What Free Will Is Really About
The standard position of free-will advocates goes like this:
1. It’s legitimate to imprison people (for engaging in wanton violence) only if they have free will.
2. Even if imprisonment is the only way for civilized human society to protect itself from mass destruction, it would still be illegitimate to imprison criminals if they don’t have free will to choose their actions.
3. But, luckily for us, criminals do have free will, so it is legitimate to imprison them, so we can save civilization from destruction.
4. A person who believes there isn’t such a thing as free will is threatening civilization, by potentially justifying the release of dangerous criminals into society — even if that same person also believes that it’s legitimate to imprison perpetrators of wanton destruction whether or not those perpetrators possess free will.
It’s one thing to disagree with someone else’s beliefs. It’s another thing entirely to refuse to recognize what those beliefs are. When free-will advocates say, or imply, that free will is a prerequisite for us to neutralize destructive individuals (step 1), they are (step 4) simply refusing to acknowledge the actual position of their opponents.
They want to believe not so much that there is free will, but even more that if there isn’t free will, humanity must rapidly perish in an orgy of self-destructive violence. Advocating for belief in free will is an activity of great importance if society hangs over a pit of doom, held up only by a slender thread called belief-in-free-will. If society isn’t suspended over a pit by such a thread, then advocating for free will is just a fancy way of walking around sappily saying “do good; cooperate with others; be peaceful and productive,” and is likely less than 1% of the reason that almost all people are peaceful and productive — the other 99%+ being the police and prison that await them if they’re not. Debates over the elusive phenomenon called “free will” have been unsettled for centuries, but during all that time, most people had no qualms about forcibly stopping random violence.
Ask yourself which of the following two individuals is more dangerous to the general prosperity of our society:
Alice, who says that there may not be any such thing as truly free will in humans, but who has no problem whatever with the forcible neutralization of dangerous sociopaths, or
Bob, who says that we can legitimately neutralize criminals only if human-free-will is true, but not if it isn’t.
And keep in mind that Alice and Bob live in the era of rapidly advancing technology, which reveals more and more about how the human brain works with each passing year.
Sometimes I wonder if free-will advocates want society to be destroyed if there is no free will, like the religious, who measure the worth of humanity in terms of the God-given tenets and traditions of their faith, and who view the alternative to their religion as not just destruction, but deserved destruction.
Similar to the “we’ll release all the criminals” argument, is the position that without free will (or belief in it, rather), there would no point in doing anything. So, even if we might not let loose all the criminals from prisons, we might not do much of anything else either. Without free will to choose, we can’t choose to do anything, and must therefore sit and stare at the wall. I’ve discussed this in other articles (linked below), so here let me just summarize: We don’t sit and stare at the wall and starve to death because we’re programmed not to — or put another way, we don’t want to do that. But wait — is any human anywhere doing that? Among six billion humans, perhaps someone is. But that person is just defective. If we all did that, we would all be defective. Because most people aren’t defective — thanks to good programming in the DNA, and natural selection weeding out really bad damage like the kind that might cause you to stare at the wall and starve to death — most people aren’t going to starve themselves to death while doing nothing.
A lot of arguments for free will are really arguments for consciousness. There would no point in the characters moving and talking on a movie screen if no one was sitting in the theater watching the movie. But that’s not the same thing as free will at all. That’s just more logic in the general ID thrust that it seems this universe and humanity were purposely set up by designers of some sort. A human may not have any more consciousness than does Mr. Incredible, but if someone is consciously experiencing the adventures of Mr. Incredible, then there is a point to those adventures.
Who Really Needs This “Legitimacy”
When free-will advocates say that “we can’t legitimately punish criminals if there’s no such thing as free will,” what they really mean is that the God of their religion can’t legitimately send heinous criminals to hell if there’s no such thing as free will — for it would make no sense to do so in that case. It would be like sending movie theater patrons to hell because the movie they just watched featured a protagonist who wantonly wasted several other characters in the film.
So free will advocacy is simply a necessary correlate of the desire that spectacularly destructive individuals burn in hell.
Free Will and Population Statistics
and
Behavior and Free Will, Unconfused
© 2010 Darel Rex Finley | design by