Free Will: It Is Not Meaningless to Talk about It
A long series of posts on this site have explained so far (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, and (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility.
This entry begins to make the case (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.
3 It is both possible and advantageous to talk about a real and radical free will.
In contrast to the things described so far—that is, in contrast to the impossibility of freedom being what it was originally cracked up to be—suppose freedom is everything originally understood. What exactly would it be? There are two different ways to answer the question, and both are important here. One answer deals with the significant capability of a will. The other deals with just how and where to pigeonhole the will as a thing.
On the first answer, the will’s ability, the most direct route is simply to observe that an individual with a free will can act in different ways given exactly the same circumstances. On the second answer, the will’s metaphysical status, the thing to do is compare it to other things considered to exist. First things first. That is, the next goal is to establish that freedom can be taken to mean that a person has real choices to make; and within that goal, the first step is to demonstrate that such a conception of the will is meaningful even if not empirically demonstrable.
3.1 Freedom can be taken as the ability of an individual to actualize a variety of potentials.
3.1.1 That this view of freedom is empirically unverifiable does not eliminate its significance.
There is no way to prove empirically whether individuals have such a freedom or not. Since an individual can only actualize one behavior in a given circumstance, and since a given circumstance can only appear once, there is no possible way to verify that she could not have gone a different way, or that she could have. That impossibility—the impossibility of proving either way empirically—could lead some to claim that there is no real difference between the two ways of describing the world. One describes it as free, the other as determined. The contention is that both systems offer internally coherent descriptions of the world. For instance: Megan uses the term blue to describe color x, yellow to describe color y, and green to describe color z. Leah, on the other hand, uses the term red to describe color x, yellow to describe color y, and orange to describe color z. (Forget all the complication for the moment. For instance, the only thing that could be meant by “color x” really has nothing to do with what appears as color, but is instead a reference to a certain range of frequency of light.) If everyone agrees to use Megan’s terms, all is well. If everyone agrees to use Leah’s terms, all is well. And Megan and Leah can use their own terms without dispute until they have to talk to each other or a third party about the appearance of colors x, y, and z. As little difference as it makes which color vocabulary Leah and Megan choose so little difference does it make whether the world is described one way or another when there is no empirical difference between the two descriptions, or so the argument goes. In truth, though, there is more to reality than inert matter and objective data. In fact, both Leah and Megan are missing a great deal about the reality of the world around them by not recognizing the difference between their ways of describing the world and therefore the layer of interpretation inherent in their experience of color.
Indeed, the whole point of this series of arguments is that describing the world with freedom allows for the discussion of actualities and phenomena which are theoretically disallowed and practically discounted by the language of determinism. For instance, appealing again to the argument for moral responsibility above, either morality is something real or it is not. If it is not, then the vocabulary of determinism explains away the phenomena of morality (with psychological egoism, for instance). If it is, though, then the language of determinism eliminates from consideration an entire domain of actuality.
The point is parallel to William James’ criticism of the evidentiary objection to faith in God: that is, there is something wrong with an argument which proves a person should not believe in God even if there is One. Well, the only way to say there is no real difference between these two ways of describing the world (as free or as determined) is to say that only empirically verifiable distinctions are real—a claim which begs the question and asserts directly that there is no good reason to believe in anything non-empirical. Now the clincher here amounts to the same point William James makes in his justification of faith. To claim that only empirical distinctions are significant is to deny that there could be anything other than the empirical even if there is something other than the empirical. Similarly, to deny that there is any significant distinction between deterministic descriptions of the world and libertarian ones on the basis that they are empirically indistinguishable is to deny the possibility that something non-empirical (free will) could be real even if it is.
Explanatory reductionism may make sense as an effort to create integrity between beliefs about the reality of the world and descriptions of that reality. But there is a difference between curt, empirical accuracy and the practice of glossing over difficult realities with friendly vocabulary. If someone calls death sleep because she wants to be sensitive to her friend’s emotions, there is an inherent deception, albeit benign, implied. “Well, your husband is really only sleeping.” But if someone calls death sleep because she believes that death should not be associated with the end of existence but rather with an intermediate or transitional state then she is not multiplying vocabulary beyond necessity, but refusing to reduce vocabulary beyond expediency. And so is the concept of will.
If will is something like an uncaused (to be qualified) cause, as an upcoming post contends, then descriptions of a world with and without will are entirely distinct, and the consequence of describing the world without will instead of with it immensely meaningful.
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