The definition works well with standard cases of coerced actions, like when a robber forces you to hand over your wallet at gunpoint. It also works well with many accidental or unintended actions (“I didn’t mean to turn you into a Chinese Chomping Cabbage. Peeves jostled my wand.”) According to soft determinists, neither of these kinds of acts is free because they don’t accord with your desires. But it doesn’t take a Supreme Mugwump to see that the soft determinist definition doesn’t work for many cases in which a person does what he desires but lacks any effective control over what he desires. Suppose, for instance, Mad-Eye Moody zaps you with an Imperius Curse and orders you to belt out a rousing rendition of the Hogwarts school song, which you do. This isn’t like the gunman case in which a person is forced to do something he or she doesn’t want to do. The Imperius Curse works by changing a person’s will, so that the victim does willingly whatever the controlling wizard or witch commands (GF, p. 231). According to the soft determinist definition, therefore, you would freely choose to sing the song. But that seems clearly wrong. And the problem isn’t just limited to fanciful examples like those involving Imperius Curses. People who are brainwashed, hypnotized, insane, profoundly retarded, infantile, or driven by irresistible impulses may be doing as they desire. But if they lack at least indirect control over their desires, it’s hard to see how their acts can be free, at least in the robust sense of “freedom” required for moral responsibility.127
The hocus-pocus of redefining freedom to suit our purposes is as bogus as one of Rita Skeeter’s scandal columns. If, as determinists claim, all of our actions are the inevitable product of causes over which we have no control, free will is an illusion.
The Religious Challenge to Freedom
God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures.
—WESTMINSTER CONFESSION
Challenges to free will can arise from religion as well as from science. In the Christian tradition, for instance, many thinkers, including the great Protestant theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin, claim that God exercises total sovereignty over all earthly affairs, meaning that absolutely everything that occurs happens in accordance with His eternal and immutable will and preordained plan.128 Clearly, there are massive problems reconciling free will with such total divine control and predestination. But problems exist even if God merely foreknows that certain events will occur, even if He doesn’t will or cause them to occur.
The problem arises because if God knows that a future event will occur, then it must occur, because God (being essentially all-knowing) can’t possibly be wrong. Now suppose that the future event in question is Harry’s courageous decision to rescue Ginny from the basilisk as described in Chamber of Secrets (pp. 301-324). We can then formulate the following Argument for the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will:
1. If God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk.
2. If it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it is not in Harry’s power to refrain from fighting the basilisk.
3. If it is not in Harry’s power to refrain from fighting the basilisk, then Harry is not free to decide whether to fight the basilisk.
4. So, if God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then Harry is not free to decide whether to fight the basilisk.129
There are various ways of responding to this argument, none of them wholly free from difficulties. First, like some Calvinists, you could accept the argument as sound, affirm divine foreknowledge, and deny that any human actions are truly free. The problems with this solution are that 1) it seems to make God responsible for evil and sin, 2) it casts doubt on the justice of God in holding sinners responsible for sin, 3) it calls into question God’s own freedom (since He presumably foreknows His own acts as well as those of His creatures), and 4) there are many passages in Scripture that appear to presuppose the reality of free will.
Second, you could opt for the soft determinist tactic of redefining “free will” in such a way that acts can be free even if they are fully determined and could not have occurred otherwise than they do. The problem with this solution, as we have seen, is that the standard soft determinist definition of “free” is a load of old tosh, as Uncle Vernon would say.130
Third, you could deny divine foreknowledge, or at least divine foreknowledge of future free choices. Some modern theologians (such as Clark Pinnock) have argued that free choices, by their very nature, cannot be foreknown with certainty. According to such theologians, “future contingent” statements such as “Harry will fight the basilisk” are neither true nor false until the relevant people freely choose whether to perform the relevant action. This is so, it is claimed, because there is no state of affairs or corresponding reality to “ground” such a statement—that is, to make it true. There are two major problems with this solution, however. First, there are many prophecies in Scripture that clearly presuppose that future free actions can sometimes be foreknown.131 Second, there are some future contingent propositions that can be known to be true, even by fallible mortals such as ourselves. I think I know now, for instance, that my good friend and colleague Bill Irwin won’t freely choose to fly to London tonight and sing the Icelandic national anthem naked in Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning. Of course, I don’t know this with absolute certainty, but it isn’t necessary to be completely certain that a proposition is true in order to know that it’s true. So, knowing Bill as I do, I know now that Bill won’t freely sing the Icelandic national anthem naked in Trafalgar Square tomorrow. And if I know now that Bill won’t freely sing the Icelandic national anthem naked in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, then it must be true now that he won’t, because it isn’t possible to know something unless it’s true. And if it’s true now that Bill won’t freely sing the Icelandic national anthem naked in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, then at least some future contingent statements are true.
Finally, some religious thinkers, following Boethius (around 480-524) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), have argued that God can know what we’ll do and we still do it freely, because God, being eternal, exists outside of time altogether, and so doesn’t strictly foreknow the future. Rather, God sees all temporal events in one synoptic, timeless vision, like viewing a whole unwound roll of film in a single glance. If this is so, it can be said, the Argument for the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will can be answered, because if God doesn’t know in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, there is nothing in the past that implies that Harry must fight the basilisk.
This solution, however, also faces serious difficulties. For starters, it’s not clear that it’s even coherent to speak of an infinitely perfect being that exists outside of time, or that such a conception is consistent with the biblical portrayal of God.132 For instance, if God exists completely outside of time, it’s hard to see how he could be a forgiving God, because forgiveness seems to involve change over time (first you blame someone, then you forgive). Moreover, even if God knows all temporal events in one synoptic eternal now, what is true from all eternity seems just as set in stone as what was true, say, a hundred years ago.133 In fact, even if God doesn’t strictly foreknow the future, the Argument for the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will can easily be reformulated to reach the same conclusion. If God eternally knows that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it was true a hundred years ago that God eternally knows that Harry will fight the basilisk. And if it was true a hundred years ago that God eternally knows that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk. And if it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk, how, then, can his decision be free?
In short, none of these standard ways of reconciling free will with divine foreknowledge is successful. The
re is, however, a better solution. First, though, let’s turn to the paranormal challenge to free will, for the solution to the paranormal challenge and the religious challenge is fundamentally the same.
The Paranormal Challenge to Free Will
Who am I to refuse the promptings of fate?
—SIBYLL TRELAWNEY
The Potter books are loaded with examples of paranormal phenomena—that is, mysterious, magical, or supernatural events that apparently exceed the power of science to explain. Examples of paranormal phenomena include things like ghosts, reincarnation, levitation, clairvoyance, tarot cards, psychic channeling, healing crystals, and the current popularity of The Bachelor TV show. Among the many varieties of such phenomena featured in the Potter novels is divination—the supposed ability to predict the future through magical or other non-natural means. Divination is an ancient art, still widely believed in by people who received “T’s” in their high school science courses, and many of the traditional methods of fortune-telling are featured in the Potter books, including crystal balls, palmistry, tea leaves, dream interpretation, astrology, rune stones, and the interpretation of bird entrails.
Interestingly, the Potter novels as a whole offer a generally skeptical view of divination and its practitioners. We are told, for instance, that fortune-telling is “one of the most imprecise branches of magic” (PA, p. 109), that “True Seers are very rare” (PA, p. 109), and that “the consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed” (PA, p. 426). In a similar vein, Sibyll Trelawney, the Hogwarts Divination teacher, is presented as a slightly daft old fraud who displays little genuine fortune-telling ability, uses bogus teaching methods, and has the annoying habit of constantly predicting Harry’s gruesome and early death. On the other hand, the novels do clearly suggest that genuine divination is possible. We are told, for instance, that Sibyll Trelawney’s great-great-grandmother was a “very gifted Seer” (OP, p. 840), and that Sibyll herself on two notable occasions fell into trances in which she made genuine prophecies—first when she predicted, shortly before Harry was born, that he would have the power to vanquish the Dark Lord (OP, pp. 840-41), and later when she prophesied that Wormtail would help Voldemort come back to power (PA, p. 426). In addition, we learn in Order of the Phoenix that there are shelves and shelves of prophecies in a tightly guarded room of the Department of Mysteries, at least many of which are presumably genuine, veridical prophecies (OP, pp. 776-780).
In short, Harry Potter’s world is a world in which genuine prophetic foreknowledge134 is possible. Does such foreknowledge pose a threat to free will?
It does, and for exactly the same reason that divine foreknowledge poses such a threat. Suppose, for instance, that Professor Trelawney foreknows on Tuesday that Harry will choose to fight the basilisk on Wednesday. Since Trelawney knows on Tuesday that Harry will fight the basilisk, it must be true on Tuesday that Harry will fight the basilisk, since, as we have seen, it isn’t possible to know something unless it’s true. So, if it’s true on Tuesday that Harry will fight the basilisk on Wednesday, then it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk on Wednesday. And if it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk on Wednesday, then it’s not in Harry’s power to refrain from fighting the basilisk on Wednesday. And if it’s not in Harry’s power to refrain from fighting the basilisk on Wednesday, then Harry is not free to choose whether to fight the basilisk on Wednesday. So, if Professor Trelawney knows on Tuesday that Harry will fight the basilisk on Wednesday, then Harry is not free to choose whether to fight the basilisk on Wednesday.
Readers not suffering from a Memory Charm will recall that this argument is exactly parallel to the argument for the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will. Thus, prophetic foreknowledge raises the same basic challenge to free will as that posed by divine foreknowledge.135
Reconciling Freedom and Foreknowledge
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Fortunately, the religious and paranormal challenges to free will can be met. In fact, the basic solution to both was laid out over six hundred years ago by the great medieval thinkers St. Thomas Aquinas (around 1225-1274) and William of Ockham (around 1295-1349).
What Aquinas and Ockham noticed is that a statement such as
If God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it must be the case that Harry will fight the basilisk
is ambiguous. It can be interpreted as saying either
(1a) Necessarily, if God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then Harry will fight the basilisk
or
(1b) If God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then it is necessary that Harry will fight the basilisk.12
These two statements may seem similar but in fact they are radically different. (1a) is obviously true—in fact, true by definition, since whatever God (or anyone else) knows is true must indeed be true, because it is impossible (by definition) to know anything that is false. (1b), however, is far from obviously true. (1b) asserts that if God knows in advance that Harry will fight the basilisk, then Harry will fight the basilisk in all possible universes that God could create. That seems clearly false, since it denies God’s freedom by claiming that if God creates Harry in one possible universe, He must create him in all.136
So (1) is either true by definition or it’s obviously false. If it’s obviously false, of course, then the Argument for the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will can’t even get off the ground. So let’s consider the second possibility, that (1) is true by definition.
As Aquinas points out, if (1) is true by definition, the only necessity it asserts is the “necessity of the consequent”—that is, the fact that the consequent (the then-part of an if-then statement) follows logically from the antecedent (the if-part of an if-then statement). In other words, the then part must be true if the if part is true. But notice now the kicker: this must is a purely logical must, not a causal must. The only necessity involved is a purely logical necessity—a matter of one thing following logically from another. And as Aquinas and Ockham pointed out, unless God’s foreknowledge (or eternal knowledge) of an agent’s free choice somehow causes that person’s choice, there is no true constraint on that agent’s freedom.
Consider an analogy. You’re sitting in the stands watching a Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Slytherin. You see Harry and Malfoy on broomsticks speeding madly after the snitch, clearly on a collision course, and now only inches away from each other. You see that, no matter what they do, they will definitely collide. Does your foreknowledge of the collision in any way cause the collision or diminish the freedom or responsibility of the two seekers? It does not. Given that you know that the seekers will collide, then it must be the case that they will collide. But because your foreknowledge imposes only a “necessity of the consequent,” rather than a causal necessity, it does not in any way affect the freedom or responsibility of those involved.
Free will, then, is consistent with both divine and prophetic foreknowledge so long as the only kind of necessity implied is a purely logical necessity of the consequent. 137 Even if God (or Sibyll Trelawney) foreknows that Harry will fight the basilisk, Harry is free with respect to fighting the basilisk so long as (a) the causal chain that terminates in his decision begins with Harry himself and (b) he is genuinely able to do otherwise given exactly the same causal conditions. The fact that Harry could not have done otherwise given the foreknowledge in no way compromises his free will, since this is merely a conceptual or definitional necessity that in no way imposes causal constraints on his ability to choose.
Thus, the religious and paranormal challenges to freedom can be successfully answered. The scientific challenge, however, remains. Are there, in fact, good scientific grounds for thinking that all of our choices are the inevitable outcome of factors such a
s heredity and environment? Or does science still leave room for free will, moral responsibility, and the sense of dignity and inherent worth that these entail?
J.K. Rowling leaves no doubt where she stands on these issues. In the memorable scene in Sorcerer’s Stone involving the Sorting Hat, the hat hesitates whether to put Harry in Slytherin or Gryffindor. Rowling writes:
Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, Not Slytherin, not Slytherin.
“Not Slytherin, eh?” said the small voice. “Are you sure? You could be be great, you know, it’s all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that—no? Well, if you’re sure—better be GRYFFINDOR!” (SS 121)
Like our own, Harry Potter’s world is one of power and mystery in which, ultimately, the one truly decisive voice is our own.138
Hogwarts Emeritus Faculty
Thales (circa 624-546 B.C.E.)
“Know thyself.”
Harry Potter and Philosophy Page 25