“Do We Have Free Will?”, A Critical Review

Are we automatons?  Or are we self-determined agents?  In a Psychology Today article, Seth Schwartz outlines some of the arguments on both sides of the free-will debate and then suggests some pragmatic ways forward.  Here it is:  Just pretend like you have free will.

Schwartz wants us to feel the weight of the scientific pull toward determinism.  He spends nearly half his article summarizing the major developments of neuroscience and the difficulties it raises about free will.  For instance, after observing the brain with varieties of image scanning technology, many neuroscientists argue “we can see there is no agent there making choices.”  It is unclear what “an agent making choices” might have looked liked to them.  I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it was more sophisticated than the Arquillian alien at the controls of a human brain in Men in Black.  But it does leave one wondering how an invisible self-determining agent/mind/soul is supposed to be found by using an MRI.  It is like searching through all the microchips and literal hardware parts of a computer system in order to verify there is some particular software “inside.”  You don't find software like that.  Its like dissecting all the chambers and valves of a human heart to see if you can find love inside it.

Schwartz also mentions a series of experiements by other neurophysicists like Ben Libet and also geneticists who all work with the assumption that somehow physical correlations inherently force out explanations that consist of mental phenomena and free agency.  A rather dubious assumption in my estimation.  And notice it is a philosophical assumption, not a psychological or scientific one.  And when you continue to trace the second half of Schwartz's argument you realize the philosophical baggage gets even heavier toward the end of the article.

What is the pull against determinism for Schwartz?  Why would we want to believe there is a free will?  He points out (correctly) that denying free will would undermine our ethical and legal systems.  Why would we punish criminals if they genuinely had no choice to do the crimes they committed?  Spoiling children or failing exams cannot be truly blameworthy in any real sense.  In fact, any system of merit or demerit will be inherently undermined in a world where no one actually has a choice.  For Schwartz (and hopefully for most human beings) this is a bit unsettling.  So where does this leave him?

Schwartz references the research of psychologist Roy Baumeister who found that people who deny that we make free choices “are led to behave in socially irresponsible ways like cheating or refusing to help others.”  He continues by asking, “if Baumeister is correct, then does it really matter whether we actually have free will?  Or does it matter only whether we believe that we do?”  The answer to that question is whether social responsibility is more important than discovering and living by what is true and real.  The answer to which interestingly requires philosophical, not psychological reasons.  In the end, Schwartz finds himself saying all the determinants of behavior are not sufficiently explained by science yet.  Nor does it look like they will be very soon.  And since science has not yet given the final verdict, how should we go forward?  His answer: Be socially responsible.  And that means pretending that you really do have free will.  Whether or not this raw pragmatism is philosophically defensible, this is a very strange conclusion for an article that is purportedly about psychology. Schwartz does admit that psychology might tell us more what belief in free will does, than whether it exists.  But that is a very different discussion than the one the title of his article purports to discuss.  I probably should have assumed a psychologist asking a fundamentally philosophical question is only going to be able to gloss out a very thin and piecemeal philosophical answer.  Hopefully the readers of Psychology Today don't feel slighted by getting an amateur defense for philosophical pragmatism when they thought they were getting good science.

Some More Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, 1874-1936

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.  It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head that splits.”

“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”