BOOK: Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will
Many have thought that if everything is caused, human free will must be an illusion. This kind of determinism, however, is seemingly antithetical to our lived experience of the world.
In Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will, philosopher Martin Gerwin argues that there is no reason to doubt that we have free will – rather, the illusion is that everything is caused in the same deterministic way. Our very idea of cause and effect is rooted in our experience of being agents who make things happen. But from this experience we derive, not a single, unified idea of causing, but an idea with different variants.
Gerwin traces the evolution of this “agency” view of causality in Western philosophy over the past three centuries. He explores its relation to the canons of scientific explanation and the findings of quantum mechanics. He also offers a brief formal development of a tensed modal logic that serves to articulate the distinctive sense of “I can” stemming from the experience of agency. The result is a fresh, innovative defence of the possibility of free will.
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Excerpts
From the Introduction
The main task undertaken in this book is an examination of causation: a project in the spirit of traditional empiricism. The aim will be to show how our concepts related to causation, and our knowledge of causal connections, are grounded in experience. But my thoughts on these matters originated in reflections on the problem of determinism and free will. I was attracted from the start to the position of libertarianism – the view that when human beings act or make decisions, as we say, of their own free will, they exercise a power of choice of such a kind that it is possible for them, at the time and in those very circumstances, to act or decide otherwise. I was suspicious of the arguments of the compatibilists, which purported to show that the existence of free will in the sense just mentioned is compatible with the truth of determinism. But another line of argument, which had always appealed to me, was that our concepts having to do with causation and causal connection are derived, not solely from our experience of the constant conjunction of similar sequences of phenomena, as Hume taught, but primarily from our experience of interacting with the world as agents rather than as passive observers. My intention is to contribute to the development of the “agency” view, and to do so in a way that displays the relevance of this analysis of causal concepts to the issue of determinism and free will.
From the final chapter: "Free Will"
For many centuries – since the time of the Stoics, to be exact – philosophers nursed a disquieting suspicion that free will might be an illusion, since to a scientific mind it seemed so obvious that determinism must be true. Yet everyone, philosophers included, went on living their lives, and engaging in moral reasoning, in a fashion that presupposed humans do have free will. What were they thinking? It seems to me that they were engaging in a sort of Orwellian “doublethink” – simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs and assenting to both of them. Then in the twentieth century the quantum physicists made the astonishing proposal that at the microscopic level the world is in fact indeterministic – so it was determinism that had been the illusion all along! This . . . reopens the whole question of whether free will is real or illusory. It does not answer the question, but it opens up the possibility that free will is real, by the most exacting standard of what would count as real.