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What is a “free act?” In our lives, are we ever able to commit a free act? If not, does this mean free will does not exist or that it is pure illusion? A “free act” may only occur if it is uncompelled by outside forces, one could have chosen to do otherwise, and if the act itself originated within oneself. Free will is the “capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives” (O’Connor). Due to forces, or laws, of nature and the unconscious, we never have the power to commit, at any instance in our lives, a “free act.” An act in itself, however, is not free; it must be the one who acts who is free. What does it mean to be “free?” In everyday use, its meaning becomes rather crude. For example, if a woman were held at gunpoint and commanded to do something by the one “in control” of the situation, i.e. he who has the gun, she would almost certainly do it. We would say that this woman had no choice--was not free in this situation, but she did indeed have a choice: she had to choose to do as the gunman told her, or to refuse and be shot. Still, we deny that she was free. John Hospers, in his “Meaning and Free Will,” gives an extreme example of the situation of a twelve-year-old boy who murdered a girl. His sentence was thirty years in Sing Sing. A newspaper headline reads “Boy Killer Is Doomed Long before He is Born.” Those words seem to exonerate the boy of his crime. How is it he could be doomed before his birth? “His family background includes records of drunkenness, divorce, social maladjustment, epilepsy, and paresis.” Early on, he displays “sadistic activity to hide an underlying masochism and ‘prove that he’s a man.’” His mother’s pampering only worsens this, and when he’s “spurned by a girl in his attempt on her, he kills her…calculatingly, deliberately.” By our everyday usage of “free,” we would say he freely chose to kill the girl (Hospers 720). However, his criminal act, and all his many other acts in his life, were “moulded by influences” over which he had absolutely no control. He was, as are we all, controlled by unconscious motivation, which Hospers summarizes thusly: “The conscious life of the human being, including the conscious decisions and volitions is merely a mouthpiece for the unconscious—not directly for the enactment of unconscious drives, but of the compromise between unconscious drives and unconscious reproaches” (720). “The Big Three,” he explains, are hard at work behind the scenes of our conscious. The id demands immediate gratification of its wishes, the superego refuses it, and the unconscious ego acts as the mediator for the two and makes compromises (721). How we are raised, our family history, how others treat us all contribute to the manner in which our unconscious maneuvers. As Hillary Clinton said, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Because we do not control those factors effecting the unconscious aforementioned, and control, even realization, of the unconscious is intangible to our conscious awareness, we could never regulate or be accountable for our actions. Thinking of our minds as a computer may help clarify this. A computer runs through programs and processes, not because it chooses to, but because it has been programmed to do so by a computer programmer. Such is the case of a man: he completes various actions and does certain things that follow the criterion programmed into him. Consider a human’s brain to be like a computer’s hard drive. Nothing on that hard drive comes about due to the choice of the computer. If what virtually “makes” a human was not of his doing, how could the actions he performs be considered of his own “free will?” When a computer crashes, which is to blame—the program that defaulted or the one who made an error when programming it? Just as a computer, the human “hard drive” controls not what is ingrained upon it, which renders it incapable of directing any act it completes. Thus, all acts do not originate within us, come without compulsion, or come from a set of options. If “our very acts of volition, and the entire train of deliberations leading up to them, are but façades for the expression of…unconscious compromises and defenses” (Hospers 721), and these compromises and defenses are indeed undetermined by the human, then a free will is non-existent and therefore may not retain any stature in the decision-making process of a human. Also of consideration when answering the question of whether or not we are ever free, is Baron d’Holbach’s argument that concludes that there are unchallengeable laws of nature to which humans must always submit, consciously or not. In his essay, “Are We Cogs in the Universe?” he writes, “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant” (715). Nature controls us in every way, from the beginning of our lives to the very end. When we are born, we have given no consent, it is nothing we have chosen to do, nor were we given a choice. We are, in and of ourselves, simply a product of a natural process: procreation, the creation of one egg and one sperm. If we are born of, created of nature, we cannot be separate from nature. A flame from a lighter will cause a cigarette to burn; the embers, simply a product, are still related to the flame: they burn. Also when we are born, we are not allowed by nature to choose our physical traits, i.e. height, weight, eye color. Our DNA determines this. And what is DNA but a catalyst of nature? Not even do our ideas come to us voluntarily. Our thoughts are influenced by our teachers, parents, peers, or our experiences, which are interpreted with knowledge attained from outside sources. Since our thoughts are un-original, for which no act comes solely from ourselves, it is impossible for us to have the capacity to execute an act originated within ourselves. The entire world is subject to change, to evolution. No species, whether animal, plant, viral, etc. in nature, are immune to these changes. Nature always changes, causing all contained within nature to adapt. When the temperature outside decreases from 90 degrees to 45 degrees, we turn off our air conditioners, maybe turn on the heater, and we will without question change our clothing from shorts and T-shirts to pants and sweaters. We adapt, therefore we are controlled by nature. We cannot escape it. Obviously, we are not super-natural, but we are intrinsically weaved into the fabric of the universe. Our thoughts, our actions are all directly influenced by that which nature has endowed to us. Because this is true, and nature follows certain laws, known or unknown to us, we must also flow with these laws. Though he offers no proof, Nietzsche, in his “Twilight of an Error,” proposes that the idea of free will is simply a human invention. He claims that free will is “the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind ‘accountable’ in his sense of the word, [i.e.]...making mankind dependent on him” (717). Without accountability, how could religion, or even rulers, succeed in controlling the masses? If we choose our actions freely, we can be punished. “The doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty” (Nietzsche 717). Coupled with the arguments of d’Holbach and Hospers, Nietzsche’s proposal is an adequate response to the question of the origin of the idea of free will. Also a possible origination of the doctrine of free will is the illusion of it in our own minds. According to Daniel Wegner, “conscious will…is experienced when we perform an action—actions feel willed or not, and this feeling of voluntariness of doing a thing ‘on purpose’ is an indication of conscious will” (3). Undeniably, we feel as those we choose our courses of action; however, we cannot consider the experience to be the same as the cause of our seemingly-chosen actions. This “tendency to confuse… [the experience and causation] is the source of the illusion of conscious will” (Wegner 3). We defined a “free act” as one that is not compelled, or involuntary, that we could have chosen not to do, or do otherwise, and that has originated within ourselves and has no further cause than that which we give it. Free will is but the ability to commit a free act. Due to the restrictions imposed by unconscious motivation and the immutable laws of nature, any such act can never exist. It is unfeasible for us to have any authority in our actions, and therefore it is also impossible for free will to exist anywhere but within the realm of illusions. |
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