The Case Against Freedom

Believing that we do not have freedom means a belief in some form ofdeterminism.

What determinism is not:

It is not fatalism: Fatalism is the belief that the universe is governed by forces beyond our control that determine everything that happens to us and everything that we do.

It is not predestination: Predestination is the belief that God has decided from the beginning of time who will be saved & who will not. Nothing we can do in this life can change that.

Both of these assume something or someone else that is directing our lives. Determinism makes no claim about some outside force.

So, what is it? We could think of determinism as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. A scientist, for instance, will never say of an event, "It just happens that way, it has no cause". The scientist may not know the cause, but he or she assumes there is an explanation for everything. Determinists see humans as fitting into a larger natural scheme like this. Since we are part of the natural order, we have to be part of the principle of sufficient reason, just like anything else.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

For anything that happens, there is a reason sufficient to account for it.

So, put in these terms, to suggest that we have freedom is to suggest that the principle of sufficient reason doesn't apply to us.

Why might a determinist believe that we don't have free will?

  1. Ockham's Razor – no freewill is needed in our explanations, so we shouldn't be more metaphysically complex than is needed.
  2. It works – determinism produces explanations that have all the features of good science – predictive ability, testability, etc.
  3. Free will does not work. No explanations are possible using it.
  4. Wanting freewill does not make it true.
  5. You can't have a little free will, and a little determinism. If you admit that we are determined in some way, then it is difficult to find the place where free will takes over. How would you know it takes over?

Examples of accounts of human life that do not use freedom:

1. Behaviourism

2. Psychoanalysis: We've already talked about this one. Freud thinks that we are the product of the forces in our subconscious world. We do not choose, we construct a narrative after the fact that accounts for our actions, which are themselves determined by the struggle in the pre-rational.

3. Reductionist Versions of Cognitive Science: One dominant metaphor of the working of the human brain is that it is like a computer, either like the hardware or the software.

What if this is true? Analyzing the brain in terms of its "modules" and their relationship has proven remarkably useful. So, what if you are just a very complex computer. Do computers have free will? What if you are able to identify all the parts of the "programming", in the computer. You can always say, "it did this because of that subroutine." Does it have free will?

Now, what if we can identify the workings of the brain to that extent? Would we have free will?

Someone might say that, in fact, we can't. But what if that is just a function of the state of our technology and science at this moment? The onus is on the person claiming we have free will, to show where it is, to show what it "caused" that is not part of the "programming."

And so, what if there wasn't anything that could be found? What if all our decisions could be mapped in the brain, and their origins shown?


Do we still have free will under those circumstances?