Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. "Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" as the title of one of hese papers puts it.
In his article (free pdf), British 'independent researcher' James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn't distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).
More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous -
Western law recognizes that the penal system is so harmful to the existing life and future opportunities of persons that to convict requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet libertarians provide no objective evidence whatsoever for the existence of free will, and therefore no apparent justification for the mass poverty and brutal punishments that belief in libertarian free will often brings with it. The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...
...In June 2009, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that ‘virtually everyone’ remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social
misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p. 23; 69% of those surveyed agreed with the statement and an additional 14% were unsure but did not disagree.) Because of their belief in the fairness of ‘deserved inequalities’, such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunities for all...
This is a polemical piece (remarkably so, for an academic journal), and clearly this is only one side of the story, but it's hard to deny that he has a point: there's a dark side to the belief in free will. If you doubt free will, and yet praise the myth of it, as some scientists seem to be doing, you need to accept that you're condemning some people (prisoners, most obviously) to suffer as a result "through no fault of their own"....Free will may just be the primary excuse many use to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will.
Personally, I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will - the arguments against it have been around for millenia, they're as convincing as they'll ever be, and they haven't convinced most people, however irrational that might make most people. So I think the debate over belief in free will is academic; it's not going away.
Miles JB (2011). 'Irresponsible and a Disservice': The integrity of social psychology turns on the free will dilemma. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 22074173
22 comments:
==I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will ==
So what?
So I don't think there's any need to be concerned about what would happen if everyone stopped believing in it.
Hi - actually I have noticed in my country that people are losing their belief in free will (as a positive construct). Like lots of people before me I've though free will is a toxic concept that at best is empty and uninteresting. But it heartens me greatly to find that many of my students now find that idea of free will very palatable.
I don't see any concern. Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the Universe and humanity survived the trauma. It would be stupid to deny the humanity the truth of the position of the Earth, because one is concerned about the consequences.
The argument itself appears to be less about Free Will and more about morality; all those pesky "Ought-type" questions. So no, I don't suspect it'll go anywhere soon.
For me, what Miles should really be worried about is the attribution bias: the fact that most people attribute complex reasons for their own actions and simple reasons for others' actions.
The problem isn't that we believe in free will -- in fact, far from it -- but rather that an individual believes *he* has free will, while others are more or less acting out their own characters, good and bad.
People are poor because they are "stupid," or "lazy," or "impulsive." But me? I'm struggling with money because I've had "bad health," or "missed opportunities," or "a lack of job security" or whatever.
Free will is a ten dollar word for what is maybe at root a simpler idea -- everyone we know is a person, other people are just statistics.
Ryan: Good point.
I used to think the brain was the most important organ ... and then I realized what was telling me that.
The research and comments by Miles are consistent with a hardening of attitudes to welfare in the UK.
My impression is that class, and therefore one's place in society, is traditionally seen quite fatalistically if not deterministically. Not that I understand the British class system.
The trouble with "free will" as a idea is that it comes fully formed with lots of Christian baggage. Free Will is what causes evil in the first place. Therefore, I suppose the thinking goes, that if you are evil you must have chosen to be evil. If we were starting to reason about human existence from scratch I doubt we'd come up with free will unless we got into the same intellectual snafu as the early Church fathers.
I blogged about free will as well this week and I conclude that it's a red-herring. We have the experience of willing, we value that experience, and we can learn.
The distinction between determinism and fatalism is an interesting one, but still so black and white. Of course we are never 100% free to make arbitrary decisions - only economists believe that! We never have 0% or 100% influence on outcomes - it's always somewhere in between. We have cultural baggage, peer pressure, ideologies etc. We're social apes who like to do what everyone else is doing. It's not whether or not we are free, it's how free are we - and it various quite a bit surely?
I include some links to a Indologist friend's blog who explores the notion of free will in Indian philosophy more broadly.
Becoming a determinist would seem to be one of the more bizarre acts of will.
I guess I have never really understood why free will and determinism were incompatible. It seems to me that this supposed incompatibility implies that "me" and my biological make-up are distinct, which seems odd to me.
If there is free will, those who believe in it can change their mind at will and agree with the skeptics. The skeptics can't do anything about it.
I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people will always believe in free will. There have been (good, cogent) arguments against an interventionist deity for millenia, but only recently, with the advent of near-universal education, easy communication, and the right political environment, has atheism really increased to a significant degree.
Why would anyone believe in free will anyway? It's counterfactual to just about everything we know about the world and any attempt to generate a robust theory of free will leads to paradoxes, mumbo jumbo and plain old crap.
It seems to me that the reason we have this powerful intuition of free will is the sequence of thought processes: Unconscious, unintrospectable brain processes produce conscious thought and/or feelings, apparently from nowhere. We conclude that we made it up ourselves.
If we were aware of the range of unconscious input processes leading to the endpoint thoughts we wouldn't need to assume a creative agent, we would just actually know how we came to the position. As an illustration, a scientist doesn't believe that he "made up" his theory, he sees it as driven by the source data. A basketballer, on the other hand, will reflexively choose a play, assume agency then congratulate himself on it's success. Smart basketballers may ascribe their apparent agency to training.
I'd be happy if the who free will thing was dropped; it's smarter to concentrate on the process of good and bad decisions - and aim for more of the good - than to assume that there are good and bad people. However, I'm not holding my breath.
Free Willy
He writes, "But on this evidence, none of these studies have actually been investigating the effects of disbelief in free will. Instead the Vohs, Schooler, and Baumeister camps appear to have been subtly conditioning their interviewees to demonstrate the effects of belief in fatalism."
But he does not explain how this was done. I would like to read more about the methodological errors.
Free will is an utterly junk idea, self defeating and philosophically bankrupt - what it postulates is an ability to defeat the laws of physics. Because of this, I am inclined toward the opinion that belief in free will serves as an impediment to rationality and a general acceptance of scientific method, and is therefore undesirable in a society that seeks to be rational.
Saying categorically that it is wrong to punish people who were never free to chose their actions is wrong, however. What society should be trying to achieve is a minimal probability for people to continue behaving like criminals, and punishment seems to have a role in achieving that end.
What is immoral, though, is the failure to provide an objective assessment of what works best in relation to this goal. This is something that society seems currently to be guilty of. This may be partly because of acceptance of free will, and the shift in emphasis from improving society to punishing the guilty.
Sam Buss had the best ever argument for free will: “You should believe in freedom of the will because if you have it you’re right, and if you don’t have it you couldn’t have done otherwise anyway.”
But it was a joke.
(reposting because I wanted to edit the comment)
Re: methodology. More specifically, I don't think he made the case for a flawed methodology - yet - because he didn't explain how the experiments primed their subjects for fatalism versus a lack of belief in free will.
However, I do think he has an amazing point re attributional bias in relation to belief in free will, and I would have liked him to cover experiments that have addressed this topic -- but maybe he has and I had trouble following the article due to ignorance.
Could you help elucidate this?
update:
In other words, I was wondering how someone would be able to run an experiment to lead to pro-social behavior individually versus anti-social behavior in society given a belief in freewill.
The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...,
He's wrong but that's not his fault now is it? Of course it is. No Free will does not equal lack of agency. I do things in the world, these things can be good or bad or neither. My behavior needs to be constrained because I must live in a society. The law is perceived by many to be about morals and freedom of choice. Not true. Many instances in law are simply about breaking the law irrespective of intention. We jail people for manslaughter.
So we should because laws are about behavior modification to maintain societal peace and stability. Laws do not require the concept of free will. While I loathe the idea of capital punishment in some cases I'd be happy to pull the trigger. People are good because it is in their interests to be good, not because they believe in free will.
As to the claims of losing morality, reminds me of the concerns that arose in the Reformation era regarding the stronger versions of Calvinism and how it would lead to antinominianism, the refusal to submit to law. Turns out Calvinists are pretty hard working folk ... Ever heard of a chap called Max Weber?
I am not a great fan of these types of psychology studies, I'm not even sure they qualify as psychology, more like sociology. Not a bad thing but let's not forget that simplistic explanations of why we behave need to be tempered against a history of us persistently misunderstanding ourselves.
Anyways, it could be the case that those who don't believe in Free will are more aggressive and less helpful because those traits help justify the non-belief in free will. That is, contrary to what many seem to think, our beliefs arise in part from our personalities, as opposed to our behavior being shaped by our beliefs, it is sometimes, if not often, the exact opposite. Cognitive dissonance anyone?
I've got a headache!
"Sam Buss had the best ever argument for free will: “You should believe in freedom of the will because if you have it you’re right, and if you don’t have it you couldn’t have done otherwise anyway.”
But it was a joke."
.. and like the best jokes, absolutely true.
If you don't agree, refute it.
hey guys that,s really amazing posts...
Post a Comment