In Our Time - Free Will

Episode Date: March 10, 2011

In the 500th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophical idea of free will.Free will - the extent to which we are free to choose our own actions - is one of the most absorbing philosophical problems, debated by almost every great thinker of the last two thousand years. In a universe apparently governed by physical laws, is it possible for individuals to be responsible for their own actions? Or are our lives simply proceeding along preordained paths? Determinism - the doctrine that every event is the inevitable consequence of what goes before - seems to suggest so.Many intellectuals have concluded that free will is logically impossible. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza regarded it as a delusion. Albert Einstein wrote: "Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion." But in the Enlightenment, philosophers including David Hume found ways in which free will and determinism could be reconciled. Recent scientific developments mean that this debate remains as lively today as it was in the ancient world.With: Simon BlackburnBertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of CambridgeHelen BeebeeProfessor of Philosophy at the University of BirminghamGalen StrawsonProfessor of Philosophy at the University of ReadingProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, earlier I came to this studio in Broadcasting House and sat down in this chair. There are many other things I could have done this morning. Go for a walk, write, read or stay in bed.

I came here of my own free will. Or I think I did. According to some of the finest minds in philosophy, free will is an illusion and everything we do, is the result of processes beyond our control. Can this be true? And if we're not responsible for our actions, can we take moral responsibility for them?

Philosophers have been arguing about these questions for a long time. The Enlightenment thinker David Hume called free will the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science. 250 years later, the debate continues, and the discoveries of neuroscience have given it new impetus. With me to discuss free will are Simon Blackburn, Bertrand Russell, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Helen Beebe, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham,

and Galen Straussen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. Simon Blackburn, can you give us a rather full idea of what's meant by free will? Well, of course, that's partly contentious, because different philosophers will try offering different definitions. but I think we can divide it into two. There's a question of the will. What is that? What's a volition or what's an intention? And then there's a question of freedom.

So if I take the first, Wittgenstein put it by asking, what's the difference between my arm going up and my raising my arm? Or if you like, what's subtracted from my raising my arm, by my arm just going up? And the obvious answer there is, well, presumably if you raise your arm, the causation has something to do with cognition and motivation, desire, intention, whereas if it just goes up, well, it just goes up, it's like a reflex action or reflex happening.

That, I think, is tractable. You can look at the causation involved, the cognitive elements, the motivational elements. But then the question is, when we analyze those things, are they just things that happen to be so because of background? causation because of the structures of our brain, the structure of the environment, the way events are unfolding according to determinate patterns in nature. And in that case, we seem to have lost, as it were, my capacity to intervene and to make

things happen. And that's bothered a lot of philosophers. So Kant, for example, thought that the absolute spontaneity of an action was necessary in order for it to be your action. But other philosophers, David Hume, possibly the most famous, have thought, no, that's not necessary. You don't need this kind of magical moment of intervention whereby you do something.

All you need is that the action, whatever it was, was partly caused by your own will. So he thought that the only freedom we needed was that if we will to do something, then there's no obstacle in the way. There's nothing stopping it happening. And that's sometimes called a compatibilist view of freedom. I can't thought that was a wretched fudge.

Why do you think it matters so much and philosophers over so many centuries have argued about it? I think two things. One is that it's irritating because we feel ourselves to be free. We feel that we face an open, future. We feel that we can do as we choose and if we did one thing we could have done otherwise.

So that seems to be almost a datum of consciousness in many people's minds. So that's one thing. I think the other thing is of course moral responsibility. We feel that if somebody's a victim rather than an agent then it's

unjust to blame them for, say, a bad action. Now when we find causes we do tend to go into patient mode. We think that the poor chap couldn't help it. So, for example, if somebody starts to behave badly and then it turns out that there's a tumour affecting his system in various serious respects,

we say, oh, well, it wasn't his fault. It was the fault of the tumour. But then we think, well, there's always something like a tumour. It may not be an actual tumour, but it may be structures and chemicals and hormones and heaven-does-what in the brain, which always makes us do whatever we do. And if we forgive the chap with the tumour,

then why shouldn't we forgive everybody? And so moral responsibility seems to fly out of the window. Helen Baby, one obstacle to believing that we free will is an idea known as determinism. Can you explain what this is and why it's so important for this argument? Yeah, so imagine watching a game of snooker on the television and you press the pause button just after the player hits the cue ball.

If you watch a lot of snooker on TV, you're probably going to be quite good at predicting what's going to happen next. You might be able to predict that the black's going to go in the corner pocket and the white's going to come back on the table and line up with the red for the next shot. But now you can ask yourself the question, what would it take to be able, in principle, to be able to be absolutely certain about what's going to happen next? And one thing that would have to be the case is that the laws of nature

that govern the behavior of snooker balls on the table, the laws of motion and so on, would have to take you from a given situation, a given arrangement of balls and a given way of striking the cue ball, to one exact outcome. They'd have to say, look, in this kind of situation, there's only one thing that could possibly happen. And then if you knew the laws of nature,

you'd be able to predict with certainty what was going to happen. So now determinism is really the idea that the entire universe is like the snooker table. Given the state of the universe at any one time, the laws of nature only leave one possibility open. So, and that covers the whole of the universe, so not just snookables and ants and rocks and chairs and tables and cats, but also human beings, our thoughts, our decisions, our intentions and our actions. And now it's easy to see why that is going to raise a worry for freedom of the will, because, of course,

if all of our decisions and our actions are completely determined by facts about the laws of nature and facts about the past, then it looks like there's only one option available to us. It's not the case that I could choose the chicken or I could choose the beef off the menu. Actually, it's determined that I'm going to choose the one that I actually choose. And not just determined by what happened two seconds ago, but determined by what happened five years ago, 100 years ago, 100,000 years ago. So long before we were born, it was already set in stone that I was going to choose the chicken. You make it sound like fate almost. Is there a distinction? Well, I think there's a distinction between determinism and fatalism. So I think, insofar as I understand belief in fate,

I think it amounts to the thought that what's going to happen is going to happen no matter what you do. So imagine that you went for a job interview last week, you put in a good performance, and you ended up getting the job of your dreams. Now, if it was really fated to happen that you were going to get that job, then in some sense it doesn't really seem to have mattered that whether or not you put in a good performance or indeed whether or not you even bothered showing up for the interview, that you were going to get the job anyway. Somehow, even if you'd stayed in bed, the job would have ended up falling in your lap.

Now, determinism doesn't have that consequence. Even if you think that you were determined to get the job, it's still going to be the case that one of the things that determined that you would get the job was that you went to the interview and put in a good performance. So it still needs to be the case that certain things happen in a certain order, in order for the things that are determined to happen get to happen. Now, that might seem like quite a fine distinction, but it's quite important, I think. I mean, if you think that you were fated to get the job,

I mean, if you think that you're fated to get the job, then it kind of looks like you don't really need to bother getting out of bed because you're going to get it anyway. Whereas if you merely think that you're determined to get the job, you've still got a good reason to get out of bed and go to the interview because that's one of the things that's going to determine it. A determinance suggests will, and I thought determinism suggested that your will wasn't a big factor.

Well, it depends what you think the will is, I suppose. I mean, if you think that the will is really just a matter of, having certain kinds of mental capacities, our ability to deliberate about what we're going to do, form intentions, make decisions, and you think that that's just part of the natural order. This is really all just a matter of certain kind of neurons firing and your brains doing certain kinds of things. And of course, that's all subject to the deterministic laws just like everything else is. Whereas I suppose if you think of the will as something that stands outside the order of nature, then you might think that in principle, maybe if the laws of nature weren't deterministic,

then the will could kind of step in and fix things that weren't fixed by the natural order just in itself. So the will is part of the order of nature? That's what I think, yes. I suppose the most famous example of fate, and all our list of all know is Oedipus, murdering his father, marrying his mother. Now, how would you isolate that and distinguish that in the argument that you used?

Well, I suppose, again, the question is the extent to which, as it were, all the factors were going to lead to those eventual outcomes, no matter what are the various things Oedipus and various other people did along the way, they were all kind of going to head in the same direction no matter what, as opposed to it merely being the case that everything was deterministically caused. So again, there's a distinction between it making a difference that you do this thing rather than that thing, if you do this thing, such and such will happen, and if you do something else, something different would happen,

versus thinking, well, whichever of those two things I do, the same thing's going to turn out. Ganes Ross, you want to take that on and then go into the way, found its way into determinism, found its way into religious belief. Well, what's odd about that is that it seems to be a tremendous tension

between the idea that determinism is true and any religion that has a story about punishment and reward in the afterlife. because, I mean, determinism, as has been said, is the view that absolutely everything you do was determined to happen, you know, hundreds of years before you were born. In fact, if determinism is true, everything you do was determined to happen by the Big Bang, right? But somehow this got gets into religion. In fact, you find it certainly in Christianity. You find it first in St. Augustine and second in Calvinism, the idea that although the...

this is true, although everything you're going to do is determined before you were born, some of us are still going to go to heaven forever, and others are going to go to hell forever. And it seems, what's extraordinary is that the view of deterrence has managed to combine

itself with religion at all, because that seems profoundly unfair. Why did it want to? Why did they take it on? Why did that such an effect? I'm not quite sure. Part of it is Augustine. He started and certainly Calvin picked up on St. Augustine's views.

I think part of the explanation is that he was an extremely sensual man and found it incredibly hard to give up his very very sensual life. And so that meant that he was really keen on the idea of original sin because that provided for him a kind of explanation of why he. Why God could make him chase but not yet, you mean? Yeah, that's right. He said, please God make me good but not yet because he wanted to go on having a good time for a few more years. So he had this view.

It's difficult to say exactly what St. Augustine thought because in the end I don't think he's consistent. But he had this view that none of us could ever do anything good without a specific intervention of grace by God. So basically, left to ourselves, we would always do bad things. So the only time we ever did anything good, God helped us. But then the question arises, how can it possibly be thinking? to punish or reward us.

And that's a tension that is not resolved and it's not resolved in Calvinism. Can you just take it on inter Calvinism a bit more, Galen? Well, I've met, you know, I think Dutch reformed Protestants as some of the purists, as it were examples today.

A lot of them in America, and I've met such people. And as you grow up and become a child, you learn that it's already fixed that you're either going to go to heaven or to hell. Nothing you can do about it. It must be a very weird, psychologically,

you might think, oh, well, if I'm already elected to go to heaven, I can do what I like and have a, do bad things. And then you think, no, probably not, because if I do bad things, that's kind of a sort of evidence that maybe I'm not chosen to go to heaven. It must be psychologically difficult to live with. Confessions of a justified sinner is... Yeah, yeah, exactly. But how does this play into the notion of free will?

Oh, well... In terms of the argument, yes. I think, I mean some people dispute this, but I think that the most commonly accepted notion of free will is a very strong notion. And one simple way to express it would be to, I sometimes call it heaven and hell responsibility. We think that we have free will at such a kind

that it makes sense to think that some people could be justly punished forever in hell or justly rewarded forever in heaven. You don't have to believe in that story. All I'm using it for is to give you an idea of how strong the notion of free will is that we think we have. And that's clearly not compatible, it seems to me, with the idea that everything we do is determined before we're even born.

How could it be fair to punish or reward us for eternity if everything we do is determined before we were born? But Martin Luther didn't believe in free will, and so people have run these two things alongside each other for a long time. Well, yes, many people say subtle things that seem to somehow solve the problem, but I just don't think it works. I think there's an irresolvable inconsistency. So it takes us Simon Blackburn to the notion of moral responsibility. If a determinism is true, how do we account for moral responsibility?

Well, I think it's best thought of when we think of other things which control bits of nature. So think of, say, a thermostat. You've got a thermostat in your room. It's there to control the temperature. perhaps it's functioning fine and you know your temperature's good then one day it goes on the blink and it stops controlling the temperature properly well at that point you

throw it out or you get a new one or you repair it it needs attention moral responsibility can be seen not in these rather exalted terms of enabling people to deserve heaven or hell

but simply in terms of some people functioning rather well. They control events in the way that people should control events. Other people function rather badly, and things go badly when they're about, or they do bad things. They cause problems for other people. Moral responsibility is then the attempt to alter people's

the way people control events by, for example, discursive pressure, by telling them that they've done wrong or that they must pull their socks up. So moral responsibility is seen in this light, not as a sort of intervention from outside nature, which enabled you to make the atoms swerve to use Epicurus's model. It's not an intervention from outside.

It's the way you control events from inside nature by being a natural object, just as the thermostat controls the temperature. But some people do it better than others, and the people that do it better, we call responsible and good, and we admire them and we encourage other people to be like them, and the people who do it rather badly, we blame and in the limit to punish or shun or in some way express our disapprobation towards.

So responsibility in that light doesn't require us to be thought of as standing outside nature. It just requires us to be thought of as part of nature, but parts which are flexible and intelligent and listen to us, and therefore we can persuade and cajole, and sometimes by sticks and carrots, threats and punishment and rewards, we can alter them for the better. But Helen Beebe, it still seems to me, with respect,

to come up against the hard rock of determinism. Is there any compatibility between free will and determinism? Because determinism, especially since Newton has emphasised that everything is organised through nature, as laws, everything including, as you said in your opening remarks, everything including us. And this table, everything, so everything, we are the same as everything. So this table presumably doesn't have free will. And so why should we? Yes, the table definitely doesn't have free will. I guess... Doesn't do much. And it doesn't do much either, Nick.

I suppose one way to get yourself into the kind of compatibilist mindset, the mindset of thinking that determinism doesn't pose a threat to free will. is to think about, it's fairly sort of ordinary situations that one might find oneself in and think about various moral distinctions and distinctions to do with freedom of the will that we make that seem to be oblivious

to whether or not determinism is true. So, for example, imagine that you offer me £100 to torture someone. I'm absolutely certain I would turn that offer down. I mean, I'm as certain of that as I am of pretty much anything. Now, it still seems to me that I have control over what I'm doing, there. I mean, it's not as though I'm, you know, sort of

things have been taken out of my control. Take the example further, if somebody offered you 100 pounds to torture someone and say if you didn't, I'm going to shoot you or I'm going to shoot your relatives or whatever, would that make a difference? I don't know, but the issue is whether in this particular situation I could have done otherwise.

And let's say in the, you're just offering me £100 pounds to torture someone. In that particular situation, let's say that I couldn't do otherwise. You might think that I'm in control of my actions in a way that in other situations I might not be so if you offered me a hundred pounds to stroke a big fat, horrible, hairy spider

that's completely harmless and I'm absolutely terrified of spiders then again I'm going to turn the offer down I really can't stroke the spider but it seems as though that's a different kind of case that's a case where I'm really not in control of my actions there's something that I would quite like to do

which is take the £100 and I just can't bring myself to do it So the thought there would be that, look, there's a distinction between being in control of your actions and not being in control of your actions within a kind of a deterministic situation, within the assumption that in neither case could I have done otherwise. And that's a pretty standard distinction in lots of areas. So if you think of the distinction between a crime of passion and premeditated murder, again, that's a distinction that seems to trade on the thought that when you commit a crime of passion, you're not really in control of what you're doing. Whereas when you commit a crime of premeditated murder you are in control of what you're doing. Doesn't determinism lead to the notion that everything can be excused and free will leads to the notion that you're responsible to everything? Don't they diverge quite severely? Well, a lot of philosophers think that. I personally don't think that. I think that the kinds of distinctions I've just described important moral distinctions and they're important distinctions that have to do with the extent to which we control our actions and those

questions about the extent to which we control our actions just are questions about whether we act freely, but there are distinctions that only make sense if you allow that we can have control over our actions, even though determinism is true. I mean, another way to think about it would be to consider the standard kind of incompatibilist argument, which says, look, the reason why determinism robs us of free will is that it robs us of the ability to do otherwise. Everything that I do, that's the only thing I could have done. There's nothing else I could have done. And compatibilist will say, well, why should we think that the inability to do otherwise really robs us? of our freedom.

So a standard example, Martin Luther, being told to recant by the Holy Roman Emperor, Martin Luther allegedly, but probably not in fact, said, here I stand, I can do no other. And Daniel Dennett points out famously that it looks like what Luther absolutely wasn't trying to do there was duck out of moral responsibility. He wasn't saying, hey, guys, you know,

this really isn't my fault. You know, that's just the kind of person I am. Don't blame me. He was exactly saying, This is a decision for which I take full moral responsibility. Galen Strausson, the notion of pessimism has come into this argument. Could you explain how that figures in the philosophical context and what weight it carries?

Yeah, I'm not sure that it's the right word. What it's used to mean is that certainly you can't be free in the way we want if determinism is true, but it's no good if determinism is false either. that is not going to help in any way. So, you know, you're absolutely caught. That's why it's called pessimism. So that's really it. And I can, do you want me to, I could say about why,

why it isn't going to help if determinism is false. Yes. And I sympathise with some of the compatibilist accounts that Simon and Helen are given. But what you can't do is think that there isn't any problem. Because let's just remember what determinism is. It says that. Everything you do is determined before you were even born.

How can it be fair to punish you or not? So some people think, okay, let's suppose determinism is false. Some people think modern science actually supports that view. How is that going to help? So here you are, you are as you are now. What we want is a little bit of randomness or indeterminism. But how can that help? Suppose something changed in your brain because of a random way from outer space.

And that makes you do something different from what you would have done. That doesn't make you responsible. for it. That's just chance or luck. That's the general point that if randomness or indeterminism comes in, that doesn't help with responsibility. It just makes things luck or chance. So if it's anything,

it's worse. So it's absolute, it's a sort of zugs-waying or something. You're absolutely stuck on both horns of the dilemma. That's why it's pessimism. You developed a four-stage argument for pessimism. Could you run through that? Okay, very briefly. I'll give the crude

I know that the crude version is open to objection, but I mean, so it goes like this. Well, look, here you are. You do what you do in any situation you're in because of the way you are. So, to be truly responsible for what you do, you've somehow got to be truly responsible for how you are, seems reasonable. But you can't be truly responsible for how you are. So you can't be truly responsible for what you do. Why can't you be truly responsible for how you are? Because, well, what would that, what would you have to do to be truly responsible for how you are, you'd have to somehow make yourself the way you are, right? So, but if you did somehow make yourself the way you were, you'd have to already be some way

to choose the way you wanted to make yourself be. And where did that come from? You'd have to get back behind that too and determine what that was. And what you get is a classic infinite regress. You just can't get back behind yourself in such a way that you could really be said to be responsible for how you are. It's brilliant. It sounds like game set and match, actually. It sounds like game set and match. But we must... Where do we move on to from that, Simon?

Well, I think we do move on to some variety of compatibilism. One thought that perhaps helps, I found it helps some people, is this. It's easy to think that we only hold people morally responsible for occasions when they've, as it were, voluntarily willed something. They've decided to do. something and it's the wrong thing and then we get cross at them. But of course we actually hold people morally responsible for other things as well. For example, negligence or recklessness. Supposing somebody ought, that is, it's their job or in some way

their duty to look after a child say and they are negligent. They just get involved in their book or whatever. There's no willing, there's no active intervention of the mind thinking, I better ignore that child. All that happens is they find themselves absorbed in their book. And the child potters often falls in the river. Well, we held them responsible. It was their job to look after the child and they failed. And we'd be angry.

If you were a parent, you'd be very angry. And the courts might be angry too. That's moral responsibility, but not for an occasion on which your mind intervened. it was more responsibility for just not behaving as you should have behaved. And I think the compatibilist wants to generalise that kind of model and say, sure, you know, it's you, it's you, I'm afraid. It's you who's a nasty piece of work or you who makes these mistakes. And I'm going to be pretty nasty to you about it. That's by holding you responsible for something bad.

You use Galen's argument and say, oh, but I'm going to be pretty nasty to you about it. and say, oh, but I can't help the way I am, I say I don't really care. You're a nasty piece of work, and I'm going to thump you. And, you know, the fact that your parents or the environment or your education or listening to the wrong kind of radio program made you a nasty piece of work doesn't bother me. It's the way you are that I'm going to treat badly.

Do you want to come back on that from a moment again? Yeah, I mean, I agree with that to an extent. And, I mean, although I do think the argument is very hard to stop, you've got to realise what it entails. It means that even Hitler gets off the hook. And that's something... That immediately is enough to put all this off forever, as it were. So that's all I wanted to say in comment.

Well, let's go to Helen again. There are some incompatibilists are known as libertarians. I'm reading this very carefully here. But there's a slightly more optimistic view here. The whole thing seems to be wriggling against determinism, doesn't it? Can you tell us what the libertarians bring to, as it were, the arm of free will? Right. So libertarians start out from the assumption that determinism is incompatible with free will.

So one of those two things has to go. Now some people think that what should go is freedom of the will. What libertarians think is that the thing that should go is determinism. So the sort of the standard libertarian model for acting freely is, you're deliberating about what to do, you come to a decision, right up until the point at which you make that decision, the laws of nature and facts about your brain and your environment and so on,

leave it genuinely undetermined what you're going to do. So your decision is the thing that settles the matter, and before that it genuinely wasn't fixed what was going to happen. So libertarian is sort of an attractive position in many ways. I mean, it gets us freedom of the will, which is great. That's something that we all want because it gives us moral responsibility. And also it connects with the way that things, seem to us from the inside,

and something that we talked about earlier, when you're deciding between the chicken and the beef or whatever it is, it really does seem to you as those two options are genuinely on the table until the point at which you make the decision. It doesn't seem to you like it's already fixed which one you're going to decide to do, and all you're really doing is kind of, you know,

playing that out. But I guess the problem with libertarianism, one of the problems with libertarianism, is that it's kind of a massive hostage to fortune because we really just don't know whether on any given occasion or in general, our decisions are undetermined right up until we make them in just that way. I mean, you can't argue from the kind of how it seems from the inside,

the phenomenology of how it seems when we make decisions, to the claim that that's how the laws of nature really are. It's up to scientists, I think, to figure out whether facts about the prior states of our brains determined via the relevant laws, what we're going to do or whether they leave things open. and scientists are very, very long way away from answering that question. So libertarianism is, libertarians make the claim that sometimes our decisions have this form, but they basically have no grounds for saying that, unfortunately.

Simon Blackburn, a lot of this relies on the assumption that the universe is entirely predictable, but we know now that there's a randomness at the heart of it, if we're anywhere near the heart of it. There's a randomness of it. Things slip, particle slip from one thing to another. How does that indeterminacy affect your argument? Or affect the argument? Yes.

Well, as Galen's already said, it's not easy to see it as affecting the argument very favorably at all. Because if a quantum indeterminacy, for example, a subatomic particle leaping from one energy state to another, if that just happened in my brain and then its effect was magnified and it made me do something rather strange, it's very difficult to see that that brings my responsibility in because after all I've just been the victim of a chance event it's as if somebody had hit me with a brick and as a result something else had happened it wouldn't be me doing it

it would be a happening in my head responsible for it I think to make me responsible we need the idea of the event somehow running through my cognitive control, running through my motivational states, running through my desires and intentions. And random events don't, as it were, bring that machinery into play, not in and of themselves. So I agree with Galen, and it's usually known as the dilemma of determinism, that determinism seems to threaten certain conceptions of free will.

So does indeterminism. So why does that leave as Galen? There are those who believe that there's no contradiction between a deterministic universe. and free will, and there are attempts. Are they flailing attempts? Are they last ditch attempts to bring them together? What's your position on that? I thought you were going to say the opposition between people who think determinism ruins it and indeterminism might save it.

That's a better question. Why don't answer that? Well, actually, one thing I want to do is put a bit of a blocker on this idea that we know that the universe is indeterministic. We certainly don't know that. and it's actually it's provably unprovable. The what, sorry, I think. You can't prove determinism true or false.

It's provably unprovable. There are lots of cool mathematical things that are proved. How is it provably unprovable? Well, to put it simply, to prove it true, you basically just have to scan the whole universe, wait till the end and say, right, the universe is over, all the events were determined, so that's though it was true. That is, you can never know if there isn't going to be one coming along.

So you can't do that. You can't wait until the end of the end of the world. universe. To prove it falls, that's a bit more interesting. You'd have to have an event and say, here it is. I've got it. I know everything about it. And there's a little thing that hasn't got a cause. There's a little in undetermined bit. But the response to that is, from me, is how do you know? And there is no way of getting out of that. Because you might, you say, look, I'm absolutely sure that I've scanned everything. And I might say, how do you know there isn't something operating at some orders of magnitude lower than you can actually perceive,

which you haven't yet seen. So in the quantum theory terms, this is saying, how do you know there isn't a hidden variable? And in fact, people like David Deutsch, who's the man who did all the theoretical work for quantum computing, is quite clear on the point that quantum theory is a local and deterministic theory. So I'm with Einstein. Einstein said God does not play dice.

The universe is deterministic. So even if indeterminism could help with free will, which it can't, we have no particular reason to think that it's true. I'm for one betting that determinism is true. Simon, you raise your hand. Well, I just was anxious in case Gaila made it sound as though philosophy hasn't taken on board the nature of quantum mechanics. And of course we have,

and the orthodox view is that there are no hidden variables. And I think we ought to remain open-minded about that. seems to me quite possible that's certainly at the subatomic level or possibly even at the macro level some things just happen. It's perfectly conceivable. There's no a priori bar to it. And I think we ought to remain agnostic about that. We've got to remain agnostic because just as you can't prove to turn this and true of force, you can't prove, well, just as you can't prove it true, you can't prove it false either, and that settles it. But I thought it was being said that the fact that some people think that we can

know that there are no hidden variables. But as I understand it, that's, as it were, an artifact of what's called the von Neumann formulation of quantum mechanics, and there have been deterministic formulations of it. Yes, that's true. What would do, is David Hume a help on this, Simon? Well, Hume is a very, um, David Hume was relaxed about most things and he was certainly relaxed about this problem. He, um, he was a compatibilist. He thought that, uh, free will in any sense that it's worth wanting, worth caring about, was compatible with determinism. And he advanced a compatibilist definition,

which he said, by liberty, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. That is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may. If we choose to move, we also may. Now, this hypothetic liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains. So it's perfectly true of me as I sit here

That if I choose to raise my left hand, I can thus And if I choose to raise my right hand I can thus But when you say I can There's experiments going on We said that before you raise your left hand Your brain has already a little bit beforehand Decided to do that without your will being involved Yes, this of course is now well confirmed experimentally

And I'm jolly glad of it I'd be very sorry to learn the time my hand goes up as it were without any antecedent events enabling it to happen I'd be very surprised at that no I think those results don't show it it wasn't me

it was me that raised my hand it just shows that my raising it isn't a ghost in the machine acting and knowing that it's acting at a certain moment of time but that would have been a very naive conception of what it is for me to do something in any event

It's the whole me, the one you're looking at, that does things. It's not the little ghost that somehow sits in the brain and pulls levers. The ghost of the machine, that's riles, right. Gelland, do you want to come in then, Helen? No, I just completely agree with that. I mean, what people want is they want to think that it's the conscious eye that makes the decision. So these are experiments by this man, Benjamin Libet, which shows that the brain, the readiness potential, the brain action that's going to be,

is the beginning of your action, has started before your conscious. before you've made the conscious decision. But it doesn't mean it's less you. It doesn't take anything away from you. It's flowing from your character, your preferences and so on. So that is just no threat to free will at all. Would you develop this, Helen?

Yes, well, I think we're all agreed about this, actually. I mean, I think those... So it is saying, just... Are you saying, therefore, that there's a place now, free will is finding a place for itself or is being argued, to a place for itself, in the general sense of the word? Well, I think...

If there is a general sense, it's stupid thing to say in a paragraph like this anyway, never mind. I think there is a sort of a common sense notion of free will that I think most philosophers agree can't possibly be realised in the world as it actually is. And it isn't, that common sense notion of free will is the kind of notion of free will that things like the livid experiments put pressure on,

the idea that there's the ghost in the machine, machine that steps in and pulls the lever while the brain just by itself is just kind of leaving things open. Now, insofar as that's kind of the ordinary common sense notion of free will, philosophers can kind of go one of two ways. You can either say, well, okay, if that's what free will is, then we don't have it, and that's kind of libid's view about it. Or you can say, okay, maybe we should just get a little bit more sophisticated about what we mean by free will and think about what role that notion's playing in our attributions of moral responsibility

and the way that we think about each other, the kinds of distinctions that we make between people, like with the spider and the torture case. And so it might be that the notion of free will that philosophers then end up with isn't quite the same as the kind of ordinary notion of free will, but that's kind of part of the point of philosophy is to refine our common-sense notions

and try and come up with a better account of the way the world is. Gernis Ross, about 40 years ago, another philosopher Peter Strasson, your father, wrote an influential essay on the subject of free will, which has a strong influence. What did he argue? I think it's just the right time to bring this in. It wasn't 40 years ago, actually, Marvin.

It was probably slightly over 50 years ago, probably even in the very year in which you turned up on his doorstep as a bright-eyed 20-year-old. But clearly he saw the problem that the terminism seems to make free will impossible. Indeterminism doesn't have. So he just tried to subvert the whole topic in a very radical way by saying,

look, what's primitive, what's basic for us is what he called these personal reactive attitudes, these feelings we have towards other people, the feelings like gratitude and resentment. I mean, if you genuinely conceived of me as completely deterministic, it wouldn't make sense to feel gratitude for me for something I did or to resent me for something I did. nasty. So it looks like gratitude and resentment depend on believing in free will. And what he did was just switch that route. He says gratitude and resentment and things like that exist anyway. There's no way they're ever going to go away. And they, as it were, presuppose free will.

So we can't help believing in it, even if there is in the end some sense in which it's an illusion. So, you know, that's time to close the debate. We can't help believing in it. That's the given fact. It's built into our characters and our emotions. actually this is Hume said something to this effect as well. Simon. Yes, I mean it was a very great paper and I think the entire debate has profited from it. Of course it left people a bit worried because it made it sound as though we have to live an illusion. We have to sort of put up with the illusion of free will in order to live human lives.

And of course that's very irritating to floss. We like to think that we're reasonable that we don't have to have illusions. so a lot of people have tried to interpret Peter Strawson's famous paper as not, as it were, leaving us just with an illusion, but leaving us with something very valuable. If I could just say something about that, one aspect of the paper was that the alternative, that is seeing people not as fit objects of resentment or gratitude or anger,

the alternative was often thought to be rather civilised. you don't punish criminals, you treat them. And one of the things that Peter did was say, actually that's not all that civilised. If your attitude to other people is that they're just there to be managed or handled or cured or trained, was his wonderful phrase, then you're dehumanizing them.

You're denying them a certain kind of dignity. A certain kind of human interaction goes missing. And I think that was a very important turn to the debate. Finally and sadly, very briefly, Helen, would you agree with that? I suppose, well, maybe one way of putting the point that Simon's just made is, if you're a compatibilist, one thing you might do is say, look, there are different ways that we might think of human beings. You can think of a human being as just a machine,

or you can think of a human being as being the locus of more responsibility and so on. And those two things aren't in conflict with one another. Well, thank you very much for rushing there. Thanks, Helen Beebe, Simon Blackburn, Gayle, And Strausson, next week we're talking about the medieval universities. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

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