One way in which people have traditionally distinguished between human beings and everything else in the world is by saying that humans have free will while everything else does not. E.g.,
"brutes [i.e., animals] do not judge of their own judgments, but follow the judgment imprinted upon them by God. And since they do not cause their choice, they do not have freedom of choice. Man ... is his own cause, not only in moving but also in judging. Hence he has free choice" (St. Thomas Aquinas, On Free Choice)But what does it mean to say we have free will? Consider a simple example: I walk into a take-out restaurant, try to decide whether I want to have coffee or tea, decide I want coffee and order it. From a commonsense point of view, this seems like a clear case of a free action (i.e., my exercising my free will).
But again, what do we mean by saying this is a free action? Probably something like this:
'I didn't have to choose coffee. It was perfectly within my power in the situation just described to choose tea.'However, is this really true? Granted, if things had gone differently I might have ended up ordering tea. So, for example, if someone in front of me in line had been raving about how great the tea was in this place (or maybe about how bad the coffee was) then I might have chosen differently. But this isn't what we mean when talk about being free, is it?
Consider the XJ7111 Coffee/Tea Ordering Robot. Let's say it's programmed so that it always orders coffee unless its auditory sensors pick up the words 'this coffee is terrible' in the one minute period before it places an order. If it hears this, it orders tea. As such, if the robot orders coffee on some occasion, it is true that the robot would have ordered something else if things had gone differently. To be exact, it would have ordered tea if someone had said 'this coffee is terrible' just before it ordered. But while in this sense the robot could have ordered differently, none of us will say that means the robot made a free choice when it ordered the coffee.What does this example tell us? It tells us that what we meant when we said I made a free choice to order a coffee wasn't just that if the situation had unfolded differently then I might have ordered differently. As we've just seen, that's true of the robot, but it doesn't have free will.
What then do we mean when we say that I made a free choice when I ordered the coffee? Maybe something like this:
'Everything leading up to me deciding to order coffee could have gone the exactly the same way it did and I still could have chosen to order tea.'It's in this sense that we're supposed to be different from the Robot mentioned above. Unless we make some change in the circumstances leading up to it placing its order (e.g., changing its programming, changing what goes on around it so that someone says 'this coffee tastes terrible', etc.), it will definitely order coffee.
The Problem With What We've Just Said: Is it really true that, if things had gone exactly the same way that they did, I could still have chosen to order tea?
Some philosophers think the answer to this question is no.[Philosophy 1200]Determinism: the view that everything that happens is predetermined
"it is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do, ... in each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable." (Nagel, "Free Will," 53)Is determinism true?One way of making determinism look plausible: Claim that human beings are just things in the natural world like everything else and so subject to the same laws of physics, etc. as everything else.So what if determinism is true?Is this convincing?
"Some think that if determinism is true, no one can reasonably be praised or blamed for anything, any more than the rain can be praised or blamed for falling." (Nagel, "Free Will," 54)Is this correct?