Philosophy
Page 9
Of course, you are very happy to learn this and anxious to make the opposite choice.
The woman is ready to turn back the clock. She warns you, however, that everything has to be exactly the same the second time around. This means you won’t have the knowledge of what will happen if you don’t buy the fortune cookie.
‘But if I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’ll just do the same thing again!’ you exclaim. ‘I wanted to go to that bakery…’
‘Are you a slave to your desires or are you free?’ she interjects.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, does desire determine what you do, or do you have free will?’
‘Well… I have free will.’
‘Then you don’t have to do the same thing again. You were weighing two options. You were balanced equally between them. Your free will can break the tie – this time, the opposite way.’
Is she right? Can you make the opposite choice even if absolutely everything is exactly the same?
You’ve got to want it
The Catholic world view, which reigned supreme in Europe throughout the medieval period, asserts that human beings have free will. Free will is the ability to choose between two options in such a way that you are equally able to do either one.
Of course, even a mosquito seems to choose between options: it hovers by your arm… it dives in for the bite… then, at the last second, it veers away. But no one thinks mosquitoes have free will. Something – like a tiny breeze – must have caused it to veer away.
So, the phrase ‘equally able to do either one’ is a crucial part of the definition of free will. Free will is supposed to enable humans to ‘veer away’ without that ‘tiny breeze’. That is, hovering over a piece of dark chocolate mousse truffle cake, you can dive in for the bite, or not, without anything but yourself to blame.
Free will is central to Catholicism because it holds that human beings are responsible for their sins. It wouldn’t be just for God to punish us for our evil deeds if ‘tiny breezes’ are pushing us into them. If something about your situation causes you to steal, for example, then you can’t be blamed for stealing.
Notice that, when it comes to ascribing responsibility for an evil deed, it doesn’t matter whether the ‘tiny breeze’ is outside you or inside you. Suppose I force you to rob a bank by holding a gun to your back. Alternately, suppose I plant a microchip in your brain which programs you to rob the bank. Though the first cause is external and the second is internal, they amount to the same thing – you were not able to do otherwise, and so you are not responsible.
Free will requires the ability to do otherwise. Although this notion traces back to medieval Catholicism, it has become part of our culture. Everyone wants it and many claim to have it, whether or not they are Catholic.
Suppose you become a bank robber, and you try to excuse yourself by pointing out that your parents were bank robbers. Those who believe in free will (known as metaphysical libertarians) are going to say: ‘Well, you can’t blame your parents for how you turned out. Your circumstances do not force your decisions. With everything the same, you still could have made the opposite choice.’
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Determinism
Although many people claim to believe in it, free will is actually a difficult notion to make sense of. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was one of the first to point this out. Following his lead, many philosophers today reject free will in favour of some version of determinism. Determinism is the view that everything has a cause – even human choices, and so there is no such thing as free will.
For Hobbes, we are the slave to our desires. Suppose you decide to go for that piece of cake. This choice was caused by a desire within you, which was, in turn, caused by your memory of past experiences with cake. Your contrary desire to avoid unhealthy food was not as strong as your desire for cake, and so your desire for cake wins.
Determinists allow that everyone feels as though they have free will. This is because we have a lot of contrary desires within us. When our desires are battling against each other, we pause, hovering, feeling as though we could equally go either way. But, in fact, the strongest desire always wins.
Nor can we create new desires out of nothing. The desires we find within ourselves are caused by a multitude of factors – biology, environment, family, friends, media, etc., etc., many of which we are completely unaware of.
Sometimes, when we are trying to make a big decision, we need to ‘sleep on it’. This allows all our subconscious desires to sift to the surface and break the apparent tie.
Metaphysical libertarians, in contrast, claim that we use free will to break the tie. In their view, this is the most important difference between human beings and animals. Some medieval philosophers went so far as to claim that a hungry donkey placed between two equally appealing piles of hay would starve to death for lack of free will to break the tie (a thought experiment that became known as ‘Buridan’s ass’). While animals are slaves to their desires, human beings are free.
Spotlight
Hobbes wanted to be a great mathematician like Descartes, but his efforts to square the circle were an abysmal failure. (Yes, he actually attempted to square the circle.) After a not-so-friendly meeting of the two men, Hobbes declared that Descartes’s work outside mathematics was equally abysmal.
Human animals
Hobbes’s entire philosophy can be understood as an effort to establish the similarity, rather than the difference, between human beings and animals.
Hobbes was the first modern thinker to defend a thoroughgoing materialism. Paving the way for contemporary materialists like Paul Churchland, whom we met in the previous chapter, Hobbes argues that everything existing in the universe is physical. (This left him with a very unconventional account of God, which is often interpreted as thinly veiled atheism.)
Even the mental lives of human beings can be understood in purely physical terms. In Hobbes’s view, all of life is particles in motion. While plants are capable of only involuntary motion, animals move themselves through the world voluntarily. But what does ‘voluntary’ really mean?
Hobbes explains that, unlike plants, animals have sense organs connected to brains. When an external object (such as a cake) impacts our bodies (through smell or sight), it causes a tiny motion in our imagination, which in turn stimulates an ‘effort’, which may or may not have to compete with other efforts already in play.
Less intelligent animals, being unaware of the competition among their efforts, simply follow the strongest one. Because human beings are aware of the competition, in contrast, we are said to deliberate. Yet the strongest effort still wins, becoming a desire which sets our bodies in motion.
All human activity is driven by the desire for what we deem good – and aversion from what we deem bad.
Compatibilism
One might be inclined to suppose that determinism destroys human freedom. If freedom is an illusion, then we are left with fatalism, the view that it doesn’t matter what we do because everything is fixed in advance. Although some philosophers, such as the ancient Stoics, were content to embrace fatalism, most regard it as a depressing and counterproductive outlook.
Hobbes, however, denies that determinism destroys human freedom. He argues that, although the causal process through which our choices are made is not compatible with free will, it is entirely compatible with ‘liberty’. Liberty, as he defines it, is the absence of all the impediments to action that are not internal to the agent.
Hobbes presents an analogy to illustrate his view. Water is said to flow freely down the channel of a river when there is nothing, such as a dam, in its way. It is not free to move crosswise, because the banks are impediments. While we may say that the water wants to flow over the banks, we never say that it wants to flow up the channel. This is because it is in the nature of water to flow down and not up.
As a river flows freely the only way that it can, so, also, we choose freely in the only way that we can. There can be no such thing as free will because it would be a break in the causal chain. It would be an uncaused cause – impossible in a world driven by endless motion. We voluntarily carry out the necessary chain of causes that flows through us.
I conceive that nothing takes beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that, therefore, when first a man has an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposes not, it follows that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes and therefore are necessitated.
Thomas Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity (http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/hobbes/of_liberty_and_necessity.html)
This passage was a bold and deeply controversial statement of the view that has come to be known as compatibilism: human freedom is compatible with determinism because it does not consist in free will but rather in the absence of external constraints.
The state of nature
As we have seen in previous chapters, philosophers’ metaphysical views strongly affect their approaches to ethics and political philosophy. This is clearly the case with Hobbes, whose contention that man is nothing more nor less than an animal brings him to a stark picture of human social relations.
In order to strip your mind of the biases and presuppositions that may cloud your understanding of human social relations, imagine what life would be like if there were no government. We often curse the government for subjecting us to so many rules and regulations while taxing our hard-earned income. But what would happen if government suddenly disappeared? Or, better yet, how might human beings have behaved before there was such a thing as government?
We would have behaved like animals.
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 13 (http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html)
Originating with Hobbes, this thought experiment, which has become known as the state of nature, has been extraordinarily influential throughout the history of political thought. (Bear in mind that, like all thought experiments, it is meant to be purely hypothetical. That is, whether there ever was or will be such a state of nature is irrelevant; the point is to explore the implications of the possibility.)
Hobbes asserts without qualification that the state of nature is a state of war pitting every man against every man. Although we may not always be actually fighting, we would be living without any security, among enemies. Hobbes argues that we must voluntarily accept and even welcome government, ugly as it may be, to lift us out of this intolerable condition and make a more noble life possible.
Spotlight
Born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later said it was as though his mother gave birth to twins: ‘myself and fear’. At least he was aware of his own obsession.
Absolute sovereign
In Hobbes’s view, the only kind of government that can put an effective end to the war of all against all is an absolute sovereign. To underscore just how ugly and fearsome it needs to be, Hobbes called it the ‘Leviathan’ in reference to a giant, biblical sea monster. Although he is inclined to favour monarchy as the best form of absolute sovereignty, he is open to any form of government that has complete authority.
Complete authority is established through the powers of legislation, adjudication, enforcement, taxation, war-making and control of any official doctrine. (The last one is included in order to prevent such problems as the Inquisition, in which the Catholic Church expected governments to allow it to imprison and punish those who contradicted its teachings – a vivid concern for seventeenth-century intellectuals like Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes himself.) A government lacking or limited in any of its rightful powers creates competing allegiances, which readily become violent.
Case study: Rousseau and the ‘noble savage’
Of course, there are those who disagree with Hobbes’s claim that human life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ in the state of nature. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was content to grant that we would behave like animals, while rejecting Hobbes’s characterization of them as depraved.
Rousseau was deeply interested in the native populations that European explorers were, in his day, discovering around the world. He developed a romantic picture of primitive culture – free as it is from the artificial complications of civilized life. In stark contrast to the frightening picture Hobbes presents, Rousseau writes:
How few sufferings are felt by man living in a state of primitive simplicity! His life is almost entirely free from suffering and from passion; he neither fears nor feels death; if he feels it, his sufferings make him desire it; henceforth it is no evil in his eyes. If we were but content to be ourselves, we should have no cause to complain of our lot; but in the search for an imaginary good we find a thousand real ills. […] Take away our fatal progress, take away our faults and our vices, take away man’s handiwork, and all is well. Where all is well, there is no such thing as injustice.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.html)
Rousseau insisted that human beings are born innocent and that it is unnatural societal expectations that corrupt us.
Rousseau does not naively propose that we attempt to emulate the ‘noble savage’. In fact, it was his critics who invented that term. Rousseau admits that we human beings cannot squelch our ambitious imagination; it will always lure us out of a simple, animal existence. We therefore must secure civil society by establishing a government.
Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that we must voluntarily give up the freedom of the state of nature. His more optimistic assessment of human nature, however, leads him away from the idea of an absolute sovereign to a republic formed instead by the general will of the people.
Spotlight
It takes a fearsome creature to control the masses… and to entertain them, for ‘Leviathan’ is also the name of the newest roller-coaster in Canada’s Wonderland. At 1,672 m (5,486 ft) long, 93 m (306 ft) tall and with a top speed of 148 km per hour (92 mph), it is one of the tallest and fastest in the world.
Although the sovereign must have complete authority in order to prevent war, the people retain certain rights against it, in Hobbes’s view. Our obligation to obey extends exactly to the extent that the sovereign is able to protect us. This, after all, is why it exists.
Hobbes’s critics contend that, by allowing individuals to retain rights against the sovereign, he contradicts his claim that the sovereign is absolute. For example, in Hobbes’s state you would retain the right to self-defence and therefore the right to bear arms. But what if the sovereign passed a stringent gun-control law in the interest of public safety? If you felt it undermined your personal security, would you have the right to disobey? The devil is in detail
s such as these – details that are often still highly controversial today.
The social contract
Hobbes was one of the first modern thinkers to propose that government is legitimate only when the people willingly agree to subject themselves to it. We make a covenant, or social contract, with one another to give up our natural rights in exchange for peace.
This social contract theory stands in stark contrast to divine right theory, according to which God gives royal families the right to rule over a region regardless of how the people who are living there happen to feel about it. It’s easy to see why this mysterious, supernatural approach to government – which was the status quo throughout the medieval period and beyond – badly needed to be replaced. So the work of Hobbes, Rousseau and other social contract theorists was extremely important in the development of the modern state.
But social contract theory is not just a historical milestone. It continues to push political theorists into refining our conception of the state – its rights and limitations – and the nature of justice. After all, making a social contract isn’t just a matter of agreeing to have a government; it requires deciding what that government should be like – what kinds of principles it should uphold and what services it should provide.
John Rawls (1921–2002) is a twentieth-century American philosopher who famously argued that we should make our social contract under a ‘veil of ignorance’. The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment in which you imagine that you don’t know anything about your personal identity – including your race, your gender, your religion, your sexual preference or whether you have a disability. This way, you won’t inadvertently allow the social contract to be biased towards the advantage of any particular group. If you don’t know whether or not you might be disabled, for example, you’ll be sure to support laws that require public buildings to be accessible to disabled people. This veil of ignorance helps to guarantee a social contract that is as fair as possible to everyone – a philosophical interpretation of the old adage that ‘justice is blind’.