Allen Wood on Free Will

The indefatigable Allen Wood recently sent me this reply to my piece Is Free Will Too Cheap? which I post here with his permission, and with its original US English spellings.

Dear Chris,

Very good post. Having just plowed through one tome of mine, this may not come to you as welcome news, but a new tome has just appeared [Fichte’s Ethical Thought].

The arguments to which you refer about Fichte on freedom are reprised in the first half of Ch. 3 of this book. More generally, I think Fichte was on to the kinds of views you're discussing. He called them ‘dogmatism’ and insisted that transcendental philosophy is the only way to avoid them. My book talks about this, especially in Ch. 2.

I have said – and still believe – that if there is a solution to the traditional problem of free will (“How does our freedom to choose fit into our objective conception of the natural world?”) then it would have to be a compatibilist one. Unfortunately, however, it does not follow from this that any form of compatibilism is a defensible position. The traditional problem of free will, so understood, may be insoluble. I would reject my colleague Tim O’Connor's views too, since they involve a supernaturalist way of solving the problem. They too are trying to fit free will into some conception of the objective world. It’s just that they include supernature as well as nature. I don't find supernaturalism a defensible position since there is no good evidence for it. The fact that we can't solve the free will problem is no evidence for anything except that we can’t solve the free will problem.

Hume is usually understood as a compatibilist, and in the Enquiry, he does describe his view about the causal determination of the will and the conditions of moral responsibility as a “reconciliation project.” But for reasons of literary popularity, Hume was trying to be audience-friendly in the Enquiry and to downplay the paradoxical side of his views. In the Treatise, he is more candid and shocking. His view is that we lack free will – our every action is causally determined by particular passions or other motives. But far from it's being the case that this destroys moral responsibility, Hume argues that it is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. That shocking paradox – which can't be described as compatibilism about free will and determinism, since it supports only determinism and denies free will, his his real view.

In short: Those who call Hume a compatibilist are whitewashing his views (and probably their own as well). In the Treatise, Hume is being more candid. He's not reconciling anything, or showing anything to be compatible. He is claiming baldly and bluntly that free will is incompatible with moral responsibility.

The remark you quote from Ramachandran, and the view ascribed in your post to Crick, puts them, and those who agree with them, in the following position: Either (a) they, as “scientists,” are mysteriously exempt from what they say about the rest of us, or else (b) their own claims that none of us exist, none of us understand why we do what we do, that nothing of what we believe about ourselves is true, are self-discrediting. For if their views are true about themselves, then they are in no position to assert those views and can have no reasons for them. For they do not exist, and whatever they think about themselves – including the science that they believe in – is an elaborate post-hoc rationalization that bears no relation to the truth. The same would of course be true of us if we became convinced of their views, and so our being convinced of their views would involve the same illusion.

One has to suppose that they do not intend to exempt themselves from the human condition that their views describe – although sometimes one has to wonder about this. One of my favorite movie lines comes early in Ghostbusters. A lady has just seen a ghost, and Bill Murray, in cross-examining her, asks her insultingly if this is “her time of the month.” Another guy wonders if this is a proper question for him to ask. Bill Murray replies: “Back off, man. I’m a scientist!” A lot of scientist-philosophers seem to take the same attitude toward their audience (namely, us).

I think it has to be admitted that their views might be true, but if they are, then neither they nor we nor anybody else (except a God or pure intelligence who is exempt from the conditions of human cognition) could ever be in a position to know or justifiably to believe that their views are true. And if their views include (as they usually do) that disembodied cognition is impossible, then no such divine or pure intelligence could exist either.

Best regards,

Allen

PS: Relating to the quotation from Crick, I should also have quoted a remark from one of my favorite writers – Robert Benchley, a writer for the New Yorker for many years. In one of his articles: ‘Did You Know That...?’ he is satirizing columns in magazines and newspapers that purport to inform you of little known and paradoxical truths. On his (absurd) list of these supposed truths is the following: “No one has ever actually seen the Brooklyn Bridge. It is merely the action of light waves on the retina of the eye.” Crick’s quoted statement reminded me of that.