Does Free Will Exist?
The debate over what free will is, and whether or not it exists, extends back to ancient philosophy. From the dawn of a man, we have questioned whether choice is an illusion, whether we really want to make a cheese toasty, or whether our decisions are pre-ordained and controlled by someone or something else. The crux of the free will issue is a trilemma — three propositions that are all individually convincing, but inconsistent and potentially contradictory. In a trilemma, one can not hold all statements at the same time, rather they have to choose which two to hold, and which one to reject.
In the case of the free will trilemma, the three statements are as follows:
- Everything behaves according to deterministic laws (e.g. cause and effect, God’s plan, the laws of physics, chemical reactions etc.)
- Free will is our ability to do other than these laws. In other words, free will is the ability to break deterministic laws.
- Free will exists.
It should be clear that these statements are contradictory. After all, if everything behaves according to deterministic laws, we oughtn’t be able to break those laws, and if we can’t break the laws, then free will does not exist.
Depending on which statement of the trilemma you reject, your perspective on free will is defined. There are 3 main broad perspectives on the trilemma.
Libertarianism
The first position is Libertarianism — the philosophical perspective, not the political category. The Libertarian denies the first statement of the trilemma, they do not believe everything is predetermined. They argue that we must have free will, which they define as the ability to freely make choices, to do other than you chose.
However there are two major brands of Libertarianism. Some believe that some things are ruled by deterministic laws, specifically causality, but that we, as causal agents, make free choices that change causal chains, thus breaking deterministic laws. However, non-causal Libertarianism argues that our choices are not ‘caused’ by anything, and that deterministic laws do not exist at all. The latter opinion is harder to support given the universe operates on the premise of cause and effect — my choices from big things to small ones are undeniably linked to previous events.
Compatibilism
Also known as Soft Determinism, Compatibilism rejects the second statement in the trilemma — that free will is the breaking of deterministic laws and the ability to do other than what you chose. Therefore, Compatibilists argue that everything is ruled by deterministic laws, but that free will exists — they just disagree with what we define as free will. Compatibilists attempt to avoid the deeply problematic consequences of denying both free will and a deterministic universe by looking to make the two compatible with each other via a redefinition of free will. Where a Libertarian argues free will is the ability to choose freely, the Compatibilist argues that even if you couldn’t choose otherwise, you can still be free.
That being said, Compatibilism has also splintered into many different factions. Classical Compatibilism, for example, originated with Thomas Hobbes, and argued that free will is the ability to do what you want, or to achieve your desires without impediment. On the other hand, you have Reason Compatibilism, formulated by Susan Wolf, which argues that to be free is acting in accordance with what is true and morally good. If someone is acting morally, according to Wolf, they are free: even if they could not do otherwise.
Perhaps the most complicated of these Compatibilist factions is Harry Frankfurt’s Hierarchical Compatibilism. To understand Hierarchical Compatibilism, one must first understand Frankfurt’s idea of volitions and the order of desires. Frankfurt defines first order desires as desires about things other than desires (e.g. the desire to eat cake or the desire to go to the gym). The “object” of these desires is something which is not a desire in itself — cake and the gym are not desires, they are things to be desired. Second order desires are desires about other desires, they focus on first order desires. For example, you might desire cake everyday (a first order desire), but desire you weren’t the kind of person who desired cake everyday (a second order desire). Or you might not have the desire to go to the gym everyday (a first order desire), but you might wish you were the kind of person that wanted to exercise every day (a second order desire). The “object” of second order desires are first order desires.
Hierarchical Compatibilism centres all around the order of desires. Frankfurt argued that to be free in a deterministic universe is to have your second order desires align with your first order desires — basically what you desire must be what you want to desire. As you don’t have any choice on what you desire in a deterministic universe, what you desire will always match what you want to desire, and thus free will, at least as defined by Frankfurt and the Hierarchical Compatibilists, exists.
Determinism
Determinism, or sometimes Hard Determinism, rejects that free will exists at all. A Determinist argues that everything is ruled by deterministic laws. If we had the ability to break those deterministic laws and do other than what we did, the Determinist believes that would be free will, but seen as we can’t break the deterministic laws, free will does not exist. Essentially, if we could we would but we can’t so we shan’t.
Hard Determinism’s main issue is that of moral responsibility — if everything is preordained and free will does not exist, then people are not responsible for their actions. How many murderers could argue their crime was predetermined by God or whatever deterministic law rules the universe? Proponents of Determinism then split in two branches — those who simply argue that moral responsibility just doesn’t exist, and those that argue moral responsibility isn’t linked to free will. Those latter proponents of Determinism suggest that moral responsibility is tied not to free will, but rather normative ethics and consequentialism. For example, if a drunk driver kills someone, though they didn’t make a choice to kill that person, they are still morally responsible. Likewise, in a deterministic universe without free will, we are still ethically and morally responsible for people we harm — regardless of whether or not we had a choice to harm them.
But at the end of the day, what does all this waxing philosophical and talk of metaphysical chains of causation really matter to our everyday lives. Well the answer is quite a lot. The metaphysical narrative around causation, determinism, and free will, gives us the theoretical framework to recognise and explain palpable deterministic structures that limit our free will. Most pressingly in the modern era, the key ‘deterministic law’ as such, is not religion, nor even the laws of physics, but bureaucracy.
Take for example, a man, a clerk in an insurance agency, surrounded by unmitigated bureaucracy. This man is Czech author Franz Kafka, and his experience of working and living in bureaucratic societies is what informed his writing, which frequently features protagonists stuck in a labyrinth of bureaucratic systems, where attempts to escape, let alone understand these systems, is rendered comically futile. This unique brand of absurd humour has been dubbed Kafkaesque — a term you’ve probably heard being used ironically all over social media in recent months: “I’m wearing wired headphones not in a broke way,” one TikTok reads, “but in a post modernist, nihilistic main character syndrome, consumerist, looking for alaska, luditean, kafkaesque, pro doc marten wearer, anti-modernist way.” In truth, Kafkaesque is a term that, as a result of differing and often contradictory interpretations of Kafka’s work by critics and philosophers, has become overused, a catch-all for vaguely bureaucratic to mildly inconvenient.
In Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, a man named Joseph K. is arrested by unnamed agents of an unspecified authority for an unknown crime. Over the course of the novel, K. is subjected to an utterly corrupt and unknowable “justice” system which operates little logic and under no central authority. He is eventually executed, never finding out what crime he supposedly committed. When K. approaches a priest about the falsity of his accusations, he is told, “It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must except it as necessary.”
20 years later, Hannah Arendt would point to this moment as the novels summation of the tyranny of bureaucracies, saying, “Lying for the sake of necessity appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.” In other words, bureaucracy has become the deterministic law over which we are ruled — we are forced to submit and surrender our freedom or die. In her 1970 masterwork, ‘On Violence’, Arendt describes the tendency of bureaucracies to sustain themselves without a real leader:
“Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
We don’t need a dictator in a funny hat or a weird moustache to have an oppressive government, nor do we need a metaphysical narration of deterministic law for our free will to be removed from us.
Kafka was not only concerned with the loss of free will in authoritarian bureaucracies, but of the increasing irrelevancy of individual autonomy in a society where everyone is assigned a particular role to perform. Kafka does not support Hobbes’ Classical Compatibilist definition of free will (i.e. that free will is just doing what we want), because even our chosen actions can be done in the context of a deterministic universe and pre-ordained role.
In his most famous work, ‘The Metamorphosis’, a travelling salesman called Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he’s been turned into an insect, in one of the most iconic opening sentences of Western literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Rather than worrying about the existential implications of being a massive bug, Gregor’s first thoughts is how he will be able to keep his job to provide for his family. It’s sort of like the post-ironic memes depicting the end of the world, with a caption like ‘this will effect the stock market’. The Metamorphosis derives its ironic humour by treating the fantastical and bewildering as mundane and tiresome. The fact he is more concerned over his financial and social status than…y’know…being a literal giant insect, is an ironic commentary on the burdens placed on us by society. Once Gregor is stripped of his role as family provider, he is also stripped of his self-worth — his family are repulsed by him.
“We think that we have the freedom to exercise our will only by forgetting that power is exercised not simply by delimiting our freedom,” argues philosopher Dimitris Vardoulakis, “but by confining our will to power’s own operation and perpetuation. The more we exercise our free will, the more power proliferates.” Real free will is subsumed under structures of power, like governments. When we feel we are freely participating in bureaucratic societies, what we are actually doing is losing our very freedom. Paradoxically, freedom becomes the prerequisite for control.
“Bureaucracy has become the water in which we swim,” states Anthropologist David Graeber in his book ‘The Utopia of Rules’, going on to argue that we live in an “age of total bureaucratization”. Bureaucracy is so ubiquitous, we don’t even recognise it anymore. Bureaucracy, according to Graeber, makes us less free via encouraging conformity, situating us in societies run by rules enforced by violence, rather than societies run by people who care. To quote the State motto of New Hampshire (yeah, really), “Live free or die”.
