One of the foundational beliefs of Ethical Culture is that we exercise ethical choice in our lives. Are we truly free to choose? Recent advances in brain physiology and evolutionary biology challenge long held beliefs in psychology and philosophy regarding our ability to exercise free will. Do we act as free agents making moral decisions? When are we accountable for our actions? Do we use reason to evaluate choices and change behavior?
At a recent series that I am presenting on the history of Ethical Culture, I read excerpts from the Founding Address given by Felix Adler, the person who started the Ethical Culture movement, on May 15, 1876.
In this address, Felix Adler outlined one of the purposes of Sunday morning Lectures. He wrote:
…it will be the object of the lecturers to set forth a standard of duty, to discuss our practical duties in the practical present, to make clear the responsibilities which our nature as moral beings imposes upon us in view of the political and social evils of our age, and also to dwell upon those high and tender consolations which the modern view of life does not fail to offer us even in the midst of anguish and affliction.
All right then. I’ve given you fair warning. Expect some of that “moral duty” and “responsibility” stuff later in this piece.
I often find that subjects that interest me do not always hold the same level of interest for others.
I found Free Will to be one of those subjects.
When I am thinking about a subject, I often bring it up in conversations with family and friends. Some topics lead to animated discussions. Other topics produce a more restrained response, “Yeah, so what?”
Free Will was one of those “other topics”.
But did I give up? Oh no, not me. I decided that I needed to present my case better. I also thought that having a captive audience wouldn’t hurt either.
Why do I find the problem of Free Will interesting? I find it intellectually interesting to examine whether we are in control of our choices or not.The philosophical discourse regarding the existence and exercise of our will intrigues me.
The biological discoveries about how our mind works – our brain’s evolutionary biology and neuro-chemistry – fills me with awe and wonder about the complex organisms that we are and our amazing human capacity to discover, learn, and understand what we are.
But aside from the philosophical and biological dimensions of the Free Will problem, there is a third dimension – that of how responsible we are for our actions. Indeed, the conclusions reached after examining the philosophical and biological theories lead directly to judgments about how responsible we are for our actions.
For me, these conclusions, about to what degree we are moral agents responsible for our actions, makes Free Will and interesting question. Resulting assumptions about how free we are to exercise choice have profound social implications.
A newspaper article about a man who had been arrested for child pornography prompted my recent bout of reading and thinking about Free Will. After he was arrested doctors found that he had a Brain Tumor. After successful surgery this behavior disappeared.
In this newspaper article, Daniel Tranel, a University of Iowa neurology researcher, said he has seen people with brain tumors lie, damage property, and in extremely rare cases commit murder. “The individual simply loses the ability to control impulses or anticipate the consequences of choices.”
Dr. Stuart Yudofsky, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine who specializes in behavioral changes associated with brain disorders, also has seen the way brain tumors can bend a persons behavior. “This tells us something about being human doesn’t it?” Yudofsky said. “If one’s actions are governed by how well the brain is working, “does it mean we have less free will than we think?”
Ah! Free Will. My mind was off and running.
Philosophers’ thinking on Free Will is traditionally divided into two categories.
Determinism – holds that, not surprisingly, our actions are determined, subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to rules of cause and effect. Again it’s no surprise that variants of this view place constraints on Free Will or eliminate it all together.
An anonomous Determinist wrote:
There was a young man who said: “Damn!”
It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.”
For a strict Determinsit, our path is indeed circumscribed, our Free Will restricted.
The position opposed to Determinism is referred to as Indeterminism.
I was personally disappointed by the lack of originality in this term and thought that they should have come up with something more independent, or at least more zingy.
Indeterminism holds that we are free agents and our choices are unconstrained. Here are some historical quotes illustrating the Indeterminist view of Free Will:
Rene Decartes: “the will is by nature so free that it can never be constrained”
Immanuel Kant “Freedom is alone the unoriginated birthright of man; it belongs
to him by the force of his humanity.”
Jean Paul Satre: “For human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to
it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or
accept…it is entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity of
making itself be, down to the slightest details. Thus
freedom…is the being of man, i.e., his nothingness of being.”
Shakespeare: Men at some time are masters of their fates
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars,
But in ourselves… (Julius Caesar)
Poetic as these expressions of Indeterminism are, I am unconvinced. I believe that our freedom, our will, is constrained by our biological selves and the forces that act upon us.
Steven Pinker wrote in his book How the Mind Works:
"In this scientific age, “to understand” means to try to explain behavior as a complex interaction among (1) the genes, (2) the anatomy of the brain, (3) its biochemical state, (4) the person’s family upbringing, (5) the way society has treated him or her, and (6) the stimuli that impinge on the person. …every one of these factors…has been inappropriately invoked as the source of our faults and a claim that we are not masters of our fates."
I believe that we exercise limited Free Will even while influenced by these factors.
This makes me a Determinist.
Comedian Emo Phillips has quipped: “I’m not a fatalist, but even if I were, what could I do about it?”
Determinism does not necessarily imply fatalism. Determinism can be compatible with limited Free Will.
Historical ideas of determinism were associated with the gods. For the ancient Greeks, the gods toyed with our fates. For later monotheists, God was omniscient – all knowing and present as God’s great design unfolded.
In 1859 Charles Darwin rocked the religious moral foundations of his time with the publication of the theory of natural selection in his “Origin of the Species”. People thought: If the biblical story of creation is not true, what are the implications for Christian moral teachings? If the concept of a personal god who supervises our lives is not true, what makes us special – different from the rest of nature. This tremor started by Darwin is still shaking today with contemporary reactions to evolution such as “creation science” and “intelligent design”.
Thanks to Darwin, our view of the natural world is materialistic and mechanistic. It is dominated by cause and effect. Are we not part of the natural world? Are the actions that we do determined by cause and effect?
Recent scientific advances in the understanding of brain function, neuroscience, have started a second tremor. How much of what we are is determined by our biology and genetic makeup? Brain physiology has not found anything resembling consciousness – is it an illusion?
Extreme versions of Determinism see us as well working machines where a specific set of stimuli produce a determined result. Pierre Laplace, a French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, wrote in 1814:
"An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before our eyes."
Laplaces's theory states that a really big computer that could hold all of the data for the state of the universe would know a determined future. Only one decision is possible and any deliberation that we undertake is toward this predetermined outcome. But is the apparatus of our will, our brain, really that efficient? Cells die, memories fade, and stimuli are misinterpreted.
Laplace’s determinism breaks everything down to the smallest levels. Thoughts become inevitable neuro-chemical reactions devoid of true content. This doesn’t make sense to me. I believe that our thoughts have power – power to transform ourselves and, when communicated, others as well.
Our consciousness, our will, is not just a mere illusion or philosopher’s puzzle that has no bearing on our daily lives.
To demonstrate this, Daniel Dennett included this illustration in his book Freedom Evolves:
"To see that the stakes are higher, that the issues really do matter, it helps to make them personal. Reflect, then, on your adult life and on something bad that you did, as bad a moment as you can bear to contemplate in suffocating detail. So fix the act in your mind; you did it; it happened. If only you hadn’t done it!
Now, so what? In the larger scheme of things, what is the meaning of your regret? Does it count for anything, or is it just a sort of involuntary hiccup, a meaningless spasm provoked by a meaningless world? Do we live in a universe in which striving and hoping, regretting, blaming, promising, trying to do better, condemning and praising make sense? Or all they all part of a vast illusion, honored by tradition but overdue for exposure?"
I believe that our consciousness is an evolved biological adaptation that helps us use our past experience, knowledge and reason to process our environment and thrive. Human consciousness has produced language, history, philosophy, science and society. We have the ability to deliberate, to reflect, to learn and to create. These characteristics are part of our nature.
One of the things that we have discovered through science is that our genetic makeup is one of the primary determinants of who we are. Yes, there is something to that evolutionary idea after all.
In Matt Ridley’s book Nature via Nurture he writes:
"Are we helpless before the tyranny of our genes? …genes have taken the place of fate in the human imagination. People used to rail against destiny. Now they rail against genes. "
Genes aren't destiny, and neither is experience. Instead, genes interact with the environment in subtle and powerful ways to determine just what kind of people we'll be.
Steven Pinker included this tidbit in How the Mind Works:
"In 1993 researchers identified a gene that was associated with uncontrollable violent outbursts. (“think of the implications,” one columnist wrote. “We may someday have a cure for Hockey.”) "
Science has found a profound relationship between brain chemistry, neuroscience, and behavior. Drugs that alter our brain chemistry affect our moods and behavior. Psychotherapy has been replaced by pills. Does this mean that we are not responsible for our behavior? That some of us are just wired wrong.
If we are strongly influenced by our genes, the anatomy of our brain, its biochemical state, our family upbringing, the way society has treated us, and the stimuli present in our environment – how free are we?
One question often posed as the litmus test of Free Will is: Could I have acted differently? If we are subject to cause and effect, we could not have acted differently. The sum total of the forces acting upon us, our biological state, and our psychological character conspire to produce the observed result. Therefore, we have no Free Will. We could not have acted differently.
I do not accept this reasoning. I believe that the question “Could I have acted differently?” is misleading.
Perhaps we are victims of our own flawed narrative. As human knowledge advanced, a higher power was dismissed as the author of our fate, but the story didn’t change. Instead, Science was written in as a god substitute.
Our experience of time is linear. Deliberation is followed by action. Once we decide and act, what is done is done. History is. Maybe the question, “Could I have acted differently?” isn’t the right question to ask. I believe that the more important question is one of justification: “Why did I make this choice?”
I believe that this question, “Why did I make this choice?” gets to the moral justification for our actions. In justifying our actions we reveal ourselves as moral agents.
Steven Pinker put it this way:
"Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior could be taken to undermine free will and hence moral responsibility. Science is guaranteed to eat away at the will, regardless of what it finds, because the scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysterious notion of uncaused causation that underlies the will.
Either we dispense with all morality as unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will… Like many philosophers, I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world... The science game treats people as material objects, and its rules are the physical processes that cause behavior through natural selection and neurophysiology. The ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behavior through the behavior’s inherent nature or its consequences.
Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can be usefully applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is not coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can be meaningfully applied to it.
Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both."
I thought that this take on Free Will was novel, something new, the result of great minds and the latest knowledge. I was surprised when I read a similar idea in a book loaned to me by Bud Blake, Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar written in 1943. Koestler wote:
"The conflict between freedom and determinism is a conflict between two instinctual beliefs, experienced in alternation and with equal intensity.
…scientific determinism was heading toward the same crisis as that of religious determinism… Instead of being a puppet of anthropomorph gods, man became a physico-chemical automaton; destiny from below left as little scope for free choice as destiny from above; the iron grip of heredity and environment was as inescapable as that of the weird sisters of fate.
The basic paradox of man’s condition, the conflict between freedom and determinism, ethics and logics, or in whatever symbols we like to express it, can only be resolved if, while thinking and acting on the horizontal plane of our existence, we yet remain constantly aware of the vertical dimension. To attain this awareness without losing the other is perhaps the most difficult task that our race ever faced."
Viewed in this way, Free Will and Determinism can coexist.
Our Free will becomes the foundation for personal moral responsibility. We make decisions and are accountable for them.
Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing Marion Brooks, a member of the St. Louis Ethical Society, speak at a recent evening meeting. It was a joy to hear the wisdom and experiences of this 89 year-old African American woman who characterizes her racial identity as “Sunkist”.
She addressed the topic of Free will when she stated that she believed there are “antecedents to our actions.” Marion said that she “did not believe in responsibility, but she believed in accountability.” She did not believe that punishment – the intention to purposely make another suffer – ever did anyone any good; however, she did believe in penalties. I suspect that Marion’s view of Determinism may be close to my own.
Marion succinctly stated the problem of accountability for our actions and pointed out another problem that I deeply agree with – the difference between punishment and penalties.
There is a connection between those who society, judges to be accountable for behavior that violates our laws, and the legal sanctions for these violations.
Alan Easton, another member of the St. Louis Ethical Society, brought this up at the discussion session that I held on Free Will prior to writing this piece. He said, “We consider people to have free will when they are adults. We hold adults accountable for their actions."
I agree with Alan and find this generally to be true; however, there is a disturbing willingness for our courts to make exceptions and try children as young as 13 as adults. Is the desire for revenge and punishment so strong that we have lost our moral compass?
In recent years I have observed a change in the way that our society reacts to those who transgress. Public discourse is marked by themes of vengeance and retribution. I see this nation acting out of irrational fear. I see our government exploiting these fears to pursue an agenda that destroys our freedoms at home and our credibility as a nation of good will. I do not support these actions – but do I have a choice?
One of the eight commitments of Ethical Culture is that ethics begins with choice – with the exercise of our Free Will.
Free Will is exercising choice.
We choose how to treat each other and how to act in this world.
Free Will is our ability to choose the good. To make choices that promote freedom, justice, compassion and human worth. To choose to bring out he best in others and thereby realize our best selves.
Professor Norman Swartz wrote on his website:
"I cannot change the future – by anything I have done, am doing, or will do – from what it is going to be. But I can change the future from what it might have been. I can contribute to making the future the very way it will be."
I believe that it is never too late to exercise our will to make choices and contribute to making a better future.
To close my talk today, I would like to read a poem that is a cautionary tale about science.
Science is important in our lives.
Science can inform us about the world, but it doesn’t give us our values, or make our choices for us.
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
By Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.