Are we truly free to make choices?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

This is post #4 in my trek to address Twenty Philosophical Questions That Are Hard to Wrap Your Head Around.? Here is the blurb that introduces it:

The eternal debate between determinism and free will continues to captivate philosophers as they explore the boundaries and implications of the agency. The philosophical dilemma surrounding will and determinism revolves around the existence of will in the context of determinism. Therefore, it is essential to establish an understanding of what we mean by ” will” and “determinism.” There are generally two schools of thought, among philosophers when it comes to the concept of will.?Compatibilists?argue that free will simply means being able to do what we want without any form of coercion – in other words, actions.?Incompatibilists?believe our desires can be manipulated and argue that true free will requires having a choice. They believe that a choice is genuine only if we could have chosen differently if allowed to make the choice again.

I’m not sure who does these blurbs—maybe an early version of ChatGPT?—but this one really does miss the mark.? The primary issue to address here is not will; it is determinism.? And this is an area where Western thought has wandered far astray, beginning with the thought experiment called Laplace's demon, summarized here by our good friends at Wikipedia :

According to determinism,?if?someone (the demon)?knows the?precise?location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are?entailed; they?can?be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.?

This wasn’t even true in Newton’s universe, and it is certainly not true in Einstein’s.? The fact is, as chaos theory, emergence, and self-organization have made eminently clear, strict determinism is simply bunk.? Yes, you can make a reasonable case for deterministic cause and effect within the boundaries of any particular level of reality, any specific stair in the Infinite Staircase , but the whole point of emergence is that causal relationships are disrupted at the transition between any two stairs.? Some effects cross over, but others do not, and some phenomena emerge that are not predictable from the underlying factors.? In short, we live in a world that is not just in flux; it is continually presenting layer after layer of novelty, both to us and within us.

In this context, the interesting questions are: to what degree are events, and in particular human actions, genuinely determined?? And, to the degree that they are, what issues does this raise for self-determination, free will, and social accountability?? This is a subtle problem, and we need to approach it with care.?

Start with genetics.? The notion that your genes irreversibly determine your biological fate is way too simplistic.? Yes, they have impact, but in highly complicated and unpredictable ways, and so do a host of other factors, including diet, exercise, physical environment, emotional state, as well as epigenetics, which entail changes to the genome that emerge during life and are not inherited.? In short, we are in the domain of probabilities, not deterministic causes and effects, so yes, we still want to be informed about our genome, but with a relatively modest set of stark exceptions, we should not feel imprisoned by it.? Rather, we should treat it instead of the hand we have been dealt and position ourselves to play it to best advantage.?

The same principle holds true for the social situation we inherit along with our genes—our parents, our siblings, our ethnicity, the era and place into which we are born, our social and economic class, our education, our job history, not to mention all the chances that simply come our way both good and bad—these are all material factors that are not under our control.? All these factors do shape our choices, and they affect the probability of our success in life’s endeavors—but it is a huge overstatement to say they determine them.? ?There are just too many examples of people who have overcome extraordinary adversity, not to mention people who have totally screwed up what was a highly privileged starting position.

Why is this so important?? It comes down to responsibility and accountability, most obviously to others, but most importantly to ourselves.? Let’s start with others first.? As I discuss at some length in The Infinite Staircase , there is a tug of war in contemporary liberal democracies between legal justice and social justice, especially when it comes to dealing with crimes committed by people who are deeply disadvantaged.? The progressive position in this tug of war rotates heavily to empathy for these folks and away from accountability.? As the city management challenges that have emerged in recent years in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco have made clear, however, that just doesn’t work.? Social cohesion is anchored in rule of law.? To be sure, there is every reason to reach out to disadvantaged people with a helping hand, but it does not work to hand out a free pass.

The narrative that supports free passes is called the oppressed versus the oppressors.? It argues that you cannot punish the oppressed for actions they are committing in resistance to their oppressors.? On the other side, the narrative that supports strict law enforcement is called civilization versus the barbarians.? It argues that law is all that keeps us from endless violence against each other.? Both narratives at their heart are self-serving, and neither speaks directly to the single most important issue, namely how accountable should we, each of us as individuals, be to maintaining our own welfare?

The answer at one level is pretty simple.? We have to take responsibility and accountability for ourselves because no one else can.? We are the only ones on site all the time.? It is our life, not someone else’s.? It is a hand that we have been dealt, and no one else can play it.? This is true regardless of how advantaged or disadvantaged we are.? In a very real sense, this is not fair, but it is also not negotiable.

So, in that context, now let us ask the question, are we truly free to make choices?? It’s actually kind of a weird question.? We have to make choices.? We have no choice but to make choices.? Life demands that we have a strategy for living, and for better or worse, that is what we act out in our daily lives.? So, let’s take that as a given and address instead what I take to be the real question on the table: To what degree are we free to determine the choices we make?

I don’t want to be flippant here (well, maybe I do, but I shouldn’t), but to quote Bill Murray from the movie Meatballs, “It just doesn’t matter!”? As someone asked the card player why in the world would he play in a crooked game, the answer was because it’s the only game in town.? As long as we choose to live, we cannot fold the hand we are dealt, but we do get to discard and draw new cards from time to time, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.? Sometimes this feels free, sometimes it feels forced, and always, it is being influenced by our history and circumstances.? But so what?

I give the Existentialists a lot of credit for how they took on this challenge.? Their strategy for living is to commit to a set of values, often embodied in a life narrative, and then remain as true to them as possible.? Their goal is to be authentic.? In itself, that doesn’t mean too much, as you can be authentically pretty horrible, but when it is combined with values that are true to our mammalian roots, it creates a powerful stabilizing force to help meet the buffeting winds of fate.

Being authentic means taking responsibility for our choices, regardless of how free or not they are.? That in itself is liberating.? It can free us from narratives of victimhood that can be alluring in the moment but devastatingly destructive in the long run.? Most importantly, it can support a strategy for living that is coherent and reliable, something others can trust and we can build on.?

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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