How much control do you really have

over the choices you make?

No Free Will

Some Free Will

Radical Free Will

Fatalism, Predestination

& Hard Determinism

Soft Determinism & Behavioral Conditioning

Existentialism

Fatalism is the

theory that one has

no free will because

the future is already

set – “fated” and

that everything one

does will drive one

to complete one’s

fate… even if one

knows and attempts

to avoid it!

Oedipus was the son of Laius and Jocasta. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he would murder his father. To avoid this calamity, the child was given to a herdsman who was told to kill him. The herdsman, out of pity and yet fearing to disobey, instead gave him to another herdsman, tying his feet together and piercing them with a stake (which caused him to permanently have swollen feet–hence one meaning of Oedipus which translates to "swollen foot." It also comes from Greek root meaning knowledge). The herdsman took the infant Oedipus to his master, the king of Corinth, Polybus, who adopted him as his own son.

Many years later, Oedipus finds out that he is not the son of Polybus. To confirm this, he seeks help from an oracle and is told that he is destined to kill his father and mate with his mother. In his attempt to evade the dictates of the oracle, he decides to flee from home to Thebes on the other side of the mountains.

As Oedipus was traveling by horse to Thebes, he came to a crossroads where he met a chariot, which, unknown to him, was driven by Laius, his real father. A dispute arose over right of way, and in the ensuing fight, Oedipus killed Laius. Continuing his journey to Thebes, Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, who stopped any traveler and asked him a riddle that none had yet been able to solve. If the traveler failed, he was eaten by the Sphinx. The riddle was “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?" The answer was “Man." Oedipus solved the riddle, and the Sphinx threw herself to her death. The gratitude of the Thebans led them to anoint Oedipus as their king. Oedipus was also given Laius' widow, Jocasta (who was also his mother), as his wife. Over the years, Oedipus and Jocasta had four children–two sons, Polynices and Eteocles (see Seven Against Thebes), and two daughters Antigone and Ismene (see Antigone).

Many years after the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta, a plague struck the city of Thebes. Oedipus, with his typical hubris, asserted that he could end the plague. He sent Creon, Jocasta's brother to the Oracle at Delphi seeking guidance. The Oracle explains that to remove the plague he must find the murderer of Laius. In a search for the identity of the killer, Oedipus sends for the blind prophet Tiresias, who warns him not to try to find the killer. In an angry exchange, Tiresias tells Oedipus that he is the killer and suggests that he is living in shame and doesn't know who his true parents are. Undaunted, Oedipus continues his search. When a messenger arrives from Corinth with the news that Polybus is dead, Oedipus is relieved that he can no longer fulfill the prophecy of murdering his father (so he thinks), but still worries that he will mate with his mother. The messenger reassures him with the news that he is adopted. Jocasta then realizes who Oedipus is and goes in to the palace to kill herself. Oedipus seeks verification of the messenger's story from the very same herdsman who was to have left Oedipus to die as a baby. From that herdsman, Oedipus learns that the infant raised as the adopted son of Polybus and Merope was the son of Laius and Jocasta. Thus, Oedipus finally sees the truth, that at the crossroads he had killed his own father, and then married his own mother.

Oedipus goes in search of Jocasta and finds she has killed herself. Taking brooches from her gown, Oedipus blinds himself. Oedipus leaves the city, and his daughter Antigone acts as his guide as he wanders blindly through the country, ultimately dying at Colonus, after being placed under the protection of Athens by Theseus, its king.

(New World Encyclopedia)

Predestination is the theory that all one’s

actions are known by and in the hands of

God/Allah.

This is a theory that defines God/Allah as

Omnipotent: all powerful

Omniscient: all knowing

Omnipresent: everywhere at once

Omni benevolent: all loving – literally all good

will.

God “created, or caused, everything.” (p.583)

Evil exists.

Can all loving and all powerful God have created evil?

If humans are to be blamed for evil then

doesn’t God know and control all human

actions too?

If God knows and controls human actions,

then isn’t God still in control of the

consequences of those actions?

“If man is a good, and cannot act rightly unless he wills to do so, then he must have free will, without which he cannot act rightly. We must not believe that God gave us free will so that we might sin…. If anyone uses free will for sinning, he incurs divine punishment. This would be unjust if free will had been given not only that man might live rightly but also that he might sin….if a man did not have free choice of will, how could there exist the good according to which it is just to condemn evildoers and reward those who act rightly?” (p.584)

P1) If God has foretold certain events, then God must foreknow certain events.

P2) If God foreknows these events, then these events must be necessary (they can’t not happen).

P3) If events are certain, then they cannot depend on the voluntary will of moral agents: we can have no free will.

P4) God has foretold certain events with certainty.

___________________________

C) It follows that we can have no free will.

Core Assumptions:

God created everything

God knows everything

The Problem:

Did Eve freely choose to

sin or was she created to

sin?

The inspiration: Isaac Newton & Pierre Simon La Place

The Principle of Universal Causation: The universe operates in terms of deterministic law-like causes and if one knows those causes, one can predict the effects with certainty.

P1) All events in the natural universe are caused by determinate forces.

P2) Human actions are “connected to universal nature, and submitted to the necessary and immutable laws that she imposes on all….” (p.597)

__________________________

C) All human actions are caused by determinate forces.

“In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness; of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience.” (p.599)

Natural/ Physical Causes:

Physics

Chemistry

Biology

Neuroscience

Genetics

Geography?

Geology?

Social/Psychological Causes:

Society

Family

Friends

Media

Education

Government

Language?

Birth order?

P1) If one is said to have free will, one must act free from determinate causes, i.e. escape causality.

P2) But one can never escape the physical/sociological/psychological causes operant on their life.

SP1) to escape these causes is to act outside of causation which would require a severance of the connection between cause and effect

SP2) to sever the link between cause and effect is to deny causation entirely

SP3) causation is a demonstrable fact of the universe

____________________________________________

Therefore one cannot have free will: “Man, then, is not a free agent in any one instant of his life….”(p.599)

In Physics:

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – we cannot know both the location and the momentum of a subatomic particle. In coming to know one, we make it impossible for us to know the other at the same time. (p.602)

Science of Chaos – all events are simultaneously linked to all other events – causation is not a linear chain but an interdynamic web and one cannot predict a single action without knowing all the causally connected events, which is in practice, impossible. e.g. the butterfly’s wings beating in Japan is causally linked to the storm in San Francisco.

Applied to Human Freedom:

Does this imply that if human events are not predictable that they are therefore free?

NO!

Just because human actions are not absolutely predictable, it does not follow that they are not caused.

Indeterminism implies that the web of causes may be so complex that we will never be able to quantify all of them in order to completely understand and predict human behavior.

P1) Human actions are caused.

P2) Among those causes is “character” (here Mill is treating character as something that is inherently a moral character, driven by rational principles – In this sense, for Mill there are only strong characters which are moral, weak characters, and a lack of character).

P3) We can affect our character, “if we will…” (p. 608)

P4) If our character is sufficiently strong and built upon rationally chosen moral principles, strengthened by experience and habit, we can resist corruption and immoral influence.

P5) if our character remains weak, we will become puppets of external causal forces and susceptible to corruption.

____________________________________________________

C) Freedom is found only if we act in accord with the character we have chosen and made sufficiently strong.

“…we shall find that this feeling of our being able to modify our own character if we wish is itself the feeling of moral freedom which we are conscious of. A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs; who, even in yielding to them, knows that he could resist….” (p.608)

Case #1: The Kaminski Hat and Neiman

Marcus

In this case I did what I wanted to do. Would

Mill say I was free and thus responsible or

was my action caused by corrupting forces

(relative poverty, depression, prejudice,

addiction, etc)?

Case #2: The $100 bill and General Feed & Seed

Would Mill say I was free -acting in accord with rationally chosen principles - even though at the time, I thought I didn’t really want to do it and instead, felt obligated or forced to do so?

“…the so-called normal person is equally the product of causes in which his volition took no part….Those of us who can discipline ourselves and develop habits of concentration of purpose tend to blame those who cannot, and call them lazy and weak-willed; but what we fail to see is that they literally cannot do what we expect; if their psyches were structured like ours, they could, but as they are burdened with a tyrannical super-ego…, and a weak-defenseless ego whose energies are constantly consumed in fighting endless charges of the super-ego, they simply cannot do it and it is irrational to expect it of them.” (pp. 617-18)

Behavior can be and is engineered.

“Each of us…is engaged in a pitched battle with the rest of mankind ….Society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age….Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The „ologies‟ will tell you how it is done.” (p.623)

P1) We have no choice in the fact of behavioral conditioning.

P2) We do have a choice in who we will put in control of this conditioning.

P3) We can choose social scientists or we can leave it up to random forces – politicians, corporations, media, religion, etc..

P4) The social scientists will be in a position to work for the advancement of humankind.

P5) Random forces will tend to the pursuit of each of their self-interests (Politicians want votes, Corporations want consumers, the media wants market share, Religions want devoted followers, etc.).

____________________________________________

C) We should turn the job of conditioning over to the social scientists for the betterment of humankind.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Burgess suggests –through the voice of the minister – that it might be better to be free and bad than forced to be good. He treats behavioral conditioning as inherently dehumanizing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMzepSePD4&feature=related

Name of theory is derived from Jean Paul Sartre’s claim that:

“Existence comes before essence ….man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”

(pp.476 - 77)

Facticity –

the facts that are

true about oneself

at any given time –

includes the fact

of one’s existence,

past history,

experiences and

prior choices.

Transcendence –

One’s projections

into the future and

includes one’s

ambitions, plans,

intentions, hopes,

and fantasies. It is

what one may

chose to do about

one’s facticity.

"It answers the

question that was

tormenting you: my

love, you are not

'one thing in my life'

- not even the most

important - because

my life no longer

belongs to me

because...you are

always me."

1. Refusing to accept responsibility for the consequences of one’s past choices and actions. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (p.477)

2. Refusing to accept responsibility for one’s future choices & the possibility of change. “…but he struggles with all his strength against the crushing view that his mistakes constitute for him a destiny.” (p.479)

3. Ignoring the factical dimension of every situation (e.g.“I can do anything by just wishing it”). “You are - your life, and nothing else” (p.482)

“One is what one is not, and one is not what one is.” (p.480)

Sometimes described as the only existentialist virtue

Is the opposite of “bad faith”

Involves a sense of living with a clear awareness of the contingency and responsibility for each of one’s choices.

Excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others.

Embraces the possibility of change and growth –views life as “a project” or work in progress. (p.477)

“There are no accidents in life…” (p.642)

“Man is condemned to be free; because once

thrown into the world, he is responsible for

everything he does.” (Being and

Nothingness)

“…I cannot ask, „Why was I born?‟ or curse

the day of my birth or declare that I did not

ask to be born, for these various attitudes

toward my birth…are absolutely nothing else

but ways of assuming this birth in full

responsibility and of making it mine….Thus

in a certain sense I choose being born.”(p.644)

Sartre argues that even if determinism is true, we’re still radically free and must take responsibility for our choices:

P1) We must make decisions – even a choice not to choose is still a choice.

P2) “No amount of information and no number of causal circumstances can ever replace our need to make (choices).” (p.641)

P3) For ourselves, we do not know how we will decide until we have decided – embedded in the act of choosing is a consciousness of being able to choose otherwise.

_______________________________________________

C) “There is no escape from freedom or responsibility.” (p.641)

“The mind is a television

with thousands of channels.

I choose a world that is tranquil and calm

so that my joy will always be fresh.”

P1) “When our mind is conscious of

something we are that thing.” (p.647)

P2) As with the television we have the

power through mindfulness to change the

channel – fear, hatred, war, love,

kindness, joy and peace are all channels

of consciousness.

_____________________________________

C) “We are what we choose to be.” (p.647)