BlackOxford's Reviews > Free Will

Kick ‘Em While They’re Down

This is a book of academic philosophy written in popular form. In it Harris is primarily concerned with defending his position about the illusory nature of the idea of Free Will, principally against the philosopher Daniel Dennett. However, there is an important cultural background to this debate which Harris has refrained from alluding to, I suppose in deference to professional discipline. This background is theological and subtly pervades the entire debate. The political import of the debate can’t be appreciated fully without this context.

Free Will is a Christian heresy, and yet it is the apparent foundation of all Christian morality. As usual the source of the doctrine of universal human corruption, and therefore the inability to act with true freedom, is St. Paul. For Paul, according to his subsequent interpreters, particularly Augustine, a truly Free Will is only possible through the gift of grace from God. And this gift is dependent upon faith in Jesus Christ. So those who have never heard of Jesus cannot have Free Will; those who have heard of him and do not have faith in him cannot have Free Will; and even those who believe they have faith cannot be certain that it is sufficient to guarantee them the capacity for Free Will. The heresy that claims even the slightest deviation from this doctrine is called Pelagianism.

It turns out that advances in neurological and other biological sciences have confirmed at least half of the ancient Christian doctrine of corruption and lack of personal freedom. As human beings, we are subject not just to the desires that Paul (religious violence), Augustine (sex) and so many others (mostly about power in one form or another) have struggled with, but also to the random experiences that provoke equally random thoughts that on occasion lead to behaviours which we ultimately regret. Many of these behaviours will be considered immoral or even criminal for which most people consider sanctions or penalties appropriate, either administered in this world or another. As Harris puts it so succinctly, with only the slightest allusion to theology: “If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.”

So, the deepest part of oneself is at least mysterious if not patently unwieldy - Dr. Freud concurs. But the other part of the Christian proposition, the gift of grace through faith, largely negates the moral impact of the idea of human spiritual corruption. If faith is not offered because of ignorance, the moral fault is God’s not humanity’s. If faith is offered and rejected, the only ‘crime’ is such rejection and not any subsequent unacceptable behaviour. Many Christians hold that the grace of faith is irresistible (and yet freedom-giving!), which implies real freedom not to sin once it is received. The actual behaviour of Christians is such, however, that either the irresistibility of grace is somewhat overstated, or it doesn’t possess the kind of divine transformative punch which is advertised.

Accordingly, Free Will presents a sort of cultural crisis among folk who share a Christian legacy. Despite the apparent availability of a get-out-of-jail-free card in not just the absence but also the condemnation of the concept of Free Will in Christian culture, it is maintained as a fundamental principle of ethics, politics, economics, many branches of psychology, and, crucially, the law. Harris’s message consequently is controversial when it should be accepted without much comment: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.” Good traditional Christian doctrine. Yet it is generally rejected by the culture which claims a Christian heritage.

There’s a significant ancillary issue in the philosophical debate, therefore. Free Will is one of those contradictions of faith-based religion which most religionists would like to ignore because it means abjuring power over others. It is the signal topic in which faith runs aground as an obvious and public anti-social concept. It’s a ship that just doesn’t float in a sea of people with conflicting interests, aspirations, sometimes malicious intentions, and not infrequent violence. Faith, as a matter of universal human experience, does not mitigate any of these traits. In fact if Free Will existed anywhere, in anyone, by definition it would be exercised only in furtherance of the good and would therefore exempt its possessor from any negative judgement. In other words, those who have it are always innocent; and only the innocent could claim it.

That Free Will is some sort of feeling is true. It is our name for something like consciousness is a name for something. Perhaps they are the same thing. But if so we know very little about either phenomenon except that it is expressed as a feeling we think we share with others; but we can’t be entirely sure. It is not solipsistic to suggest that your feeling of Free Will is not anything like mine. Neither one of us has a clear idea what it might be. By suggesting that there was such an entity as the will at all (a politically important Christological topic in theology), Paul and Augustine and the rest planted a concept, like faith and grace, whose main function is to raise doubt and promote guilt about not having them.

The idea of freedom persists even if the associated feelings of religious faith and species-guilt have attenuated. What we’re left with is a psychological myth and a forensic category meant to assign Free Will to precisely those who cannot have it, namely those who do supposed evil things, most often the poor, uneducated, abused, genetically deficient human being. Free Will is claimed as the source of their guilt but Christian doctrine says it cannot be. This is hypocrisy of massive proportions. To what end? Functionally it is to exercise power in restricting freedom and to justify doing so.

Augustine was right in his condemnation of Pelagius, but for the wrong reasons. The issue is not corruption of something called the human Will; it is, as Harris says, the fabric of our being: “Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.” To claim faith or grace as a sort of short-circuit to this process is what Christians have perennially done with no evidence whatsoever. Whatever is meant, or interpreted, by faith and grace is simply another one of the chain of causes.

Harris thinks that Free Will is not a result of conscious awareness but of a lack of it: “Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us.” I agree. It is an illusion that disappears as soon as one tries to attend to it. It has no subjective content as well as no objective existence. In this it is like faith and grace. And like them, Free Will has become a conceptual instrument of repression and justification for the exercise of arbitrary human power. I don’t think the philosophical debate is complete without this element.

Postscript: Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim sums up the situation neatly: “I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will".