There is no escaping fate

The argument

The main challenge to free will is determinism: the view that everything that happens (human decisions and actions included) is the consequence of sufficient conditions for its occurrence. Often people who say they believe in free will usually also believe that every event has a cause. There are many types of determinism such as genetic, theological and causal. Causal determinism means that as a physical being in a physical universe the ways things interact are in accord with set physical laws. Theological determinism argues that everything is destined occur in a certain way because that is God’s will. Hard determinism is the belief that all events are caused by past events and that nothing other than what does occur can occur. In the 18th century, hard determinist Baron D’Holbach said that everything is part of a chain – the inevitable result of what came before including everything we do. Therefore, people have no freedom and no choice. Every event is caused by a previous event and people can never do anything apart from what they did. Therefore, they are never free. Although we can not pinpoint the exact factors that led us to an action, we could in theory isolate them if we knew enough about all the beliefs, desires and temperaments swirling around in our brains. Decisions are the result of a combination of mental processes that come together in a specific way so that whatever choice of action is made, the result is ‘fixed in stone.’ The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, and Einstein paraphrased, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument assumes both that hard determinism is true and that determinism rules out free will, but each step is contested. Compatibilists from Hume to Dennett argue that free will is consistent with every event having a cause: to act freely is to act on one's own desires and reasons without external compulsion, not to be uncaused, so the fact that a choice has antecedents does not by itself make it unfree. The picture the argument leans on — d'Holbach's single unbroken chain in which 'nothing other than what occurs could occur' — is drawn from an 18th-century mechanistic physics that quantum indeterminacy has since complicated; the world may not be deterministic in the clean sense the chain requires, though indeterminism alone would not secure free will either. And the Schopenhauer line that a person 'cannot will what he wants' is asserted as a slogan rather than demonstrated: it presupposes exactly the point at issue. The strongest reading is that determinism, even if true, does not obviously entail the absence of free will, so the inference from causation to fatalism is the argument's weakest link.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That every event has a cause does not entail that no one has free will; compatibilists hold that acting freely means acting on one's own reasons without compulsion, which is consistent with causation. [Rejecting P2] D'Holbach's unbroken causal chain reflects an 18th-century mechanistic physics that quantum indeterminacy has since complicated, so 'nothing other than what occurs could occur' is not established.

Further reading

Guolipour, B. (2019) A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ Kane, R. (2016). The complex tapestry of free will: striving will, indeterminism and volitional streams. Synthese 1–16. Lavazza, A., and Inglese, S. (2015). Operationalizing and measuring (a kind of) free will (and responsibility). Towards a new framework for psychology, ethics and law. Riv. Int. di Filos. e Psicol. 6, 37–55. doi: 10.4453/rifp.2015.0004 Nahmias, E. (2014). “Is free will an illusion? Confronting challenges from the modern mind sciences,” in Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 1–26. Overbye, D. (2007) Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html Schurger, A., Mylopoulos, M., and Rosenthal, D. (2016). Neural antecedents of spontaneous voluntary movement: a new perspective. Trends Cogn. Sci. 20, 77–79. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2015.11.003 Trevena, J., and Miller, J. (2010). Brain preparation before a voluntary action: evidence against unconscious movement initiation. Conscious. Cogn. 19, 447–456. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2009.08.006 Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wegner, D. M. (2003). The mind’s best trick: how we experience conscious will. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 65–69. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00002-0 Wegner, D. M. (2004). Précis of the illusion1 of conscious will. Behav. Brain Sci. 27, 649–659. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X04000159