Free Will: People May Have It Whether They Act Like It Or Not
This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally (3) both that it is possible that there is a free will, and that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.
3.2.1 That people do not appear to be free does not change the possibility that they are free.
The phenomenological objection is that people do not appear to act freely. This objection is as plain as the nose on any observant and thoughtful face and manifests itself in practically every venue of life. On highways drivers are strangely animalistic, running in packs of cars and adjusting and maintaining speeds based on stimuli from, for example, the drivers around them, usually without any awareness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In homes, parents and children spiral around each other in relational systems governed by hidden but practically omnipotent stases. Because they have no idea why their daughter is running amok, they seek counsel from someone who can explain the invisible system behind their behaviors and inject some new stimulus into the system to make a change. More poignantly, anyone who cares to see it can watch manipulators (from salespersons to politicians and, unfortunately, sometimes even preachers) use psychological tools to motivate automatic behavior in unsuspecting clients or followers. Indeed, the herd mentality so disdained by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is a frightening and disappointing reality of humanity.
However, the lack of freedom’s exercise is in no way a proof or even evidence of its non-existence. When a person’s will injects creativity into the world that person is active. When, on the other hand, she flows along with the causal chain of events she is passive. Sadly, almost everyone—even this author—lives predominantly in passivity. Some probably spend their entire existence, with one notable exception, in passivity. While it is wise to acknowledge that people often are not aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it (think of the myriad unconscious motions with which everyone is constantly busy) it is both liberating (with the power to do differently) and encumbering (often with the responsibility to do differently) to realize that there is at each person’s disposal a tool for breaking free from many of the behaviors which appear to govern existence within the material world.
It is no wonder, by the way, that people do not appear to be free. Most do not believe they are—except at the shallowest level. Very few any more believe that by simply making and acting on a choice they can change their involvement in and contribution to their circumstance. With that claim though comes the other observation of what appears to be determined behavior: addiction.
It does seem foolish not to admit that some behavior is beyond a subject’s ability to change it. That a drowning man’s surge for air is inevitable is arguable. But that some persons’ addictions are inescapable without causative intervention would be practically undeniable within contemporary culture. (At a theoretical level, this subject ought to be more debatable than the question of gasping and struggling for air when drowning, but within current American culture, it is not. It would be practically useless to claim within this culture that a person can simply choose to stop using crack cocaine. So this argument proceeds within that assumption.) So how can a person’s will be free if addiction can become deterministic in its power? The answer is fairly clear.
At the point where a person engages for the first time in a certain behavior, say smoking, she is confronted with a choice. She may actively choose to smoke or not to smoke. Or she may passively negate her responsibility to choose. But either way, she is an agent in that circumstance with the ability (whether applied or not) to behave a certain way or not. The ability to choose does not in any way imply the ability to control what results from that choice. That a bad choice or passivity can result in circumstances which are beyond a person’s ability to choose is no great surprise and completely compatible with the existence of free will.
(Of course, those consequences can extend beyond one generation, say to a baby addicted to cocaine. Those implications are profound, leaving open the possibility that original sin eliminates the function of free will in the fallen. It is important then to remember that this argument is not about what must be, but what is. Bluntly, free will could have ceased with the fall, but nothing requires or implies that it did. And further, it seems the point of general revelation and the grace or hope that lightens every man that comes into the world, that part of God’s activity in everyone is to provide them with this singularly human-making attribute.)
More importantly, no libertarian (except the most ridiculous of existentialists) believes freedom extends to everything. Free will does not mean the choices available do not control. Everett can remain on the roof or step off. But he cannot step off the roof and not fall. And so with addiction. Perhaps given a certain circumstance a person cannot control whether to imbibe a chemical (like stepping off the roof but not falling) but that same person can control (hypothetically, and just as an example) whether to enter the circumstance.
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