us. If we define an alternative as an action that is physically possible, then determinism implies that we never have more than one alternative. But since we cannot know in advance what we will choose, if we define “alternative” this way, we will never know what our alternatives are. For the purposes of deciding what to do, we need to define our alternatives more broadly: as those actions that we would perform if we chose them.

A person whose actions depend on her choices has alternatives; if she is, in addition, capable of stepping back from her existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among them, then, according to compatibilists, she is free.

Whether this view provides an adequate account of free will is not a problem neuroscience can solve. Neuroscience can explain what happens in our brains: how we perceive and think, how we weigh conflicting considerations and make choices, and so forth. But the question of whether freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with free will is not a scientific one, and we should not expect scientists to answer it.

Whatever their views on the compatibility of freedom and determinism, most philosophers agree that someone can be free only if she can make a reasoned choice among various alternatives, and act on her decision; in short, only if she has the capacity for self-government.

Perhaps, but an unnecessarily anti-Humean theory of motivation may be lurking in the background here (as may an unnecessarily restricted understanding of science). It’s not clear to me that compatibilists should require that we use reason in any strong way to choose among alternatives that are available to us. I don’t see the need, in all cases, to step back from our existing motivations and habits.

In many cases, surely, we can make a decision that the folk would count as “free” even if we don’t get much distance at all from our own psychologies. What if I calculate the expected results (weighted by probabilities) of alternatives available to me, perhaps working out how the alternatives will tend to advance or set back various conflicting values that I have – but I make no great attempt to work out what weights I put on these conflicting values? What if I merely let my unconscious mind weight them? What if I let it do even more?

Surely this sort of thing happens all the time, and there is nothing odd or worrying about it. I don’t see why this, without more, can’t be a situation where I act of my own free will, and perhaps with free will: if my choice to act in a certain way reflects my values, or desire-set, and if the action is efficacious to some extent, or is at least reasonably likely to be, that’s a long way toward saying that my choice was an example of free will, as understood in ordinary language. If we’re going to use free will talk at all, I don’t see why we should reserve it for situations where the agent gets involved in a whole lot of conscious reasoning or self-scrutiny. After all, we frequently use the phrase, “she acted of her own free will” in cases where nothing so high falutin’ is involved.

Michael Gazzaniga on free will – is free will talk without meaning?

Posted by on April 1, 2012 8 comments

The third of the recent pieces on free will in The Chronicle of Higher Education is by Michael S. Gazzaniga. He (or perhaps a sub-editor or someone) has chosen to entitle this: “Free Will Is an Illusion, but You’re Still Responsible for Your Actions”.

An interesting feature of this one is the way its author dismisses the whole concept of free will as “without meaning” – asking rhetorically whether robots, ants, and chimpanzees have free will. The implication, I suppose, although Gazzaniga doesn’t quite spell this out, is that we don’t have free will, either, since we are sufficiently like these things for the purpose. He asks, still rhetorically, “Is there really something in all of these machines that needs to be free, and if so, from what?” He goes on to say that no one thing is in charge of us, according to modern neuroscience, “with its ever-increasing mechanistic understanding of how the brain enables mind”.

Something about this is attractive (too me, at least). I must say that a lot of free will talk – for example that in the work of religious apologists – strikes me as sanctimonious nonsense, often full of intellectual confusion. So why not cut through it all and simply abandon talk of free will once and for all?

Still, the argument Gazzanniga sketches in his piece is not very strong. I take it that what he is really getting at is that we are relevantly like other things – robots, ants, and chimpanzees – in that we are deterministic physical systems with no single centre of control from some kind of (non-physical?) commander of the whole thing. If the idea of free will seems silly for robots, ants, and chimpanzees, then it should damn well seem silly for human beings! So the thought seems to go. I say “deterministic physical systems” because at one point Gazzaniga refers, as if it’s important, to “brain determinism”; he tells us that this has no effect on personal responsibility, even though it (apparently) prevents us from having free will. (This will be news to those philosophers who actually define free will as having personal responsibility for our actions. But so it goes.)

But when Gazzaniga asks what robots, ants, and chimps need to be free from , that question does not easily translate to human beings. It is not just obvious that there is nothing that human beings need to be free from, even if our brains function deterministically. The fact remains that you and I are conscious beings with certain values that we’d consciously like to honour, certain desires that we’d consciously like to satisfy, certain goals or outcomes that we’d consciously like to achieve or bring about. We may also have various unconscious desires, etc., but for the moment it’s enough to observe that we have these conscious ones. It doesn’t matter if my current desire for a cup of hot chocolate is itself identical to or supervenient upon some aspect of my neurophysiology that undergoes causally deterministic transformations – that can’t take away from the fact that I have the desire. (Frustratingly, we ran out of hot chocolate here last night, and my desire not to go to the trouble of heading off to the supermarket for fresh supplies is currently more salient to me than my desire for the chocolate.)

My desire for hot chocolate right now is a rather weak and trivial one; however, there are other things that matter more to me, such as success in finishing the books that I’m working on at the moment and seeing them through to publication … and there are other things that matter to me even more, and which I seem to be able to influence, such as the happiness of various friends and loved ones. A robot has no such desires – it may be programmed to achieve certain goals, but it cannot consciously desire anything. In the absence of conscious desires, I don’t believe we can meaningfully talk about its possessing unconscious desires, either. If we talk about a robot having desires, this is just a metaphor or an instrumentally useful manner of speaking. Something similar applies, probably, to an ant. What about a chimpanzee? Well, we just don’t know enough about what it is like to be a chimpanzee, but the more like us chimpanzees are in possessing conscious desires, values, goals, a sense of the future, and the like, the less obvious it is that we can’t meaningfully talk about a chimp having free will. A very advanced chimp (or, if it comes to that, a very advanced robot or ant) with those cognitive characteristics might have much the same concerns about its choices and actions as we do. It is not obvious that that sort of chimp (or robot, or ant) would lack free will.

If I possess conscious desires, etc., and if you are capable of communicating with me (as you are), then you can reassure me that I am capable, at least in many cases, of acting in ways that reflect those desires, etc., together with my beliefs about the world. I will only be able to act in ways that fall within my physical and cognitive capacities, I concede, but within those limits (and doubtless others) I’ll be able to act on my desires (values, etc.). What is important to me is that my actions genuinely reflect my desires – that I am not, for example, being tricked or manipulated in some way that is inconsistent with this – and my choices and actions are not subject to onerous constraints above and beyond the limits imposed by my ordinary capacities. E.g., I’m not in jail or acting with a gun at my head.

I want to be able to act in a way that expresses my desires, is not the result of some kind of trickery, coercion or compulsion by others, and is the product of having at least some opportunity to deliberate: I don’t want to act without appropriate time (appropriateness being a highly flexible, pluralist, and case-specific concept, however) to work out what I want to do. This is not intended to be a complete or rigorous list, but it’s a reasonable sketch of what I and others want we say that we want to be able to act “of our own free will”. A life in which we typically act of our own free will is one that we generally aspire to.

I’ve glossed over the issue of capacities here, because it adds a complication. None of us is omnipotent, and most of us could, conceivably, be far more capable even within a normal human range. But we are generally fairly accepting of mere limitations in our capacities, at least if they are not massive compared to those of the people around us, or massively inadequate to what we regard as living a worthwhile life. Inadequate capacities to satisfy our desires are not usually what we have in mind when we discuss free will, though the level of my capacities can indeed affect my options, affect my vulnerability to coercion, etc. Questions about free will and questions about capacities cannot be kept completely separate.

There’s another thing in the vicinity that we seem to want, and this does seem to worry a lot of people. We want to live in a world where our choices and actions have some significant efficacy. Conversely we don’t want to live in a world where, perhaps as a result of the operations of Fate, or Moira, or some other overriding principle or being or force, certain outcomes that are important to us are disconnected from our choices and acts. Some things, such as my death on a certain day, might be imagined to be unavoidably fated – independently of whatever choices I make or what I actually do. In a world like that, it makes intuitive sense to say that I am not free. (I’d like to see some concerted research aimed at testing whether the folk think free will exists in such a world.) Perhaps, on this picture, I can will certain things, all right, but my will has no efficacy (in important respects) because something overrides its effects. So I might as well (in those important respects) give up. This is a counsel to … if not to despair, then to resignation and passivism, or alternatively to imprudence or recklessness.

If someone forgets that these are the sorts of concerns that free will talk is mainly about, he or she may imagine that it is possible to dismiss free will with references to causal determinism at the level of our brains, and with analogies to robots, ants, and the like. But history, experience, and the few empirical studies conducted so far suggest that the concerns I’ve described are, in fact, the sorts of things that bother people. Free will talk may, for all that be confused and misleading, and perhaps we could eventually replace it with more precise kinds of talk that eliminate the expression “free will” altogether – but it does not follow that this sort of talk is, meanwhile, just without any meaning or usefulness.

Jerry Coyne on free will

Posted by on March 24, 2012 151 comments

As I indicated yesterday, I am going to comment on the six pieces about free will published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ll start with Jerry A. Coyne’s article entitled “You Don’t Have Free Will”.

Some preliminaries

This article contains points that I agree with (for example, that the expression “free will” is used in many ways or with many meanings) and points that I possibly agree with (for example, that we should drop free will talk). I do think it’s clear that many different definitions of “free will” are used, and I’m inclined to think that that, alone, might be a reason not to use the expression. It can mean that we are all just debating at cross-purposes.

At the same time, I wonder what the expression conveys to an ordinary person in ordinary discussion. Attempts to get that clear by the sort of conceptual analysis favoured by analytic philosophers don’t appear to me to have gone anywhere near settling this, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of empirical research on the subject. To an extent, I am relying on a hunch here, but the difficulty that philosophers have had, historically, in defining “free will” makes me wonder whether the meaning of the expression is clear at all, unless a meaning is actually stipulated for the purpose of debate. In that case, we might frequently be talking past each other when we use the term.

I also suspect that the term has various connotations that are troubling. It may be that when I say, “You have free will”, I at least connote something rather spooky that is likely to be false. At the same time, if I say, “You do not have free will”, I may at least connote certain fatalistic or passivist ideas that are also likely to be false. So perhaps, if I want to avoid misleading people, I should avoid saying either of those things. (But I’d like to see some more empirical research on what these statements, “You have free will” and “You do not have free will”, actually do connote to people.)

So I can agree with Professor Coyne that we might do best to avoid the term “free will” … and try, instead, to make whatever points need to be made with other language. At the same time, my reasons are, I think, a bit different from his.

Are compatibilists just saving face?

I do not agree with him when he says the following:

Although science strongly suggests that free will of the sort I defined doesn’t exist, this view is unpopular because it contradicts our powerful feeling that we make real choices. In response, some philosophers — most of them determinists who agree with me that our decisions are preordained — have redefined free will in ways that allow us to have it. I see most of these definitions as face-saving devices designed to prop up our feeling of autonomy.

I don’t think there is any reason at all to believe that; it strikes me as overly cynical. I can report, in my own case, that my past (and certainly not entirely buried) tendency towards compatibilism is not at all a face-saving device of this kind. It is a sincerely held position based on the view that we retain certain capacities even if our decisions are the product of a causally more-or-less deterministic process. Furthermore, reflection on what is important that reasonably falls within the ambit of the free will debate leads me to think that the capacities we retain are very important.

These capacities include: the ability to deliberate; the ability, more specifically, to deliberate about what I most value or desire in a situation; the ability to shape my own future to an extent, as a result of my choices; and, more generally, the ability to affect the future of my society and my world, to an extent, as a result of my choices. Some people – certain fatalists and passivists – seem to deny the latter abilities, at least.

Consider “soft determinism”, which is perhaps best regarded as a sub-set of compatibilism (if compatibilism is regarded as something like the view that free will and determinism are logically compatible whether or not determinism is actually true). Soft determinism might be interpreted as the claim that these fatalists and passivists are wrong, even though causal determinism is more-or-less correct. If that’s a plausible interpretation of what soft determinists are trying to say, then soft determinism seems like a position that is at least arguable and that people could hold sincerely. Once again, I see no reason to believe that people who hold these sorts of positions are insincere or trying to change the subject. So I reject this talk of “face-saving” and so on.

The “couldn’t have acted/chosen otherwise” argument

Still, is the Coyne position correct to this extent: We don’t have free will in the sense defined by the article?

The first problem is that the article relies on the claim that we live in a more-or-less deterministic world, including at the level of the brain. Things could get a bit complicated if it turns out that the brain functions in an indeterministic way (to some important degree), and I’m not at all sure that the actual science accomplished to date rules this out. However, the science may be suggestive, and in any event I’m not opposed to the claim, either temperamentally or philosophically, so in what follows I’ll assume its truth for the sake of argument. The claim seems plausible enough to me, at least, even if not definitively established. For the sake of argument, then, let’s assume that the brain (along with everything else) functions deterministically to whatever extent is needed for Professor Coyne’s argument to go through.

Does this rule out free will? Well, that’s going to depend on our definition of free will, and I’ve argued that this is unclear and that different definitions may be used sincerely and reasonably. Still, what if we use the idea of:

At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different.

Even this is problematic. The idea of “could have chosen otherwise” (which some philosophers do, indeed, use as a definition of free will) is at best equivocal.

On one interpretation, to say that I could have chosen otherwise simply means that I would have been able to act differently if I’d wanted to. Say a child drowns in a pond in my close vicinity, and I stand by allowing this to happen. The child is now dead, and the child’s parents blame me for the horrible outcome. Will it cut any ice if I reply, “I couldn’t have acted (or couldn’t have chosen) otherwise?” No. They are likely to be unimpressed.

What more would I have needed to have been able to act otherwise? I was at the right place at the right time. I can swim. No special equipment that I lacked was actually needed … and so on. The parents are likely to reply that it’s not that I couldn’t have chosen to act otherwise, but that I merely didn’t want to act otherwise.

Surely there are many cases like this where the reason that I didn’t act otherwise was not any lack of capacity, equipment, being on the spot, etc., but merely that I didn’t want to act otherwise. The most salient thing determining how I acted was my desire-set. Leave everything else in place, but change my desire-set, and I would have acted otherwise. In those circumstances, it is true that I could have acted otherwise. In those circumstances, someone can rightly say to me: “It’s not that you couldn’t have acted otherwise; it’s that you didn’t want to.”

Suppose the tape is replayed. Suppose that determinism is sufficiently true that I end up making exactly the same decision for exactly the same reasons (I don’t want to get wet, I don’t like children and desire that as many as possible drown, or whatever my reasons might be). If determinism holds true to that extent (which, again, I am happy to stipulate), I’ll act in exactly the same way – speaking tenselessly, I don’t save the child. Professor Coyne says, and we’ll stipulate that he’s right: “free will means that your choice could have been different.”

But, Jerry, it could have been! It’s true that if the tape is replayed my choice will be the same. Putting it another way, it’s true that my choice wouldn’t be different if the tape were replayed. But the article is confusing wouldn’t with couldn’t. It’s a straightforward confusion of modality. As happened the first time, I could save the child in the perfectly familiar sense that I have whatever capacities, equipment, proximity, etc., are required. As happened the first time, the parents could and would rightly say to me, “It’s not that you couldn’t have; it’s that you didn’t want to.”

Now it’s true that my wants or values or goals, or whatever – my desire-set – may itself be determined causally. Indeed, I’m assuming throughout that this is so. I’m assuming (and I think this is reasonable, given the concessions I’ve made to causal determinism) that all these things are identical with states of my neurology that have a physical causal history. Perhaps that fact grounds some kind of argument against free will, if we imagine that free will involves some sort of ultimate capacity for self-creation. I agree that we don’t have free will – certainly on this picture – if “free will” means: “Free will all the way down.” Thus, on this picture, we don’t have free will of a kind that could be deployed in theodical arguments … my choices can be traced back eventually to the initial creative acts of God, if such exists.

But as long as the explanation as to why I didn’t act otherwise is just those states of my neurology – the ones that constitute my desire-set – the parents are quite right to complain that I could have chosen to do otherwise and saved their child. “You just didn’t want to,” they say, correctly. I was someone whose desire-set was such that I wouldn’t act otherwise in such circumstances, but I was not someone who couldn’t do so. Thus the “couldn’t act otherwise” argument, based on causal determinism, should not convince us that we lack free will. When I failed to save the child, I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise.

Free will or not free will?

Posted by on March 24, 2012 13 comments

It seems that everyone except me currently has a book about free will. As Jeremy Stangroom said when I made a similar remark on Twitter, if I had a new book about free will everyone else would have a new book about secularism. Well, so it appears … but I suppose that’s an illusion.

Be all that as it may, new books on free will or related topics have been (or soon will be) published by Sam Harris, Michael S. Gazzaniga, David Eagleman, Neil Levy, and Mathew Iredale – and there may well be others. This suddenly seems like a very hot topic, both within the academy and among a larger class of educated people.

By the way, the only book amongst this lot that I have yet read is Levy’s, which I found persuasive up to a point, although I do have the Harris book on order. Anyone who’d like to send me/get their publisher to send me review copies of the others is strongly encouraged.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has very recently published a batch of essays about free will – partly, it says, in response to the books by Harris, Gazanniga, and Eagleman – perhaps annoyingly, but not that surprisingly, philosophers Levy and Ireman are not mentioned. It’s not surprising for a number of reasons, including that their books are not aimed at a broad general audience. Or rather, Levy’s book is very much written for fellow philosophers, and more particularly those with some specialisation in this field (its approach is quite technical, which is not true of all Levy’s books), while Iredale’s forthcoming volume is from a relatively small academic press, even it’s written in a broadly accessible way. These books are not likely to receive heavy marketing. Still, it’s unfortunate that important new books on the topic by philosophers haven’t been picked up on by the Chronicle, of all places, mainly because they are too academic.

I’m planning, over the next few days, to look at the six articles in the Chronicle, taking them in order (which will mean starting with the contribution by Jerry Coyne, then, respectively, those of Alfred Mele, the aforementioned Gazzaniga, Hilary Bok, Owen D. Jones, and Paul Bloom).

Do I have a dog in this fight? Well, to an extent. I still tend to think of myself as a compatibilist, although I’ve increasingly come to wonder whether “free will talk” is actually very useful at all, one way or the other, in illuminating our situation. Perhaps everything that needs to be said can be said without actually using the expression “free will” – and perhaps both “You have free will!” and “You do not have free will!” convey false or misleading content, or are simply too unclear to convey anything very coherent at all to the average person. So I’ve become something of a sceptic about the whole concept, or, rather, the expression, while still thinking that there are useful things that can be said in the vicinity, perhaps in other language. Since these things include some of the content that affirmations that we have free will are apparently intended to convey, my scepticism is not so much about whether we have free will, whatever it is, as whether the expression “free will” is especially clear or useful.

But we’ll see. Although I do have a viewpoint that I start with, I’m open to being persuaded by all or any of these six articles. Join me over the next few days as I tackle them one at a time.

Get That Chip Out of My Brain!

Posted by on January 9, 2012 30 comments

There has of late been some discussion of free will and determinism, and particularly the relative merits of compatibilism versus incompatibilism, at various blogs. (See, for example, here, here and here.)

I must confess that I’ve not followed these discussions closely, despite having a longstanding interest in this issue (see here and here, for instance), so I don’t really have anything substantive to say about the debate, except, I guess, that I’m inclined towards the sort of incompatibilism espoused by Jerry Coyne (my hands were strangely reluctant to type that).

However, this does seem like an opportune moment to ask the readers of Talking Philosophy for their advice and opinions about an interactive activity that I put together at Philosophy Experiments, which explored some of these issues through a look at a Frankfurt Case and some other stuff. It’s here:

Get That Chip Out of My Brain!

Thing is, I programmed the activity about six months ago now, but I was never happy with it, and haven’t added it to the front page of the site (it’s been played quite a lot because of traffic that comes in via Google, etc).

Basically, my view is that most people will find the stuff about “Transfer NR” (John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza) confusing and philosophically suspect – it seems tricksy – and I tend to think that I ought to rewrite the whole activity, focussing on the Harry Frankfurt stuff, which I think works much better.

If anybody felt inclined to play through the activity (it’ll only take a few minutes), and let me know if they agree, disagree, or have any other thoughts, that would be really helpful. If it turns out that even a few people think it doesn’t work, then I’ll almost certainly rewrite the thing (because I think there is a good interactive exercise in there somewhere, but I’m not sure this is it).

Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris on free will

Posted by on January 2, 2012 37 comments

Jerry Coyne has an interesting article on free will in USA Today and a follow-up post at Why Evolution Is True. It all seems to be triggered by the publication of a new book about free will by Sam Harris.

Both Harris and Coyne point-blank deny that free will exists. The USA Today piece is well worth reading, but the passage quoted from the Sam Harris book, in the post at WEIT, doesn’t impress me. In particular, I disagree about the “changing the subject” claim as a way of dismissing compatibilism. Come on, Dr Harris, that is a rhetorical tactic to put down thoughtful and intellectually honest opponents, rather than trying to appreciate the real strength of what they are saying. (Of course, you may not have any choice as to whether or not you argue like this.)

It’s just not at all clear that the original “subject” was some spooky power to act contrary to our own desires and whatever physical substrate they supervene on. In fact, I doubt that any serious philosopher thinks of it quite like that, and I doubt that ordinary people do either – though the attempts by some libertarians (in the sense relevant to this debate) to preserve our motivations while giving us a radical power to act independently of the causes that shaped our personalities are, indeed, sometimes baffling. It seems that they want to have it both ways, which places them in danger of saying something incoherent. As for what ordinary people think about all this … well, it’s likely to be very confused.

I agree that there is no free will in any spooky libertarian sense. I don’t think the idea can be rendered coherent, whether physical determinism (at the level of the brain’s functioning, say) is true or not. But this is all a very modern way of thinking about it. It may be what’s bugging some people, but historically the questions were more along the lines of: “Am I a plaything of fate or destiny or necessity or mere chance or the will of the gods?” “Is it rational to deliberate about what I do, if the outcome is fated anyway (or, conversely, a matter of mere luck)?” “Are my attempts to shape my own life and to make a difference to the world all futile?” These are the questions that are at stake in the traditions of myth, literature, and even, to a large extent, philosophy.

Even now, much popular fiction involves themes of, “Can I overcome my destiny?” “Can I forge a better life for myself?” This kind of thing, arguably, is what gnaws at ordinary people outside of any formal theological or philosophical context. Do we have the power (or some power, at least) to shape our lives? It seems obvious that we do, or why bother making decisions at all (unless we simply can’t help it, right?). Why deliberate about what career to pursue, if it’s all controlled by God or the stars, anyway? But we do, ordinarily, think it’s worthwhile deliberating about what career to pursue, what skills to develop, etc. Deliberating certainly doesn’t seem irrational or futile.

This obvious appearance is challenged by various plausible-looking arguments, ranging from arguments about the foreknowledge of God, to arguments about physical determinism, to arguments about living in an Einsteinian block universe, to arguments based on the law of excluded middle (after all, all statements about the future are either true or false … aren’t they?). And doubtless many others. These arguments suggest that our sense of having some ability to shape our own lives is an illusion. That is exactly what Harris and Coyne think it is.

Well, perhaps one of those arguments works, but if you’re going to show why they probably don’t, and why the everyday appearance that we can make decisions, act on the world, and, to some extent, shape our own future lives, is not just an illusion after all … well of course you’re going to have to do what philosophers do. I.e. we make distinctions, try to clarify issues, etc. That isn’t arguing in a contrived or dishonest way, or “changing the subject”. It’s our job. It’s how we earn our supper.

When philosophers try to clarify, and perhaps dissolve, these concerns, showing, perhaps, that the concerns don’t make good sense on closer analysis, we are playing a time-honoured role. Indeed, the Stoics (or certain of them) gave a “compatibilist” answer to the question of whether outcomes can be up to us, in some sense – despite there also being some truth about what we will decide – way back in Hellenistic and Roman times.

The issue of free will in the specific sense that I mentioned in the third paragraph above becomes important in debates about whether God could be absolved of responsibility for evil actions by us. If some sort of spooky free will exists, it’s thought by some theologians and philosophers that this creates a gap between the creative activity of God and the evils perpetrated by us, thus solving the ancient problem of evil.

Others may try to argue for spooky free will in an effort to preserve moral responsibility. They think that we can’t be (morally) responsible for our actions unless we are somehow responsible for them all the way down. Thus, they want to create a gap, not between our actions and God but between our actions and whatever events formed us as we are. Indeed, this issue has become central in the contemporary debate about free will among professional philosophers. It’s now largely a debate about whether and when we are responsible for our own actions.

But once again, compatibilists who are involved in this debate are not engaging in any dishonest or contrived reasoning. It is strongly arguable that no spooky gap between us and the events that formed us is required for us to, quite rationally, hold each other responsible for our choices and actions. You may disagree with this, but it’s inevitable that a question like that is going to require both sides to engage in attempts at conceptual clarification. This is not “changing the subject”.

Jerry Coyne rightly points to these – i.e. theodical reasoning and arguments about moral responsibility – as two areas of discourse where a spooky gap is invoked. Since he evidently thinks that spooky gaps are needed for moral responsibility, he denies, if I read him correctly, that we have moral responsibility.

Let’s set aside the theodical arguments. I agree that the free will defence is unpromising as a solution to the problem of evil. But what about (moral) responsibility? Surely getting all this clear requires that we examine what the concept really amounts to – and that is a non-trivial exercise in conceptual analysis, since the concept of (moral) responsibility, as it appears in everyday discussion, does not look straightforward, or even coherent, and it is tied up with many other difficult concepts, such as concepts of fairness, justice, and desert. There’s conceptual work to do here, and the best approach is simply not obvious.