> No one chooses to be anything. There is no free will and there never has been.
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
Sapolsky's book Determined is really the counter to your post.
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
Thank you for referring to that review [0]. I think it is a pretty standard compatibilist argument, which accepts that everything about a person, including the degree of "willpower" one has, is determined by prior causes, and yet still attempts to salvage a notion of free will out of it.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
Regarding your point about moral responsibility: while I agree it is a major motivator for human belief in free will, it isn’t the only one. Added to that, while belief in free will and belief in moral responsibility are strongly correlated, neither is a necessary logical consequence of the other - believing in either but not the other is a facially logically coherent, even if somewhat rare, position
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
My specific issue is with moral responsibility, which I believe is out of one's control. (So for example I don't think developers are to morally blame for writing bad code.)
Blame is a messy idea. I'm big on morality, it's how we know what to do next - what we should do, and "should" is a word indicating that a moral idea follows. Without morality I'd be (even more) like a sessile sponge, incapable of action. "Why bother?" is a moral question.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
Historically, ideas of "moral responsibility" are strongly linked with retributive punishment.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
Yes, but there again you are conflating three separate questions:
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
I don't identify as an incompatibilist, but to try to steelman their position:
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
But that's my point – the standard philosophical definition separates the existence of choice from the question of whether it is free or unfree – but you aren't using the standard philosophical definition, because you are conflating those two issues.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will