In order to do this, it is of critical importance to establish a definition for “free will”. What is it exactly? The common explanation is that free will is the ability to do what one pleases in one's life. This is not exactly accurate, and does not satisfy what is needed in this discussion. Dictionary.com provides a helpful suggestion, in that the concept of free will is “a doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces”. It is not the ability to do as one pleases! Free will lies in thought and decision, rather than action. It is a capacity for action rather than an assertion of personal desire, and should be taken as such (an ability to choose), as opposed to an assertion of desire. It is not “the ability to do as one pleases”, but rather the “ability to please in the first place”. Consisting entirely of cognition, it is completely independent of resources and thus is not inhibited by an apparent absence of choices.
Let's begin by examining the arguments opposing the existence of free will. Having established the concept of free will, we can now begin to investigate the point of view of the determinist. Determinism is the belief that there is no such thing as free will. It is rooted in the ideal that there is always an underlying cause for every event, action, and choice which often can be drawn back to a divine being (God) as an original source. Determinism poses the question “Does God impede on free will?”, but does so rhetorically.
Determinism is bad for free will. It assumes that there is no free will because all actions, and decisions have been planned and thought out for you. God being all knowing would have to know what you are thinking as well; in addition God will have to know what you Will Be thinking throughout your lifetime. How then are you free to have freedom in thought, if your thoughts are known before you think them? If God knows how our lives are going to end up, do we have any sort of free will at all? If God as the all powerful has our lives planned out for us, where can we go that is not already predetermined for us? Would free will then only be an illusion? Would that not make God then a great and powerful deceiver?
Next is the problem other people cause in the world. How are we given free will if the will of others imposes itself on our own will? If someone makes a decision, immediately everyone's range of options is effected. For example, if you eat someone's cake, how can they have it too? A manifestation of the application of this dilemma in the human development of Government and structure, laws are created to prevent certain manifestations of free will to negatively impact others (especially in grim ways). Is it really free will if we have rules to abide by? How are we given free will if there are finite numbers of options? What happens if you aren't able to get what you want? Where's the freedom in that? To make my challenge even MORE difficult, masochistically I present the Humean answer to whether or not we have free will.
Everything according to David Hume must be derived from experience; he was an empiricist which is the outlook originated by John Locke that takes the position that all knowledge that is available to us is derived from the senses. Sensory data is as close as human beings get to certain knowledge. In his classification of all knowledge Hume created a distinction between “matters of fact”, and “relations of ideas”. Relations of ideas includes empirical, and demonstratively proven knowledge such as Geometry, Algebra and other such mathematics. Matters of fact are all other facets of knowledge. The problem with the latter is that their contrary is quite possible, because it can never present a contradiction. Matters of fact are a posteriori; meaning they do not exist in the mind prior to occurrence or experience.
Hume had a problem with Relations of ideas because they were a priori, to which he responded (for the sake of his empiricist beliefs, since a-priori necessary truths would prove to be a detriment to empiricism) that these ideas are merely tautological. “That by saying 'all sisters are siblings' we say nothing about them that was not already known by calling them a sister in the first place, even though it is a necessary truth.” (Palmer 181). Thus we can not expect anything from Relations of Ideas other than near arbitrary truths. So, Hume turned a majority of his focus to Matters of Fact as he concluded that these tell us more of the universe around us.
Hume is known in particular not for his empiricism, but his skepticism. Skepticism is rooted in the belief that true knowledge can not be obtained (even by sensor data) and that reality is therefore unknowable as it is. Humean skepticism has its empirical implications, and thus presents an anthropocentric view of the world due to the fact that any claim of truth would have to be drawn from a human experience.
He went on further to develop what is known as the induction fallacy. The induction fallacy contradicted nearly all scientific knowledge by suggesting that the fact that we have not witnessed every instance of an occurrence of which we claim to have certain knowledge is enough to say that we can not be sure that just because something occurred millions of times in the past that it necessarily mean it will continue to do so in the future. Just because you notice that every swan that you have ever seen has been white (even if several others confirm that), it doesn't necessarily follow that every swan is white. From this, Hume went on to conclude that no two events are necessarily connected.
To relate Hume's skepticism back to the issue at hand, it is my belief that Hume's position on free will would be the same as his position on the existence of God; bearing in mind that Hume was an established atheist. So let us look at how he reasoned God out of his life. Hume's empiricism was so ingrained that he reasoned that since there is no way to verify the presence of God through sensory data, God must therefore not exist. The same can be said of Free Will as an a priori concept. To go even further, it can be said that both God and Free will are relations of ideas, and that to say that “God exists” and that “free will exists” do not contradict their negatives, that “free will does not exist” and that “God does not exist”. Therefore, they are placed in the non-empirical category of Relations of ideas, for which Hume had no time.
Hume would also present what came to be known as Bundle Theory as an opposition to the existence of free will, due to the fact that within the theory the self doesn't exist either. Bundle theory suggests that everything we come to know through sensory data (which is only as close as we get to real knowledge, without actually being real knowledge) is merely a collection of properties which are projected by whatever we perceive in order for that thing to be perceived. Hume posed the challenge that you should try and imagine an object with properties uncharacteristic of what it is known or perceived to be. For this reason, you can not imagine a square circle. Next step then is to imagine an object with all of its properties removed. “Imagine a granny smith apple. You picture something that is round, green, small, shiny and delicious. Now take away every descriptive property I have just named and you get nothingness. The object ceases to exist.” It is for this reason that David Hume began to believe that all existence is a swirling array of properties wandering aimlessly that the mind puts together to create every object, including what is thought to be “the self” which according to him didn't exist either. Apply this then to free will, the properties of which aren't present anyway, and you could say that this could not POSSIBLE exist as anything more than nonsensical dribble. It would have failed a second time to exist by virtue of not being a thing with properties, which would still have been reduced to nothingness should those properties have existed in the first place. For Hume, there was no place for free will.
The opposition presents very powerful arguments against the belief in the existence of free will, to which I respond with the following arguments in favor of the existence of free will
Libertarians believe that everyone to some degree has free will. You are therefore responsible for everything you do. If God determines our life's paths that strongly, why would he not make us all believers in him? This is in favor of free will in belief and thought, and would avoid individuals going through paths unfavorable to God, and thus not in their best interests?
The same events follow from the same causes, and from this we believe we can be sure of what people are going to do. If you know that a person is inclined to do something, you are not surprised by what they chose to do. In response to the determinist argument that God's foreknowledge of our thoughts implies a lack of free will I would like to point out the following distinction. God knowing what one's thoughts are does not necessarily mean that God thought those thoughts for you, or even manipulated you to have them.
To counter the assertion that we may not have free will if God has our lives planned out for us, I would like to present the following objection. Why would God allow people to question both him and his existence if he has complete authority over out lives and thoughts? It seems futile to make your followers not believe in you on purpose. God doesn't seem like the masochist type. I propose then that this is not an intentional occurrence on God's part. That there is some influence independent of God that causes atheism, agnosticism, and belief in other divine bodies (free will perhaps?). Free will then would not be an illusion, and God would not then be a great deceiver for it.
Also,from a bit of an existentialist standpoint, consider the following: if God could control the actions of every individual for the entirety of their lives, then as a benevolent maker, would there be any reason to even have human consciousness? To rephrase this question, “why make dolls think?”. It wouldn't matter anyway, right? One might as well save them the hardship, pain, and embarrassment they would face should they actually have consciousness. Why feel as if you must take into any sort of consideration the input of anything over which you have control? This argument for the record is trying to illustrate the futility in believing that we can be both pawns in God's divine chess game AND be given a consciousness just to be able to realize that cruel fact.
Imagine each individual as a character in an existential video game. Those characters have no free will for the following reasons: They can be forced into performing the same task over and over again regardless of the result. They can be made to enter situations that contradict their best interests. They can face the option of standing there motionless in the presence of great turmoil. They have invisible boundaries. Can not freely walk into the ocean. Any progress in their lives is the result of them having passed a certain checkpoint. The reason why this does not apply to our current situation is that unlike the virtual reality faced by these characters, our reality involves individualized personal free wills whose only limitation is the presence of other free wills.
It was asked whether we have free will if we are faced with rules and limitations; that given a finite amount of options, there is no real “freedom” of will. Firstly, if you aren't given restraints, your existential homeostasis would never be disturbed so essentially you would have no motivation to do anything at all. Secondly, within every finite existence lies some sort of infinity. Within every straight line, no matter how small, there lies an infinite amount of points. For another example, perhaps more closely related to the issue of free will, if I am performing a task there are an infinite amount of opportunities for me to choose to stop what I am doing entirely. There were an infinite amount of chances, while writing this paper, for me to have stopped and done something more fun.
Also, to assume that once options are “removed” the freedom to choose from the removed options is also removed (thus crippling free will), is to suggest that free will is rigid, static, and unadaptive. This CAN NOT be, because of the nature of human beings as flexible, dynamic, and highly adaptive creatures would be inconsistent with that type of free will. Free will then HAS TO change over time because the conditions that affect it also undergo changes. In addition, through our ability to manipulate imagination we also have that degree of free will. In such a case we are able to increase our capacity for free will. Free will should be taken then as a capacity for action (ability to choose), as opposed to an assertion of desire. Once again, it is not “the ability to do as one pleases”, but rather the “ability to please in the first place”
In response to Hume's entire argument, which is difficult to counter considering the depths of the purely objective logic applied in its creation, I feel it is important to know how David Hume himself responded to his own skepticism. In writing his “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”, he most likely (and almost certainly) had to drop his pen and perform normal human functions (eat, sleep, relieve himself) leading one to believe that a part of him could not accept his own skepticism for the sake of living a normal life. “Though many of these things he speaks of may not exist, we must still live as though it does”. His skepticism was bad for both philosophy and for life. In addition, it could be argued that his skepticism was based on empiricism, which was grounded in the belief in sensory data as the only knowable truth. What this means is that his skepticism had to have been grounded in a non-skepticism for him to have even adopted it!
I believe that the problem with free will is that it is viewed with such egocentrism that in discourse it is often mistakenly confused with having relativistic implications and objectivity, as opposed to subjectivity. Free wills interact with other free wills. This interaction merely affects the options, and not the wills themselves, in what can be described as a clash of wills. It is important to note for the sake of free will that within a finite amount of possibilities, there can and still are an infinite amount of choices. It is possible and highly likely to have free will in spite of the once thought Judeo-Christian inconsistencies. I believe the problem there is that God himself has been misunderstood.
- "determinism." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 13 May. 2010.
. - Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
- Palmer, David. Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness Of Philosophy Made Lighter. 2nd Edition. Mayfield, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994. Print.
- "Three Minute Philosophy - David Hume ." Youtube. Web. 12th April.
- Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
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