Free Will

Definitions

There's more than one way to define what we mean by 'free will'.

The most common, the 'colloquial', is someone's ability to act without clear external pressures.

For Example

　　　Bill was free to go to the shop or not. He had free will.

　　　Bill, age 6, was told to go to the shop by his mother. He had limited free will.

Bill was forced at gun point to go to the shop. He had no free will in doing so.


This is just a useful way of speaking and is not under debate.

Disagreement comes about whether Bill actually has free will even in the first example.

If you asked observers of the situation described by the first sentence, they would usually say that Bill was free to go to the shop. However some may say that it would depend on other factors not mentioned. For example, did Bill need food from the shop? If he had absolutely no need to go to the shop, the probability that he would go would be lower.

Already we have passed the colloquial, uncritical, usage of the term and are considering the reality of human actions.

Now, fortunately, we do not need to quibble about overt reasons for a specific actions to be skeptical about free will . You may give me an event that I have no knowledge about and that I could not give detailed reasons for its happening like 'because it happens annually' or 'because the person wanted to do it'.

This would not limit my argument if I wanted to prove that there was no free will involved.

This is because I can argue that there is no such thing as technical free will, in any case.

'Sophisticated' Actions

It would be uncontroversial to argue that many of our actions are not free.

It is easy to see how most of our daily actions are habitual: wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth, go to work, have lunch etc.

The controversy would come in challenging the human's ability to freely change such actions or perform more sophisticated ones.

Many examples can be given of 'sophisticated' human action, but I shall focus on just one that I consider most sophisticated and representative of human 'free will' in action.

For Example

Bill had been getting very stressed at work lately, so when he got home he decided to sit
quietly and think about why he was getting stressed to try to alleviate the fundamental problems.

Now, this is much more complicated action compared with a person deciding whether to go the shop or not.

It would be impossible to try and map out all the various goings-on in the brain during his time of reflection and how exactly they lead to whatever his conclusions were after the brainstorm.

But does this make his action 'free'? He was unhindered in performing the action and the action was far from what we would consider 'robotic' or 'habitual'.

Cause and Effect

Without going into physics (because I can't remember the details off-hand) it is understood that all actions have a cause and an effect. There can be no action without prior action causing it nor without it causing further action, an equal action onto what acted upon it as well as any action it then plants onto anything else it comes into contact with.

This may be a little complicated but it is clear at least that this means that the normal concept of free will is put under scrutiny. Previously 'free' actions now no longer seem to arise solely from our intelligence, but from a complicated mixture of previous actions that we can have no better claim to have had a choice in.

From a purely scientific point of view, this doesn't seem particularly controversial. We are just following the logic and accepting how reality must clearly be working.

The difficult arises when we consider the ethical implications for this.

Ethics

If everyone's actions are performed due to previous uncontrollable actions, how can we hold someone morally responsible for their actions - or even value morals at all?

It appears that morals are just a subjective perspective on certain types of human action which aren't, in reality, any more controllable by the human than the pace they breath subconsciously at.

This issue is further complicated by its own irony. Usually when a moral problem is raised you are free to consider it, considering how you may have to change your behaviour based on its validity etc. However, if one was to find this claim valid, it is difficult to properly act upon, as its validly actually denies your ability to act upon it meaningfully.