The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing up to a false belief

PRAISE FOR ‘THE NONSENSE OF FREE WILL’

Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, and Free Will:

Most people are completely taken in by the illusion of free will. Happily, Richard Oerton is not among them. The Nonsense of Free Will is a wonderfully clear – and very clever – little book.

Professor Ted Honderich, Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London:

There are philosophical, scientific, scholarly, novel, determined, American, pompous, dotty and other books on free will and determinism. There are also a few books that are lucid and informal introductions for ordinary readers and let you know that your free will does not exist. Richard Oerton’s may be the best of these.

Joshua Rozenberg, lawyer and legal commentator, formerly legal editor of the Daily Telegraph:

This book is superbly written and a delight to read. Starting as a clearly reasoned treatment of determinism, it merges seamlessly into a critique of English criminal law and penal policy, and ends with a plea for society to abandon what the author sees as its irrational belief in free will.

Dr. Stephen Cretney, D.C.L., F.B.A., Q.C., LL.D., Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, formerly Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bristol University, and a Law Commissioner from 1978 to 1983:

This fascinating book explains and discusses one of the most difficult questions underlying criminal liability – are we right to work on the basis that all sane people can exercise ‘free will’? Richard Oerton explores the free will v. determinism debate with remarkable and rare clarity. This is not a book only for academics: it is of vital interest to all who want to think about the way society is organised.

Richard Double, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania:

[What] I loved about your book [is that you] have an unsurpassed grasp of the deep issues in free will and reach the most reasonable conclusions, without becoming sidetracked by the philosophical jargon that impedes professional philosophers.

Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, USA:

Oerton has written a terrific book, a must read for anyone interested in the free will debate and why it matters. He reaches all the right conclusions, for the right reasons, stated most felicitously … a delightful read – unassuming, straightforward, informed and funny.

For the full review, see:​

http://www.naturalism.org/resources/book-reviews/the-rise-of-the-new-determinists

Copyright © 2012 Richard Oerton

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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This book is dedicated

to my grandchildren, Lily and Grace,

Eve and Gabriel, and Louis Jacob

and

to the memory of Louis Jacob’s father,

James Oerton,

forensic clinical psychologist

I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

Then you should certainly lecture on Philosophy, said the Dragonfly, and he spread a pair of lovely gauze wings and soared away into the sky.

Oscar Wilde, The Remarkable Robot,

from The Happy Prince and other stories,

first published in 1888.

Contents

Preface

1. Introductory

I DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL

2. What is determinism?

3. What is free will?

II CAN WE RESCUE FREE WILL?

4. Could he have done otherwise?

5. What about conscience?

6. What about choice?

7. What about religion?

8. What about chance?

9. What about mind, brain and consciousness?

10. What about falsifying predictions?

11. Do we form ourselves?

12. Can the human mind evaluate free will?

III DO WE REALLY BELIEVE IN FREE WILL?

13. Our ambivalence

14. Just a little bit … not too much of it?

IV IMPLICATIONS OF DISBELIEF

15. Reason and emotion

16. What have we got to lose?

17. Determinism and morality

18. A determinist view of oneself and others

19. Why doesn’t free will self-destruct?

V DETERMINISM, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

20. The real causes of crime

21. The incoherent aims of sentencing

22. Society’s need for retribution

23. Towards a rational penal system?

VI LAST THOUGHTS

24. Free will and religion: some parallels

25. The nonsense of free will

26. Beyond determinism?

Epilogue

Notes

Preface

What do we talk about when we talk about free will? A recent book which touches on this subject says, Tell most people they don’t have free will, and they will defiantly tell you you’re wrong ¹. I guess this is true. But I think it’s true also that if you were to ask them to explain what exactly it is that they claim to have when they claim to have free will, they would flounder. While I was writing this book I asked one of my grand-daughters, who happened at the time to be studying an aspect of Roman history for her A levels, what she understood by the term free will. She answered kindly but firmly, Oh no, Grandad: I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the Catiline conspiracy, but not free will. It seemed a wise reply.

If this book has a main theme, then this is it. Free will is indefinable, and it’s indefinable because it is an incoherent idea – a nonsense, literally a piece of non-sense. If free will were a comprehensible concept, the job of a free will denier would be to examine it with a view to showing why, despite its comprehensibility, it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in human beings. In fact, however, my purpose is rather to show that it is not a comprehensible concept at all, but a self-contradictory one, so that it is intrinsically incapable of any existence.

Attempts to define free will seem to resolve themselves into definitions of an absence. Free will is what exists if something else does not exist. In its popular conception - the only conception which will bear the weight we put on it - free will is what exists in the absence of determinism. (As we shall see later, this isn’t the conception advanced by compatibilist philosophers, though even they conceive it in terms of an absence - in their case, an absence of external compulsion or mental illness.) But this sort of negative definition is not acceptable. I suppose you can define peace, rather crudely, as an absence of war, or war as an absence of peace, but you can say much more than that about war and peace: you can, if pressed to do so, explain more or less what constitutes the one and what constitutes the other. Not so with free will.

The nearest you can get, and the nearest I could get in this book, to defining free will is to show, by means of examples, the effects which its exercise is supposedly capable of producing. Whatever else is true of our idea of free will, it must be true that, if we possess it, we really might have acted in ways different from the ways in which we did act. Because of free will, Hitler really might have shown particular benevolence towards the Jews, spoken disparagingly of the Aryan race, and insisted that Germans already had more lebensraum than they knew what to do with ². And since free will must mean not only that people might do good things instead of bad, but equally that they might do bad things instead of good, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, instead of acting in such a way as to win themselves a Nobel Peace Prize, really might have conspired together to plunge the whole of South Africa into civil war. And my grand-daughter, instead of responding in the way she did, might have said to herself, Poor old sod, I don’t know what he’s on about but, preoccupied though I am with thoughts of Cicero and Catilina, I’ll try to answer his question, and attempted (perhaps without much success) to do so. And these things might have happened - really might have happened, might really have happened - despite the whole history of the universe and the way in which that history produced, formed and bore upon the individual people concerned up to the moment when they did what they did and didn’t do what they didn’t do.

We’ll say no more about my grand-daughter (so goodbye, Eve), but the idea that Hitler, Mandela and de Klerk might really have behaved in the ways suggested in the last paragraph is so implausible that most people would reject it out of hand. Where does that leave them? It is at this point that many would seek refuge in some sort of compromise. Some might say that our free will consists in the ability to make the best of the hand which history (in the shape of our heredity and our past environment) has dealt us; but of course this ability, its nature and strength, must itself be a part of that same hand and so, come to that, must be our conception of what the best is. Other people, while reluctantly accepting that complete free will is impossible, might still want to assert that some (incomplete) free will must exist somehow, or somewhere; but, as I hope to show in the book, a belief of this kind would be of no practical utility even if it were tenable.

The fact that free will is conceived negatively, as what exists in the absence of determinism, has at least two ill consequences. The first, as I’ve mentioned, is that little attempt is ever made to give the concept any positive definition of its own, so that the impossibility of framing such a definition goes unnoticed. The second is the widespread belief, held even by some philosophers, that all you have to do in order to preserve and uphold free will is to pick holes in determinism. But even if such holes can be picked - even if, for example, an element of real chance, real indeterminacy, enters into human behaviour - this would not serve to establish free will unless free will is itself a meaningful concept.

This book contains quite a few references to philosophers, but I am a lawyer, not a philosopher, and I didn’t conceive it as a book of philosophy. I certainly haven’t tried to adopt or regurgitate the views of any philosopher. I set out to write almost an anti-philosophical book; a "come on, get real, cut the crap and just look at this sort of book; very nearly a this isn’t philosophy, this is common sense sort of book. My intention, above all, was to bring the subject down to earth, in the hope that people who may know nothing of philosophy, but are open to reason and willing to think for themselves, will see the nonsensicality of what we call free will. Whether I’ve succeeded is not for me to judge, but I think the attempt is worthwhile. Our belief in free will is a false belief and we are better off without false beliefs because any false belief enslaves us even if it goes by a name which has the word free" in it.

1.

Introductory

I can remember the moment when I became a determinist. It was well over half a century ago and I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I was sitting in a classroom at school. Either the lesson had finished or it hadn’t started, or perhaps it was taking place but I was paying no attention to it. And whatever train of thought I was idly pursuing led me to see, suddenly and without warning, that I was inescapably the product of a complex chain of cause and effect stretching back into the past and ultimately to a time before I was born, and that because I was a product of this chain so, too, were my thoughts and feelings and actions. In my mind’s eye I saw existence as something like a patterned carpet slowly unrolling, its size unimaginably great and its pattern unimaginably complex. The part of it which has already unrolled is the past, the pattern now exposed but most of it lost beyond recollection. The part still rolled up is the future, and although its pattern is not yet visible it is already fixed because it follows ineluctably from the pattern of the earlier part. My own life was a tiny piece of the pattern located just where the carpet was unrolling, part visible, part not, its shape and nature determined by the fact that it fitted into the larger pattern beside and behind it.

I think that I imagined myself the first person to have had this insight. In fact, of course, the arguments between determinists and proponents of free will have their origins long ago. It has been said that each generation – or each generation of budding philosophers – discovers these arguments anew. But although each generation rediscovers them and dances around them, no real consensus ever emerges from their activity. They are like a large family playing a long-lasting board game like Monopoly and enjoying it so much that they want it never to end. This struck me, when I first discovered it, as deeply strange. It isn’t as if the outcome of the arguments doesn’t matter: in some important ways, as I hope to show, it matters very much. Yet, desultorily, at an abstruse level and inconclusively, the arguments go on. As I read more about them, I found myself lost in wonder at the sophistry with which the issues were treated or, much more often it seemed to me, avoided. I came to see determinism as an elephant in the room – something which is both obvious and significant but which no one wants to acknowledge. I realised in the end that the reasons for this are not so difficult to understand, but that is something to explore later on.

In describing my first awareness of determinism I have used a visual metaphor: the patterned carpet. To understand something must always, I suspect, be in some sense to picture it visually. It is no accident that someone to whom something eventually becomes clear will say, Oh, I see, or, "Oh, now I see". It is somehow pictured in the mind’s eye. And if it is never