Free will? Well, freeish, on a good day.

 When Christopher Hitchens, in several of his public appearances as mediated by YouTube, passingly joked "We have to believe in free will - we have no choice!", the bon mot was invariably greeted with a chuckle from the audience, who, you got the impression, were inclined to concede a claim that seemed among the least controversial he ever made. Well, not any more, as far as I can tell. Since his fellow-horseman Sam Harris first embarked on a decades-long anti-free-will crusade, more and more people have freely exercised the choice not to believe in the free exercise of choice, to the point where this has become a rare point of convergence between the woke Left and the philosophically-inclined liberal centre-right, leaving only recalcitrant conservatives out of the party, either because their religious catechism generally obliges them to pay lip-service to the troublesome notion (our misuse of Free Will is God's pretext for treating us all like shit, remember?), or because they’ve an attachment to self-made heroes or self-raising bootstraps, to the romantic ideal of being free as a bird, free at least to leave Penelope behind scrubbing out the bath while you bugger off to fight the Trojans.

But leaving the Odyssey and theodicy aside, I really don't see what all the fuss is about. I still haven't heard an argument against Free Will that doesn't go galumphing after a strawman (or at least a Strawson). "We don't choose our thoughts" says Harris. Whoever claimed that we did? "Everything that happens has a necessary and sufficient material cause, including our choices". Well, 'ave a banana. I seem to vaguely remember Roger Penrose or some such trying to make a deus ex machina case for brain neurons somehow hooking up with quantum uncertainty - very a la Descartes' pineal gland - but as far as I'm concerned this misses the point by a mile, since even if there was a plausible case for thoughts or decisions being seeded with random numbers in some misty subatomic realm, we don't want our decisions to be random, and believing in free will in no way entails that they somehow are. Unpredictable by all means (see below), but random? Would you want a randomly-seeded agent flying your plane? I wouldn't. 

So if free will is not about picking your thoughts off supermarket shelves or randomly crashing planes into hillsides, what is it about? Well, this is where the linguist (me) parts company with the philosopher (everyone else who's ever written on the subject) since while philosophers generally take for granted they know what words mean without any help, linguists who hear the word "freedom" (or any other) naturally reach for their corpus. Well, I've left mine in the downstairs loo, but what I expect you'll find is that general usage (the source of any meaning that’s worth a damn) insists on a binary opposition between people being made to do things and people doing them of their own free will. Freedom, in short, is not the opposite of determinism: properly understood, it’s the opposite of tyranny.

Thus, if I jump a red light because someone in the back seat with a gun pressed against my head tells me to, I am not acting "of my own free will", whereas if there is no such gun-toting villain, I have to own it and pay the fine, because I am a responsible adult aka "free agent" and the fact I was late for class or distracted doesn't get me off the hook. This is how we understand free will in law, in literature and in life. Philosophers seem to be the only people who just don't get it. "But." they protest, "even without a masked gunman, your thoughts, genes, upbringing, learned reflexes and the fact the radio was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd all conspired to make you jump that red light! You had no choice!" Which only goes to show philosophers are a privileged, rather spoilt bunch who've never been made to do stuff. For most of us, there's a world of difference between, say, getting vaccinated because you don't want to die of COVID and getting vaccinated because some state myrmidons force you to at gunpoint (or at cashpoint), even if the outcome is the same.

And no, free will contains no requirement that you "are able to do other". I may legitimately feel righteous for choosing to be faithful to my wife, even though any attempt on my part to choose otherwise would very quickly lead me to the discovery that no other choice is possible, since infidelity requires the consent of another party, which for someone like me would only be forthcoming in a world with very different physical and biological laws (Planck's constant would need tweaking for a kickoff). What is required, surely, is not that you can choose otherwise, but that you can imagine choosing otherwise, and are able to bring your own values, preferences and scruples to bear in choosing one imaginary scenario over another without something like a gun pressed to the temple being the overriding factor in such a preference.

All of which makes me wonder sometimes if there is some sort of movement afoot to systematically downplay or discredit the role of human choice and agency, and above all imagination, to persuade us that we are all just automata blindly following our genetic programming, social conditioning or random impulses - which, if true, not only deprives individual decisions of most of their significance, but also provides cover for those who would like to upgrade our internal software with some programming of their own. After all, if all I am is a robot, what does it matter whether I am following the encoded instructions of my school RE teacher, of "society", of Dr Fauci or that nice Mr Zuckerberg? It's all just programming after all. In fact, it's probably better for all concerned if I follow the lead of Mr Zuckerberg and the Loudoun County School Board, rather than whoever filled my head with foolish notions of making my own informed choices.  Thus we drift inch by inch towards the Skinnerian paradise, Walden Two, where you can be safely left to do whatever you like because the choice of things you can conceivably like has been predetermined in advance by The Controllers, the people who keep the pellets and YouTube recommendations coming in your socially distanced but otherwise comfortable Meta-Skinner Box.

The two tendencies I seem to detect among the “anti-frees” (let’s call them that, for simplicity) are, first of all, reductionism (if you prefer, “nothing-but-ism“) and second of all, self-exceptionalism (I’m sure the philosophers have a better word for this, but I’ve already told you I’m not one of them).  Reductionism: while it shouldn’t harm anyone’s ego to learn that they didn’t, in fact, create themselves, and hence that they are not the Prime Cause of all their naughtinesses (who wants to be a Prime anything?), this prosaic fact is emphatically not the same as “your decisions and achievements are nothing but the product of blind chance and as such have no significance”. You might as well argue that Michelangelo’s David is “nothing but” a collection of atoms and thus has no more right to be in the Galleria dell'Accademia than any similarly sized chunk of marble. What the nothingbutters miss is that, as humans, we are constrained to look at things in human ways (which, although biased, are not necessarily wrong ways) and that it is human to locate, given a set of enabling conditions which include the absence of coercion, a decision in the mind of a decider, rather than go chasing down a fractally expanding maze of biochemical, chemical and ultimately physical sufficient prior conditions. The reason why it’s convenient to view people as agents is not only that we don’t have enough chemistry or enough history to take more than a wild stab at anything further up the causal stream; it’s also that we are designed to understand human agency much better than we understand any other sort. We know, for example, that even the least imaginative person can easily picture doing the opposite of whatever they’re about to do, and that the mere act of mentally conjuring these alternatives guarantees the imprint, however faint, of preference upon choice.

By “self-exceptionalism” (I’m sure there’s a better word for it) I mean the idea that you can generalise about people without those generalisations applying to yourself. If people cannot “really choose”, then not only is it pointless for you to try to persuade me of this (because I cannot “really choose” to be persuaded by your arguments), but this conviction on your part is one that you, likewise, did not “really choose”, which means you are asking me to believe a stochastically formed proposition as opposed to a freely deliberated one.  Furthermore, saying that I cannot “really choose” is to say that you can imagine such a thing as “real choice” that is inaccessible to me, which again suggests that you are seeing both me and the world as an interplay of blind causality, while placing your own imagination above and outside this, in the metaphysically privileged position of an external observer who is able to freely compare what is the case with what might be the case but is not: you can roam freely in a universe of imaginary possibilities, while I, according to you, cannot. I mention this self-excepting aspect of the Strict Determinist view in part because I see it reflected in a lot of political discourse these days. For example, to support censorship, as many do these days, you are forced to divide humanity into two groups: the masses who must not be permitted to read or hear the offending work or utterance in question, and the censor – you, by implication - who must necessarily be allowed unrestricted access to all such discourse in order to gain such familiarity with it as is needed to make those important decisions on the masses’ behalf. It’s an obvious point perhaps, but I never fail to be surprised by how readily some writers cast themselves implicitly in the role of independent, objective observers while denying that any mere fallible human can fill such a role.

Once again: of course the freest of our free choices are ultimately determined by what chance has put in our heads, and I’ve never come across anyone who denies this. In saying I believe in free will, I am not asserting the existence of anything that metaphysically escapes material causality; I am simply saying that people have the capacity, even if they don’t always use it, to imaginatively represent alternative courses of action and bring their preferences (moral, aesthetic, religious or other) to bear on deciding algorithmically between them. That this capacity and those preferences all lead back to causes that are ultimately outside our control is true but irrelevant, given that the enemy of free will is not the fact that the source of my preferences lies outside and beyond myself – rather, it is the fact that I am also capable of making choices that are not dictated by my own preferences, but by those of another person – say, a carjacker ordering me to run a red light, or a government ordering me to attend a struggle session. True, I am still, in those scenarios, exercising my “preference” for continuing to live over being shot in the head, but as I pointed out above, that’s by consensus not enough to justify calling the action “free” or “willed”. Measured against this yardstick, incidentally, it’s obvious that freedom is not an all-or-nothing thing: we are freer when our decisions are both relatively unconstrained by coercion, and the result of careful deliberation involving the most valued elements of our internal make-up: among them perhaps morality, reason, intuition, experience and taste. To the extent that some of these are lacking, we are of diminished responsibility, even if the legal criteria for such a description are not met. We know when we’ve been acting on autopilot and when we’ve thought stuff through properly.

So how, then, does my compatibilist view differ from that of the anti-frees? Is it merely a question of semantics, of disagreeing on the meanings of words? Well, put me in a debate against a wily philosopher and it may well come down to just that, but as already hinted, I’m not trying to make a contribution to academic philosophy here – I’m hardly qualified for that – but instead I’m interested in how the anti-free philosophical stance, in the debased and possibly caricatured form in which people like me will inevitably encounter it, influences everyday discourse, including political discourse. And here, as I say, what I see is the growth of both a terrifying reductionism and the sort of loathsome elitism (yes, that’s the word) that likes to divide people into those who “get it” and those who don’t. I’m not saying that philosophical determinism necessarily entails any of this, but simply that this is what we tend to find associated with it out in the wild.

As a frinstance, we only have to look at how the left on social media commonly respond to conservative appeals to such social virtues as resilience, responsibility, work habits and personal effort. Wherever you see a conservative justifying personal wealth as a deserved reward for hard work, a member of the condescendi will inevitably pop up to sneeringly inform us not only that some rich people never did a stroke of work in their lives (a fair point, easily conceded especially where I live) but that since the capacity for hard work is partly a genetic inheritance and partly the result of going to the right school, being blessed with it is all about privilege and not at all a matter of deserving. (Paradoxically, this may be accompanied a few lines down by an impatient exhortation to “do the work” of investigating the many ways you are wrong about all this.) In such arguments, there is an implication that free will, as manifested in such things as a purposeful and meritorious decision to defer gratification and immerse oneself in gainful effort, is a mere superstition: since people cannot in fact choose to do other than what they do, the concept of “deserving” is shorn of meaning, and “to each according to his need” becomes the only operative criterion for whatever redistributive policy one wishes to pursue.

Personally, I find this line of argument enticing in that the older I get, the less I feel my theoretical freedom to choose and decide things actually counts for anything. My congenital laziness has been so freely indulged over the years that it is now pretty much baked into my habits and reflexes: I could perhaps prevail upon myself to work a little harder than I do, but not much harder, and I’m definitely not going to surprise people by becoming the next Bill Gates in my declining years. So yes, the notion that I can’t really help being the penurious failure I am feels plausible and oddly comforting. I am a prisoner, if not of my genes then at least of the accumulation of bad choices I’ve made over the years, and of the deep grooves and ruts I’ve dug for myself, so deep that I can no longer see over the top of them. (Which incidentally goes to show that being young is where it’s at. If there’s a time in life when your decisions might mean something, the one I’m at now for sure ain’t it.)

I think this is why more and more people these days are turning into anti-frees: it’s often comforting and convenient to be told that nothing you can realistically do can change the way things are. It’s seductive to be reductive. To accept that the outcome of all your decisions is determined in advance – to actually internalise this message - is to license fatalism, passivity, laziness and rejection of dialogue, in rather the same way that being old, past it, clapped out and on the junk heap, as I now am, also licenses these things. In the past, for example, whenever someone suggested I could give up smoking, I would nod uncomfortably and shamefacedly, and after a few dozen uncomfortable nods of this sort spread over a few years, I would feel goaded into giving it a try, and would go nicotine-cold-turkey for maybe a few months, which probably did my lungs some limited good. Now, however, if someone suggests the same (in the updated variant “haven’t you stopped vaping yet?”) I have the perfect answer: “no, I haven’t because my mental configuration makes it impossible for me to make this choice”. In other words, I have turned my weaknesses into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and my past into a straitjacket for my future. I’m not going to try and persuade you that “nothing is impossible if you believe in yourself” (a self-evidently silly notion), but it seems reasonable to suppose that if you don’t think you’re capable of doing a thing, you probably won’t do it, at least if the thing requires effort – and one apparent consequence of being anti-free-will is that you are wedded to the belief that you are not, in fact, “capable of” anything at all, beyond the prosaic reality of what you’ve done and what you are predictably likely to do, with the result that reality - which you now understand better than everyone else - approximates asymptotically to “everything is impossible”. An impractical and very likely unlivable outlook – I find I’m in full agreement with Hitchens on this.

The above should not be seen as an attempt to refute the determinist position by pointing out its bad consequences – which would clearly be a fallacious line of argument. I myself am determinist in the sense of believing there is a causal explanation for everything, including our decisions, that ultimately leads outside and beyond the individual. So no argument there.  What I am arguing is that, determined though our decisions may well be, the vocabulary we use to talk about them - including the sort of moral considerations we use to decide whether, say, a rich person “deserves” his wealth or not - does not necessarily require us to engage in self-deception or metaphysical obfuscation: we have it because it’s useful, because it helps us explore possibilities and get stuff done. Freedom is not (or need not be) an illusion, despite the wealth of constraints and limitations we live under, any more than health is an illusion, despite our being continuously bombarded with disease vectors. It only requires fulfilment of certain modest conditions to be a proper, if somewhat fuzzy, description of human agency. Those who reject this standard lexicon appear to attach some sort of strange, nonsensical meaning to words like “free” or “decide” – they seem to suppose that to be free one would have to exist outside the material universe, or that the only genuinely “free” decision would be one which lacked any discernible motivation (cf. Gide’s acte gratuit). This isn’t how most people understand these terms. Moreover, as already mentioned, to think in this way – “people, fools that they are, think they are free, but having freely investigated their claim, I know better!” - requires us to except ourselves from humanity and adopt some sort of privileged-observer position that leads straight in the direction of the sort of narcissistic elitism that turns good people’s hair blue.

Saying that our actions are “determined”, meaning they have sufficient causes, does not, incidentally, mean that they are predictable, even “in theory”. I used to believe, years ago, that it was theoretically possible to predict a person’s behaviour, provided you had access to all the necessary information on the subject’s mental state, genetic and neurochemical “wiring”, and any relevant external circumstances. What changed my mind was the realization that a prediction is nothing more or less than a speech act, and as such takes its place as part of the closed system which also contains the subject, who may quite easily respond to this act in such a way as to falsify the prediction, no matter how confidently data-driven it was. This, by the way, is not some sort of metaphysical hocus-pocus, but a simple algorithm that you can write in a few lines of BASIC. Under the prompt “predict the next number I will output”, allow the user to input a number, add one and output the result: hey presto, a program which, though we understand perfectly what it is doing, we cannot outwit. People are like that too: tell them what they’ll do and they’ll go and do the opposite, or they’ll add one, just to spite you. Add to that the fact that the “relevant external circumstances” we may need to consider to ensure the accuracy of a prediction could in theory encompass the entire state of the universe at a given moment: and it is clearly impossible for the universe (let alone your brain) to contain a complete copy, record or representation of its own state at any time, since the copy itself would have to be part of the representation, leading to infinite regress. So no, predicting someone’s behaviour with complete confidence is not possible. Not even someone like me, whose mental existence has become, with illness and senility, simplified to the extreme. There is always the possibility that the explosion of a distant star will convince me not to eat that last doughnut. You can’t rule it out. Believing that people are “predictable” thus turns out to be one more instance of the Skinner-box mentality which I referred to above as “self-exceptionalism”, the idea that “there’s people, and then there’s me, the Controller, the objective Scientist, the pellet-giver.”

Speaking of which, and by way of a coda, let’s go back to Sam. One of his best-known arguments for the anti-free position is the experimental observation of a man who raised one arm as a result of externally induced brain stimulation, who then insisted that he had “chosen” to do so. This is certainly a tricky one. In spite of our professed opposition to tyranny, to the imposition of “their” will over ours, how can we know whether “they” are already controlling all our thoughts? Perhaps our opposition to tyranny has been very cleverly induced by the very tyranny of which we are unconscious? If the control is lifelong and total, we cannot know this, as we cannot know we are not brains in a vat. However, we can to some extent guard against it, by which I mean take steps to avoid becoming the unwitting dupes of Skinnerian social engineers, of “thought leaders” and other manifestations of Big Brother who want us to believe we are freely raising our puppet arms to vote for them. To the extent the exercise of our presumed freedom involves deliberate choices that can be justified according to our own long-term values, we can at least make those values a matter of public and private record (akin to a pledge “I will not raise this arm while in this bed”) so that any departure from them should at least raise questions and force us to face our inconsistency. We can then try to determine if we’ve changed our minds simply because we grew up, or if we’ve been social-engineered into compliance with the New World Order, or if – as I sort of get the impression happened to Sam himself – if we’ve simply let our heads disappear completely and without trace up our own rear ends.