Response to Free Will Comments

A few replies to these very interesting comments:

One comment asks whether, if people don't have free will in some strong sense, they can object to a law--say a ban on smoking--that restricts "freedom." But let me say first that I don't object to rhetorical flourishes, and so to marching under the "freedom" banner when defending a right to be left alone by the government in particular areas of liberty. In fact I find Mill's libertarian principle extremely attractive. But I don't find it attractive because I think I have free will in some strong sense of metaphysical autonomy--of exemption from cause and effect--but because I don't expect to be made better off by being told not to do things by government officials who have a much less exact knowledge of my utility function than I do. This response also relates to a comment that asked whether one can rationally complain about being "coerced" to surrender one's watch to a thief who says your watch or your life, if one has no free will. My answer is yes. Even if everything a person does is in a sense coerced, if only by character, upbringing, and other internal-seeming forms of coercion, there are certain forms of coercion that we would very much like to do without, even if the only consequence is to allow other forces to determine what, say, shall happen to my watch. Of course to speak of character as "coercive" is something of an abuse of language; and it is no part of my purpose to reform language. I assume that moralistic rhetoric, including the language of free will, serves a social function. It serves that function whether or not there is "free will" in a sense that engages the interest of philosophers and theologians.

One comment points out that my discussion of criminal responsibility treats the function of the criminal law as deterrence; it is also preventive. But there no interesting question of responsibility arises, because when crime is prevented by imprisonment there is no intervention in the thinking process and therefore no issue of free will. It is when the threat of punishment enters into the calculations and emotions that determine action that we are treating the potential criminal as a "responsible" being, meaning only by that that he has the mental capacity to add the threat to the implicit cost-benefit analysis that determines his conduct.

Comments

[Kip Werking]

Judge Posner,

You may be interested in another legal scholar's similar view on this subject. In "The Civilization of the Criminal Law" Christopher Slobogin (University of Florida, Levin College of Law) argues that humans do not have, in one important sense, free will. Consequently, we should abolish the criminal law. We should also embellish the tort system with the goal of deterring future crime, not punishing past crimes. You can find Slobogin's fascinating article here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=600674

Other philosophers and myself discuss issues of freedom and moral responsibility at the Garden of Forking Paths blog:

http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/

Best,
Kip Werking
William & Mary School of Law

[Fernando]

The topic of free will is one of those that leads to overblown discussion and a lot of confusion. It leads many great writers and thinkers down into dimly lit domains of theoretical possibilities which in turn provide little social hope. Many turn to skepticism, the mute kind--with regard to the topic of free will and simply shrug shoulders in despair. Two points are worth mentioning. First, ‘Free will’ is an odd concept for it’s dealt with from both an objective conception--physicality, human behavior, neurons, glial cells, transmitters and all--and a subjective conception--phenomenologically (from the locus of perception outward to the world). Therein lies one key difficulty. We talk about the experience of free will as an actual occurrence from a subjective point of view; yet muse over to objective considerations which fundamentally negate freedom due to the pervasive physical determinateness throughout the macro universe. Second, some argue for the salvation of free will by arguing that QM (Quantum Mechanics) makes for an indeterminate universe at the micro level. A sharp and clear account has not been published as of yet. Not too sure whether it can work due to the inconsistency that indeterminism creates when talking about free will, which is determinism in some sense, one that does not abide by the physical laws as we know them. But perhaps there is a mismatch in the way we humans conceptualize determinism and free will. We are prone to talk about the determined course of events as if they have no other possible alternative. For example, At1, Bt2, Ct3 , Dt4 are said to follow sequentially in a deterministic way. Think of the letters as Billiard balls, one striking another in real time. Not only does common sense dictate the expectation of a sequential order but Newtonian mechanics does too. (Interestingly, Hume‘s argument is a serious challenge!) However there are interpretations of the formalities of QM which re-describe the sequential relation of the Billiard balls as one of probabilities, where at each impact it’s possible that the preceding billiard ball could have instead appeared orbiting alpha centuri or in the library of congress rather than rolling across the billiard ball table in a downtown Los Angeles hall. Determinism goes to the way side at the macro level. The question is, can QM make room for free will? Metaphysicians and philosophers of science deal with this monster topic. While great minds continue to rack their brains over the issue, pragmatists, it seems, are better of hedging their bets on the phenomenal aspect of free will, because it sure seems like we have the capacity to do so. Whether real or apparent, it sure feels like free will. That just might be enough to justify that concept, preserving many of the presuppositions of the American legal (criminal) system. The point is, perhaps the only kind of determinism that there is is the kind manifested through will, the free kind.

[Shmuel Rotenstreich]

Just a quote:

"A problem that exercised the minds of the medieval Jewish philosophers was that of reconciling God's foreknowledge with human free will. This problem, called the problem of "knowledge versus free will," can be baldly stated. If God knows, as presumably He does, long before a man is born how he will behave throughout his life, how can that man be blamed and punished for his sinful acts and praised and rewarded for his virtuous acts?"

[John Fischer]

Shmuel: medeival Christian philosophers, and even contemporary philosophers of various religions (or no religion, such as me) also have "exercised their minds" on this family of questions. If I may be very obnoxious, I'd like to recommend my anthology, God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom, published by Stanford Univ. Press, and my monograph, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Blackwell Publishers. Also, as Kip Werking mentioned above, a number of us are discussing some of these issues in the blogospheric Garden of Forking Paths: gfp.typepad.com

I find Judge Posner's views on free will a bit superficial and highly problematic, even if put forward with his characteristic intelligence. Where to start, though?

[David Chester]

Is there such a thing as free-will? Of course there is. It must be true, because there cannot be any other choice.

These statements are intended to show that in fact the idea of free will as opposed to pre-denisty is an illogical concept. When one must occur then the other also applies. Hence to argue about it has no possibility of reaching a useful conclusion, except this one of course!

[Paul Torek]

Judge Posner buries a gem in the middle of his text: `Of course to speak of character as "coercive" is something of an abuse of language.' Take that ball and run with it.

Fernando writes that free will "is determinism in some sense, one that does not abide by the physical laws as we know them." I would suggest that the relation between the determination of action by will and the determination of physical motion by physical law is simply unknown, at least at a detailed level. Therefore, for all that introspection reveals, the two may be perfectly compatible.

[Martin Bento]

I'm sorry I didn't get back to this thread while Posner was still active. Perhaps he'll read this anyway.

Judge Posner, the position you have taken with regard to "freedom" is one I would characterize as "epistomelogical skepticism" - you don't believe the government can achieve as accurate an appraisal of your utility curve as you do. It is easy to see why one would have such skepticism, but it seems problematic nonetheless.

For one thing, how can a government incapable of accurately estimating individual utility curves justify regulation of behavior at all? If smoking tobacco is not to be banned for this reason, how is marijuana different? If one believes in freedom, then one can perhaps speak of weighing freedom against other claims, but it one holds that the subjective benefit derived from the activity is invisible to the law, and that such benefit is nonetheless a legitimate consideration in deciding what the law may or may not permit, how can the law evaluate whether an activity should be regulated? Indeed, this arguably goes beyond even what are sometimes called "victimless crimes". Without knowledge of utility curves deemed sufficient accurate to justify coercion, how can the law justify any coercion based on evaluation of competing interests?

As for what the other commenters have said, let me just say a couple of things. First on the question of QM and free will. QM confronts us with a system whose informational output cannot, even in principle, be predicted, even with perfect information about inputs (I'm setting aside the brand-new stuff about "quantum Darwinism" because I haven't looked into it yet). Is this what free will would look like from the outside? Suppose we did have free will, so that even with all deterministic givens in place, we still can produce one of several outputs (decisions). We subjectively feel this as a "choice", but would it not, viewed by an observer, simply appear random? Does "random" in this sense actually mean anything but not predictable? If there were wave functions collapsing in our heads, causing our electron flows to wander hither rather than yon, would we feel this as "ourselves" making a "decision". It seems to me plausible that we would, in which case a mapping of free will to some effect of QM could be coherent. That doesn't make it true, of course, but an an hypothesis I think it could get past the first hurdle of making sense in its own terms.

[Fruttis]

:)