Free Will is a Value Statement
When I was a kid, we had a dog. It didn’t go well.
This particular dog- one of several in my childhood, and the only time it went awry- loved us very much, and we loved him too. But when it came to strangers, he was very aggressive, and very dangerous, and not fully under our control. We’d have to lock him up when there were visitors to the house, and even then it was less ‘barking’ and more ‘baying of hounds’, and unlike some animals he didn’t suddenly turn nice when he was in the same room with them. And he was large, much too large for this to be safe. Things came to a head when my mom was taking him for a walk and he started threatening a small kid playing in their own yard, and she came back terrified that if he ever got out, somebody would be badly hurt.
I remember quite clearly the conversation where my parents told me we couldn’t keep him. They’d made the unfortunate choice to feed me cookies at the same time, to make the bad news go down easier; the net result is that there’s a specific brand of cookies that, to this day, I still can’t eat. They just turn to ashes in my mouth.
(The good news is that, against all odds, it seems the ‘farm upstate’ that they sent him to was actually real. They literally saved the receipts, so that when I got old enough to realize what that kind of story usually meant, they could give me proof that they hadn’t lied. He did live what I believe to be a happy life in what was, more or less, a wild animal sanctuary. Not all dangerous animals are so lucky, but sometimes, they are.)
The reason to dredge this up is to notice how unthinkable it was for any of us to call him ‘evil.’ Even when he was straining at the leash as hard as he could snarling and growling at a three year old, he wasn’t evil. ‘Dangerous’, yes. ‘Violent’, certainly. But not that, not ever.
And that’s how it works, right? We recoil at using the E-word for pets, young children, anyone that’s enough weaker than we are. Evil-as-an-adjective is for peers and superiors, things which present a genuine threat to us. You can watch this change for the natural world in real time- us moderns watch nature documentaries about predators avidly, and not as horror films, but our received culture still has ancient fairy tales about the ‘big bad wolf’ that date from before our conquest of Earth’s ecosystems. What a difference a little power makes! What was once a real and imminent fear, and a central figure in the atlas of evil, has withered away to a narrative archetype with no material referent, while the wolves themselves become objects of admiration and wonder, or a focus of conservation efforts, in direct proportion to our own sense of security against them.
And maybe you’re not the sort of person who thinks about evil much at all, which is honestly a pretty good strategy most of the time. It can often obstruct thinking more often than it clarifies. But even if you don’t, I’ll bet you still think about ‘justice’ a fair bit- and that follows the same rules, for about the same reasons. The punitive and remunerative kinds of justice, anyway. Was it some kind of punishment, to have that part of my family broken away when I was a child? Was my dog’s loss and confusion something he deserved? Of course not. It was just- disharmony, I suppose. We couldn’t find a way to put the world right, and so we suffered instead.
And yet when we reach a certain level of direct personal injury or threat of injury, especially by human causes- political enemies, alien people, angry mobs- then, almost without fail, we find ourselves reaching for this idea of justice. (And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?) Show me, anywhere in the world, where a person has in all sincerity called for justice- and I’ll show you someone who feels weak.
Now, I can point at sentences like ‘my dog was not evil,’ and it should be pretty clear that I’m making a value statement, rather than expressing mundane factual belief in the same mold as ‘grass is green.’ That is, I’m not disputing any mechanism of action, or trying to explain why events occurred as they did. I’m not giving you information you could use to prevent this from happening to you too, much as I hope you can. I’m telling you how I feel, about what I want, about who I am. I’m telling you about my grief.
Loosely speaking, you can imagine beliefs falling along a spectrum. Don’t take this typology too seriously, it’s just a useful distinction to make for present purposes. The first extreme of our spectrum is just the observational set of beliefs- the ‘sky is blue, grass is green’ category. These are especially good for making plans that work, since they model a system that we usually want to work with in some capacity. If you don’t want to fall off a cliff, it helps to have a good map. The second type is imperatives or value statements, beliefs about how to direct our efforts. ‘Murder is bad’ is a belief like any other, but instead of telling us how to accomplish a goal, it tells us what goals we ought to have and what ends we should work towards. (Moral realists will think of this second category as being a subset of the first; that’s perfectly reasonable but orthogonal to my point.). Both types of belief are absolutely necessary for acting in the world: the means and the end, if you like.
Here’s where I reveal my thesis: When, honestly, was the last time you used the concept of free will to make a plan?
“People have free will” sure feels like a factual belief, from the inside. It’s a description of who we are, right? Like saying we usually have two legs, like saying the Earth goes around the Sun? Only… it isn’t doing any of the things I do with factual beliefs. It doesn’t make predictions, it doesn’t expand my capacity to act on the world. If anything, ‘free will’ as a concept has a weird twisty negative definition (often something like ‘nonrandom indeterminacy’) that resists analysis of the reductive kind we usually use for this sort of thing.
And if we look at how it’s positioned in the grand constellations of human thought, it’s awkwardly conjoined with a lot of the other things I’ve been talking about here. Good, evil, justice. I use my belief in free will a lot when I’m talking about culpability or praiseworthiness, when I’m deciding what to act towards, when to cheer and when to boo.
I use it when I’m feeling weak.
Or, less personally, think about where ‘free will’ crops up in our court system. And it does, in more than a few guises. For example, altered states that compromise our volition are taken into account, and might even qualify as fully mitigating circumstances that tell the court not to punish the transgression. (“I was not negligent on that construction site, your honor, I’m a diabetic and I was having a blood sugar crash.”) In other cases, such as in murder charges, malice aforethought or planning the crime carefully might upgrade the sentence to be more harsh, whereas a crime ‘of passion’ might net fewer years in prison. (First-degree versus second-degree murder.) What all of these have in common, notably, is in assessments of culpability, relevant to the question of how strongly the community wants to punish or condemn the situation. But when it comes to the presentation of evidence, the chain of material observations that we use to establish confidence in the story of ‘what happened’, we invoke ‘motive’ instead- that is, we ask what benefits, inducements, insults, or other circumstances might have led the defendant to commit the act. “Your honor, the accused is ordained with free will and is capable of choice,” is, notably, not considered sufficient to establish motive- but “your honor, the defendant was listed in the victim’s will as a primary recipient, and they were seen to have a large argument two days before the murder,” very much is. Interesting discrepancy, no? When we ask whether we should condemn others or show mercy, we care deeply about the defendant’s capacity to exercise free choice. But when we ask material questions about what happened, trying to get a clear picture of the world as it is, we instead ask where the defendant is positioned in a causal web of material and social circumstances.
It’s hard, really hard, to reliably tell when our beliefs are about facts, describing things other than ourselves, and when they’re doing something else, paying rent in other ways. But I notice, when I was a little kid crying in the car, I never once asked whether any of this was my dog’s fault. It’s not that I didn’t know whether he had free will or not; it’s that it didn’t occur to me to ask. I asked if it was my fault, certainly. I’m sure my parents did too. But we never asked if it was his, whether he’d decided to be this way. That’s just not what ‘free will’ as a concept was for.
So, am I saying there’s “no such thing as free will” in the sense that I’m saying humans are fully deterministic and mechanistic? Nah, not really. To reiterate: I’m not saying that I have any confidence whatsoever that humans are deterministic, mechanical agents. I think there’s plenty of room for consciousness to complicate the story of causality in ways I can’t anticipate; there’s every chance that human brains aren’t just billiard balls bouncing around in a universe running on linear algebra or whatever. But I don’t think that ‘free will’ as currently discussed is in any sense an alternative to that model, either. What I’m trying to say is that ‘free will’ isn’t really a claim about what the world is like at all.
The opposite of a belief in free will isn’t ‘I assert humans are chemical robots governed by deterministic electrochemical reactions’. Instead, the opposite is ‘I am not angry at you for hurting me.’ Free will is a value statement.
Remember that ‘rate my dog’ parody account, and the central joke was that all the dogs got scores of like 12/10 or whatever? And the punchline to it all, when somebody tried to call them out on the uselessness of a rating system that always stayed maxed out: “They’re good dogs, Brent.” If I were at a high enough perch- strong enough, wise enough, safe enough- then that same optimism, I think, is the only part of my need for justice that would survive. True power doesn’t rank humans from best to worst, or spend time blaming us for outcomes that cause suffering to ourselves or to others. It doesn’t need to.
