Fated to Choose: An Intuitive Embrace of Free Will

In a brilliant essay titled “The Power of Rational Beings” [1], Peter van Inwagen presents a cogent argument for what has been termed incompatibilism, or the view that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive. Either we are able to freely choose certain things and are thus free agents, or every effect (including our thoughts and actions) is determined by a previous cause that we do not choose. The two cannot coexist.

The opposite of incompatibilism is—you won’t believe it!—compatibilism, or roughly the view that a deterministic universe leaves room for human freedom. Even though the causal chains of our existence are fully outside our control, we can still retain agency and moral responsibility, the view holds.

In his essay, van Inwagen walks us through two helpful diagrams, one of free will and the other of determinism. He depicts free will as a “forked road” where we are faced with several potential futures that are equally open to us. On the contrary, determinism is an apparently forked road with several open options. On the deterministic reading, there is one and only one possible physical continuation of the present.

To reiterate in van Inwagen’s words:

“To say that we have free will is to say that more than one future is sometimes open to us. To affirm determinism is to say that every future but the actual future is physically impossible. And, surely, a physically impossible future can’t be open to anyone, can it?” (205).

What makes determinism so compelling is the existence of what van Inwagen calls “untouchable” facts. In short, an untouchable fact is any fact about which no past, present, or future human can do anything. That magnets attract iron, that only some numbers are prime, that dinosaurs once existed and now no more—these and countless other facts are inalterable and beyond the human arena of choice. With this in mind, we are introduced to "the Principle" (208):

Suppose it’s an untouchable fact that p. And suppose also that the following conditional (if-then) statement expresses an untouchable fact: if p, then q. It follows from these two suppositions that it’s an untouchable fact that q.

If p is an untouchable fact, van Inwagen tells us, and if q could happen if and only if p happened, it follows that q is also an untouchable fact. Let’s take a trite example. Let p = the last dinosaur died long before I was born and q = I have never seen a living dinosaur. What we have is this: if the last dinosaur died long before I was born, then I have never seen a living dinosaur. According to the Principle, the fact that I have never seen a living dinosaur is an untouchable fact. In other words, a past event over which I had no control (p) was necessary for the present event (q) to occur exactly as it occurred. Since I had no control over the past event, I have no control over the present event.

But is this example relevant to matters of human agency and choice? That dinosaurs don’t exist anymore is pretty obvious, so let’s consider a different scenario. Say that a group of mercenaries is planning to assassinate a President. They go to great lengths to gather their equipment, plan the escape, and decide who will do what. They succeed. The President is dead; an unstable country plunges into deep chaos; some worry about the future; some want to know who did it so that justice can be done.

The Principle tells us that we cannot do anything about something that is an inevitable consequence of something about which we cannot do anything. If that is true, then we have to conclude that the mercenaries couldn’t have done anything about assassinating the President. In other words, they were not acting freely because the vast array of untouchable facts that led to their shooting a bullet was, is, and will always be outside of their control. They were not free to choose whether or not to kill.

I don’t need to tell you that this logical conclusion is troubling. If they truly didn’t choose to kill the President, then their actions are but an inevitable consequence of past consequences. But if they are not free to choose because they couldn’t have done otherwise, are they guilty of their crime?

For any moral judgment to have meaning, free will—the ability to do otherwise, to contemplate future alternatives, and to choose the moral (or least immoral) one—must exist. As van Inwagen writes, “there’s no point in trying to get people to act in a certain way if that way is not in some sense open to them“ (207). But the Principle, assuming it is sound, doesn’t seem to welcome free will.

Are we back to a philosophical impasse? After all, even those who reject any notions of free will won’t dare to do away with morality and ethical responsibility. And so it seems that we arrive at a truly forked road: on the one hand, we can make a robust, logical argument for determinism and its incompatibility with free will; on the other hand, our intuitions are so powerful that we cannot seem to seriously deny our freedom to choose otherwise.

What a mystery!

Even the hyper-rational van Inwagen, whose essay makes it very easy to negate any freedom of the will, declares defeat before his intuitions: “I myself prefer the following mystery: I believe that the outcome of our deliberations about what to do is undetermined and that it is nevertheless—in some way I have no shadow of an understanding of—sometimes up to us what the outcome of these deliberations will be” (215-16). It may be a mystery with no answer, an enigma with no solution. But it is one of the most vital questions we could ask ourselves: are we truly free? Free to choose our fate? To strive with agency toward a good, a better, life? To exercise reason independently and to avoid apparent inevitability? Are we free to be held responsible for harming others? To choose otherwise?

The answer may well forever be “I don’t know.” And maybe that’s good enough to abandon convoluted discussions and listen to our intuitions. In this regard, I share the approach of the late Christopher Hitchens, whose inimitable wit may have given us an easy way out.

“Of course we have free will—we have no other choice."

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Notes

[1] Full title: The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of the Will, from his book Metaphysics, 4th ed., 2014, Routledge.