Determinism as Necessary for Morality

by Chris Cogan (Copyright 2005)

Feedback, discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan, ccogan@ou.edu

 

The basic idea here is to show that indeterministic free will is incoherent, outright harmful to any serious concept of moral responsibility, and confused, and that there is a straightforward alternative theory that does not entail any of the problems that the theory of indeterministic free will entails. In order for our choices to be our choices, they must be determined by us, by what we are. Therefore, any breakdown in deterministic causation at the point of choosing is a breakdown in the relationship between us and our choices that makes them our choices. There can be no moral responsibility for uncaused events.

 

I found, after writing the first draft of this essay, that Daniel C. Dennett had said many of the same things in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Our respective views are so similar that Dennett and I seem to have undergone a process of parallel evolution. Nevertheless, my own formulation here is far shorter than his book (which, itself, is not a long book), and it is also far different in formulation in most respects, so even someone who has read the book may find slants and perspectives and connections here the he may not have gotten from the book. Even though I have not yet finished reading his book, I think I can safely recommend it as further reading for those who are interested in further development of some of the ideas I've covered only briefly below.

 

Also, I'd like to note a common reversal in argument, which is the tack of arguing, in effect, that indeterministic free will has to be assumed because it is needed for morality. The main problem with this view is that we cannot rationally argue for a factual claim merely because we want it to be true, or even if we need it to be true. Fortunately, we don't need indeterministic free will to be true. In fact, we need it to be false.

 

I say this despite the hint of this fallacy in my own title for this essay. Though I regard determinism as necessary to morality, I don't argue for determinism on the basis of any moral ideas. My use of moral ideas is mainly to show that a rational deterministic theory does not (luckily for us) invalidate rational ideas of freedom or moral responsibility. I do this because I know full well that, even if people found my logical and metaphysical arguments apparently sound, they would still hesitate to accept my views in this respect if they still felt that indeterminism was necessary for morality. People would be unreasonable to do so, at least if they fully understood the argument and accepted the argument, but I know from experience that they would still do this. Ironically, this is a form of determinism that my theory does not imply but which I have seen too often to deny: People are often determined by their belief in the moral necessity of indeterminism to reject determinism.[1]

 

Intuition Pitfalls

 

Intuition is only reliable when it has a "knowledge-base" to work from, when that knowledge-base itself is adequate to justify the ideas that intuition supplies, and when the habits of thought that the person habitually applies with respect to that knowledge are adequate. If any of these conditions is not met, then, no matter how true an idea based on intuition seems to be, there is a really good chance that it is not true. Even if these conditions are met, there is still a good chance that the idea is not true.

 

Many principles of physics, mathematics, economics, probability theory, and philosophy are, at least for most people, counter-intuitive. But they are true in spite of that. Reality blithely disregards our beliefs about it, no matter how much we may feel that they are true, and reality has not the slightest concern with adjusting itself to make our intuitions and faith-based beliefs true of it.

 

This means it is up to us, not reality, to ensure that our ideas and beliefs match reality. Reality will, as a whole, makes no active contribution to ensuring that our beliefs are true of it. It will, sometimes, let us know in dramatic ways when one or more of our beliefs is wrong, but, even then, we have to figure out which belief or beliefs are wrong, and sometimes it "tells" us about our errors by killing us. Obviously, using death as an epistemological tool in this way is not usually very practical. Sometimes reality seems to tell us that a belief is true when in fact it isn't. This doesn't mean that we cannot learn the truth about reality, but it does mean that we cannot rely on our guesses and intuitions with respect to many philosophical issues, because our intuitions are based either on insufficient data, or on what we have been taught, and so on.

 

We cannot trust intuition and our feelings in any sort of global and uncritical way. Ultimately, we need a rigorously rational basis for our beliefs, especially those that clearly have a major effect on how we live our lives.

 

Also, in general, as we grow up we tend to classify things, tend to conceptualize things, in terms of whatever concepts and ideas seem handy or plausible, not necessarily in terms of how we would classify or conceptualize if we were, say, attempting to prove a mathematical theorem or develop a principle of theoretical physics that other physicists wouldn't just laugh at. That is, as normal human beings growing up in the world, we tend to conceptualize in a very informal and even casual way, and we tend to accept whatever way of formulating something seems plausible to us, and that we don't immediately see any problems with.

 

One example of this kind of conceptualization is the old belief in the flatness of the Earth. If those around us do not specially inform us about the shape of the Earth, and if we have not for some reason put forth considerable thought, the flatness of the earth seems obvious. After all, when we just look out towards the horizon, we don’t see the Earth curving down away from us. Indeed, from our perspective on the ground, hills and buildings in the distance that happen to be taller than we are might suggest that the Earth curves upward.

 

At one time, the flatness of the Earth was assumed by most ordinary people because such flatness is easy to conceptualize and imagine, and because people mostly didn't have or notice evidence of overall curvature, or, generally, have any special reason to do so in their daily lives. How much need for knowledge of the Earth's shape would a European serf have?

 

My point in warning you that intuition and faith are commonly unreliable in certain areas and under many conditions is that parts of what I'm about to say may seem severely counter-intuitive to you, especially at first, but I hope you will try to hold off on flatly rejecting it until you have a better sense of how it all hangs together and what it means and why I say it.

 

Misconceptions about Determinism

 

Fatalism

 

One common misconception of determinism associates determinism as such with what is better called fatalism, or the idea that one is somehow "fated" to perform some action regardless of what actions one takes to prevent oneself from performing that action. Thus, if one is fated to kill his parents, it doesn't matter if he moves to another continent to avoid any such possibility; something will somehow put him in a situation where he kills his patients. But, this view of determinism is clearly mistaken. Outside of literature, most notably in some plays by some Ancient Greeks, we don't see this kind of thing happening. The point here is simply that, while this would be a kind of determinism, it is not determinism in general, it is not the only kinds of determinism we can imagine or conceive of.

 

Compulsion

 

The other main misconception about determinism is that, if we are determined to do something, then we must be compelled to do it, such as by a strong emotional impetus, or an obsession or psychological compulsion. This form of determinism is like fatalism in that it makes suppositions about the kind of determinism that must be the case if we do in fact act deterministically. But this supposition is unjustified; determinism as such has absolutely no implications at all to the effect that deterministic actions must be somehow "forced" on us, if only in a psychological way.

 

Misconceptions About Indeterminism

 

Both of the main misconceptions about indeterminism are reflections of the above misconceptions about determinism, so they only need to be briefly described here.

 

Rejection of Fatalism

 

Sometimes a person claims to be an indeterminist because he supposes that determinism must be fatalistic and he has rejected fatalism and therefore infers that he must also reject determinism

 

Rejection of Compulsion

 

Sometimes a person claims to be an indeterminist because he supposes that determinism is necessarily a claim of psychological compulsion. Since he sees that we do not always act on compulsion (and that is implausible to argue even that we secretly always act on compulsion), he claims to be an indeterminist merely because he rejects this "compulsive" view of human action.

 

Both of the views described here depend on the corresponding misconception about determinism, in that, in each case, the term "indeterminism" is applied because of the rejection of determinism as misconceived in one of the two ways described, rather than because of a well-considered and detailed understanding of determinism as such which has led the person to see it as unacceptable.

 

In fact, two of the main reasons people are reject determinism is because of such misconceptions. Sadly, this applies even to many philosophers, who really ought to know better.[2]

 

What Determinism Is

 

Determinism is simply the view that, whatever happens, it is somehow caused to happen. As such, it makes no suppositions at all as to what the causes must be ("the gods" or some sort of compulsion, for example), and absolutely no suppositions as to what must be caused, and, finally, no suppositions as to the specific causal processes occurring in the world. Determinism assumes causation, not fatalism, not compulsion, and not magic. Determinism is really nothing more than the recognition of the nature of causation as being the way things in reality "express" what they are, their identities.

 

For example, spherical things act differently from cubical things; that's how we can tell them apart. They reflect light differently, they block the view of what's behind them differently, the reflect sound waves differently, they produce different sensations when touched, the roll (or don't) along the ground differently, and so on. That is, with respect to the particular facts of things that exist in the real world, what they are is simply what they "do" and what they "do" is what they are. We need two different ways of talking about things for conceptual and communicational reasons, not because the causal behavior of a thing is supposedly somehow distinct from its identity.[3]

 

The only means we have of knowing anything specific about things in the world is via causal relationships, because all of our sense organs depend on physical interactions. Even when we infer some fact about the world form other facts, we are still depending on causal relationships. If we infer from the explosion of a building that a friend is dead because we know he was in the building at the time, we are still using causal relationships, but merely in an indirect way. There is no way around this: If we want to know something about the real world, we simply must make use of causal relationships. There is nothing about the real world that we can know that we don't know of via causal relationships of some kind.

 

Why mention this? Because some have argued against determinism on the grounds that things might be one thing and yet act like something else entirely. This view assumes that there is some very bizarre disconnection or distinction to be made between what a thing is and what it does. My remarks above are intended to show (or at least indicate) why this cannot be true.

 

One of the implications of this idea that what a thing is is what it "does" (where what it "does" may include nothing more than passively continuing to exist) is that we can never, on an observational or logical basis, suppose that a thing might do something other than whatever it does in fact do. This is because not only is a thing's identity whatever it does, but whatever it "does" is also its identity. There is no identity above and beyond whatever it "does" in this sense. What would such an identity be? How could we ever know of it? Suppose we have a cube of solid iron, and someone suggests that there is more to this particular cube's identity than what its identity as a cube of iron would imply or comprise. Suppose it's claimed that the cube of iron also has an "invisible" identity as a sphere of ice, such that, if left on a smooth slope in the hot sunlight it could roll down the slope and also begin to melt into water. Would we be wise to support this claim? Anyone want to make a real-world bet that this could happen?

 

I imagine not. Why would we refuse this bet? Because a cube of iron is not a sphere of ice. We might convert the cube of iron into a sphere of ice, of course, by dismantling its atoms and reassembling the subatomic particles as water molecules, but that's irrelevant to the claim that a cube of iron also might also have an identity as a sphere of ice.

 

Now, it is, of course, true that we don't always (or even ever) know all of the facts of a thing's identity, but this doesn't mean that any of the facts of a thing's identity can ever be facts that are logically incompatible with what we do know, and it doesn't mean that we can suppose that a cube of iron may arbitrarily act like a sphere of ice (if an object really and truly acts like a sphere of ice, then it's simply false that it is a cube of iron at all).

 

A complete cause for an event or effect is the entire causal context present at the time of the event that produces that event. But, the complete cause for the causing of any one event is incompatible with the complete cause for the causing of any other, incompatible event. For example, if a complete cause is such that it will cause an object to move to the left, this is incompatible with the complete cause needed to cause that same object to move to the right. What this means is that the complete cause for the case where the object will move to the left is such that it prevents the object from moving to the left (obviously, moving to the left is not compatible with moving to the right at that time). Similarly, the complete cause for moving to the left prevents the object from moving to the right. If it doesn't prevent it, then it cannot be sufficient to cause the object to move to the left because it might still move to the right.

 

Put in other terms, supposing that something (take your pick as to what; the logic here is absolutely universal) may truly do either of two different and incompatible things at a single time is to suppose by implication that there are two mutually exclusive complete causes present at that time, and that, even though they are in fact such that either will prevent the other from existing, neither of them does prevent the other from existing. This is a fairly obvious violation of the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction, since, by definition of either, the other cannot occur at the same time.

 

Let me close this section by proposing a paradigm case for determinism: Suppose the entire universe were exactly duplicated by God so that, even an infinite degree of precision of knowledge about every particle and photon could not distinguish any difference between them. Suppose they are both kept causally isolated, from each other and from all other outside causal influences. Then, what strict determinism implies is that, even after trillions of years have passed, these two universes will still be absolutely identical, down to the last detail. And, under determinism, this would be true of even an infinite number of such duplicated and isolated universes. This is quite a lot to claim, but notice that it does not imply any form of fatalism or of compulsion in any particular human actions. In particular, it does not imply that a person who chooses to go to the drugstore for aspirin for a headache is unfree in any morally meaningful sense merely because his exact "Doppelganger" in the other universe is making the same choice at the same time.

 

What Would Indeterminism Be?

 

Since I flatly deny the possibility of indeterminism, I have titled this section " What Would Indeterminism Be?" rather than "What is Indeterminism?" Given the thought experiment of the duplicate universes above, probably the clearest and quickest way of indicating the nature of indeterminism would be to say that, if indeterminism were true, we could not, in general, suppose that even just two exactly identical universes would still be exactly identical after the passage of some amount of time. That is, indeterminism would allow that the two universes might actually diverge in some way at some point. If someone agrees that two such initially identical and isolated universes would necessarily remain identical until at least one of them was interfered with in some way, then that person is not advocating a theory of true indeterminism, but merely something like unpredictability due to the impossibility of gaining adequate knowledge. On the other hand, a person who agrees that two such initially identical universes could not diverge in some way over time, is actually holding to a theory of determinism even if he describes himself as an indeterminist (oddly, it sometimes actually happens that a person will describe himself -- perhaps in other terminology -- as an indeterminist and say that the two universes would not in fact diverge).

 

Just as determinism may come in many "flavors," so may indeterminism. Some indeterminists suppose it to apply only to the behavior of subatomic particles; others suppose it to apply only to some choices of human beings.

 

And some really only mean that they are not fatalists or believe in determinism as compulsion, under the assumption that determinism simply is fatalism or compulsion. I will only point out here that this is a basic conceptual mistake, and does not affect the basic issue of determinism at all, since both strict determinists and indeterminists can agree that fatalism is not true and that we are not always acting under compulsion. The real issue with respect to determinism itself is strictly a matter of causation as such, and the real issue with respect to morality is what freedom is.

 

That is, while indeterminism as non-fatalism and as non-compulsion does not suffer from the contradiction of indeterminism argued above, such indeterminism is actually misnamed and is actually compatible with strict determinism, at least when it is not supposed that non-fatalism and non-compulsion imply true causal indeterminism as well.[4]

 

What is Freedom?

 

The idea of indeterministic free will is a staple of the philosophical ideas of Western Civilization. In fact, it is so much a staple of our philosophical ideas that the phrase "indeterministic free will" would be typically regarded as a redundancy, because free will is normally defined in terms of indeterminism. This idea is especially popular with Christians, who claim that, if we are not free in some absolute, indeterministic sense, then we are not responsible, and we need to be responsible so God can punish us for all eternity if we choose wrongly and reward us for all eternally if we choose correctly.

 

Indeterminism itself is formulated in terms of absolute openness of alternatives, such that, when something is acting indeterministically, it is possible that it could have done at least one other thing than what it did, some other thing that would be incompatible with what it actually did do. Indeterministic freedom defined this way requires that a person have been able to do something other than what he did in fact do. The advocate of indeterministic free will will claim that one can't actually be free if one could not have done something else at the time one is supposed to have free will.

 

However, this view of freedom, aside from the incoherent theory of causation involved, has the problem of being silly as well. Suppose you come to an intersection and you want to go to the right because that's where the store is that you want to go to, and you also think that going to the right is the right thing to do, so you go to the right. According to the indeterminist, you would not be free in this case if you could not have gone to the left instead, even though you have no reason to go to the left, and you don't want to go to the left. Do you have a sense of a lack of freedom when you turn to the right, even though, given your values, your knowledge, and your goals, you could not have turned to the right?

 

No, because freedom doesn't depend on alternatives in the sense that prior to considering situation (maybe you hadn't yet decided that you needed to go to the store), you would have seen the intersection as offering two alternatives for turning (let's suppose it's a "T" intersection), but, as soon as the relevant facts come to mind and are adequately processed, you lose the alternative of turning to the left. You could go to the left if you chose to, of course, but, given your knowledge and understanding and your goals, you can't choose to go to the left. If your knowledge (etc.) were sufficiently different, you would have chosen to go to the left, but that would be a different situation, so the ability to choose that option under those conditions is irrelevant to your current situation.

 

But, there have been, even since early Greek philosophy, some brave souls who had trouble with this view of free will that requires the possibility of such contra-factual choices. Some of them, being more brave than philosophically insightful, have simply accepted the idea that free will, if it is real at all, must be indeterministic and have consequently simply denied the occurrence of free will. Others, in my opinion the more insightful, have recognized that there is no reason to accept a definition of free will that's arbitrary and baseless, and have sought to define free will in a way that makes it compatible with determinism. People who hold this view have come to be known as compatibilists, even though compatibilists may not agree on much else about free will or human choices and actions. This essay can be regarded as, among other things, a defense of compatibilism.

 

The indeterminist seems to be getting confused between how we may experience a situation before we have chosen an alternative with the situation at the time when a choice is actually made. Before we have realized that we need to go to the store, we may view the "T" intersection ahead as offering two equally acceptable alternatives, such that we are, let us suppose, indifferent to which way we turn. But, as soon as we realize that we need to pick up some items at the store and we realize that that's what we really want to do, and no counter-considerations of any significance have come to mind at the moment when we actually must choose, then it is false that we could have chosen to go to the left, and yet, as we turn to the right with the blasé aplomb, with no sense at all of being unfree.

 

I hold that this is the correct approach, that there is what we can properly call free will, but that it doesn't require or depend on any form of true causal indeterminism, and that, in particular, it only depends on acting on our judgment.

 

Responsibility

 

Another step to be taken is to consider what responsibility requires. If there are situations where we are truly free in the sense of being free even from our own judgment, then, whatever choice we make in those situations is not really our choice. It is, instead, something that just happens to us. Whenever there is a causal disconnection of the kind required by indeterministic free will, there cannot be moral responsibility. If, were you a deterministic being, you would definitely choose not to steal given an opportunity to steal, then, if we modify your basic metaphysical nature so you will now choose indeterministically to steal or not to steal, then your choice is, to the extent of such "freedom," disconnected from you, disconnected from your judgment, disconnected from your character.

 

Such disconnection is, to say the least, not a basis for moral responsibility. In fact, it is, by itself, tantamount to a denial of responsibility.

 

When people say that free will must be indeterministic, they are typically trying to have their moral responsibility and deny it too, because, though they don't say so, what is really leading them to claim that free will is necessary for moral responsibility is not indeterminism, but rather a freedom from classes of determinism that invalidate responsibility. They use the concepts or the terminology of indeterminism, but, in imputing responsibility to the moral agent for his free will choices, they are also saying that his choices did in fact, and despite their earlier disclaimers, emanate from the person himself and that these choices are therefore not indeterministic.

 

This contradiction is inherent in the usual ideas of free will, which amount to a kind of package deal fallacy, because, while one idea is explicitly stated, another idea must "packaged" with it and accepted along with the first idea in order to save moral responsibility.

 

The result is a contradiction that can never, even in principle, be resolved as long as freedom is supposed to be both truly indeterministic (not merely deterministic in a special way) and we are supposed also to be morally responsible for our choices.

 

If our choices are indeterministic, we cannot be responsible for them. But if we are to be morally responsible, our choices must be determined by us, by what we are, by our judgment, and must not occur in an indeterministic way.

 

All of these problems disappear if we adopt both a rational deterministic idea of free will and a concept of moral responsibility that rests on it. We then still have other problems about moral choices, but all of these problems exist under indeterministic ideas of free will, so we gain nothing as far as dealing with these issues by reverting to an indeterministic view of free will. And, in any case, most of them are not fundamental problems of morality, but are more in the nature of technical difficulties arising from the complexity of human nature and human action and from lesser conceptual confusions that I want to avoid dealing with here.

 

The basic idea is that we have free will to the extent that our choices emanate from our judgment as to what we think is the best thing for us to do, and free will is lost to the extent that our choices are determined by compulsions and/or external forces (such as someone threatening to kill us if we don't steal).

 

I've already suggested that we cannot be responsible for indeterministic choices because, by definition, they cannot be our choices. If they are our choices, they are determined by us, and are thus no more indeterministic than an ordinary pocket calculator (though the processes involved are a lot more, well, involved, of course).

 

We can't even have our indeterminism and eat it too by supposing that there is something indeterminate about us just prior to a free choice. If there is, then that is not under our control, and it is not something we can be responsible for. Suppose that, just before some choice, a beam from a Martian's ray gun passes through your brain and produces a modification of it such that some aspect of your brain is now indeterminate in nature, such that it is no longer possible to predict, even with God-like omniscience about the present state of your brain and mind, whether you will choose to steal or not to steal in the next moment.

 

Would we be responsible for choosing either way in such a case? No, because the indeterminate aspect of our brain would not really be a part of us. It would be like an intrusion from outside, negating the conditions of moral responsibility.

 

Responsibility would return only if there were some sort of "settling" that removed the indeterminateness and left us in a specific state. But, if that were to happen, then we are back to a deterministic context in which the issue of responsibility depends on our character (and, even so, since a person would, presumably, have no way of knowing that his brain had been corrupted by an outside force, his responsibility would be limited). There is no point to responsibility if there is no good correlation between what we are and our choices and actions, and, since an outside force caused the change in the person's brain in this hypothetical case, the person cannot be immediately responsible for it or for its consequences.

 

The general problem with indeterminism in relation to responsibility applies regardless of where the locus of the indeterminism is supposed to be. If it breaks the causal chain between our character and our actions, it invalidates responsibility. If this break occurs at the exact point of choosing, it invalidates responsibility. If it occurs, unknown to us, just before the choice, it invalidates responsibility.

 

There is no way around this. There is no way of re-formulating indeterminism so that it both retains its strict contra-causal nature and allows for responsibility. We cannot be responsible for anything not under our control and indeterminism, by definition, invalidates control. If it does this at crucial times (at the point of choosing), then it invalidates responsibility.

 

There is no way of reformulating the issue so as to avoid this problem because it is a factual issue. It's like introducing a gizmo into a pocket calculator that randomly modifies calculations on the basis of the detection of decay products of a bit of some radioactive substance. The parts of the calculator that still work cannot be "responsible" for the results past the point where one of these radioactive decay events intrudes, because it has no control over them. The "responsibility" in such a case then shifts to the nature of the radioactive material and the causes that trigger decay events. If there are no causes, if this kind of event is truly indeterministic, as some claim, then nothing is responsible for the results of a calculation. Thus, rather than provide a basis for responsibility, indeterminism negates responsibility to the extent that it is real because it breaks the causal links responsibility requires.

 

This is the point at which indeterminists start implicitly contradicting themselves if they haven't done so up to this point. This is because, while they are claiming that we have indeterministic free will, they also claim that we are responsible, and responsibility requires deterministic causation. Thus, in order to save their position in spite of their own claims, they have to ”smuggle" in the idea of determinism all over again, but without calling it such. The have to do this, if they want to preserve responsibility and they have to "smuggle" it in because explicitly introducing it would directly contradict the claims of indeterminism that they have already made.

 

Thus, their position, if it is to be coherent at all, and if it were to be explicitly formulated, would be something like this: We can act on our own character but we are indeterministically free with respect to compulsions and/or external causal factors that effectively force us to decide one way or another, even if we might not decide that way without the compulsion or other factors being present.

 

Notice that this is not indeterminism in any metaphysical sense, but merely a limitation on the kinds of determinism that we face. They are really claiming not that indeterminism is true, but that we are not always acting under the conditions of the kinds of determinism that invalidate free will and moral responsibility. They are forced into this position of going back on their initial indeterministic claims because, if they don't, then they cannot justify responsibility.

 

But, because they don't clarify their views enough to force the contradiction out into the open and then of their position, they end up actually advocating a kind of metaphysical nonsense because, I suppose, they have gotten so befuddled that they cannot conceive of any non-metaphysical concept of free will that will allow for any kind of moral responsibility. This is a mistake, not only because moral responsibility is perfectly possible in a deterministic view of free will, but also because it is arguing backwards, from desired results to supposed facts. We cannot suppose moral responsibility to be real and then argue backwards from this to some metaphysical conclusion, because moral responsibility itself is called into question if we haven't already resolved the metaphysical issues. That is, the proper direction for argument is from the more basic facts about causation to whatever conclusions about morality those facts imply, not from the wished-for conclusions back to the imagined metaphysical facts.

 

This does not mean that we cannot refer to the desired conclusions in a rhetorical way, to help people understand that moral responsibility is not invalidated in any general way by determinism. Showing that moral responsibility is still possible helps people make sense of both the metaphysical ideas and moral ideas. I'm only saying that the logic of proof cannot be from the desired conclusions about morality to some supposed conclusions about metaphysics. What this means is that, if the metaphysical facts were such as to invalidate free will and moral responsibility, then, rationally, that's what we would have to accept. We would then have to formulate whatever moral theory was still possible (if any) in the face of such a result. Fortunately, determinism, properly understood, has none of the horrible implications commonly associated with it by advocates of indeterministic free will.[5]

 

I have already said that, without causal continuity and connection between us and our choices, we cannot be morally responsible. But this idea can go down hard for some people because they have a view of moral responsibility steeped in religious metaphysics. In their view, moral responsibility is not merely the fact that we are responsible for the nature of our choices and actions if they are not compelled or externally forced, but rather, for them, moral responsibility is to some mystical/magical standard of morality deriving from God or some other similar metaphysical whatsit. This view is characterized by a deontological cast. It involves the idea that moral responsibility means adherence not to principles of action aimed at producing good consequences, but at adherence to some idea of duty that is not based on the to-be-expected natural consequences of actions. For example, they may hold that we have an absolute duty to follow the rules laid down by their God in some book, such as the Koran or the Bible or the Torah, regardless of the consequences. When this view is taken seriously, it means that even if an action would destroy the entire universe, if it were according to the rules, one would be immoral not to take that action.[6] Under such a view of morality responsibility becomes not making the best choice one can make for one's values (including other people), but rather it is a matter of slavishly following rules, rules that either have no basis other than religious pronouncements in some book, or which are, at best, only partially justified by rational cognitive processes, and which therefore, cannot be rationally regarded as rules to be followed no matter what. This view of moral responsibility assumes that morality is fundamentally contrary to human needs and human nature, and so, in order to claim that we can be moral in this sense, we must be free to ignore or discount our actual objective needs as human beings and act on the basis of rules that are cognitively arbitrary. How else could we attribute moral evil to a person who boils a kid goat in its mother's milk? I have no particular idea why a person would want to do that, but, if one is morally okay with boiling the goat at all, and if it is okay to use, say, the milk of another goat to boil it in, how can it be a moral "crime" to boil it in its mother's milk?

Objectively, this makes no sense, so to hold a person responsible for such actions, we have to establish a view of morality that ignores reason, and that just follows the rules.

 

That is, free will is regarded as the means whereby irrational moral rules can be made to seem something that we are "free" to act on, no matter how stupid and vicious they may be. The idea is that we are free to abandon reason in order to follow such arbitrary rules.

 

Well, in a sense, we are free to abandon reason, in that, if we do in fact choose to do something irrational, we can often in fact do so. But, the point here is that the usual Western religious idea of free will is aimed at weakening, not strengthening, any tendency we may naturally have to act rationally. Once an arbitrary set of rules is set up and once the idea that some abstract duty is adopted as the driving premise of morality, then such concepts of free will and moral responsibility become useful tools in persuading people to abandon reason in favor of such moral rules.

 

But a rational morality has no need for any such rules, and is not based on any premise of such duty, and so it has no need for any such concept of free will or moral responsibility. A rational person is morally required to choose the best action for his objectively based values, including those of his own remote future, and is thus enjoined by his morality to reduce his choices to cognitive activities by which he determines, as best he can, what is objectively the best action to take. For the most part, the choice at the end of this cognitive process is merely the acceptance of the conclusion to a process of thinking (most of which may amount to a nearly instantaneous integration of his knowledge of his situation with his well-established knowledge of his own objective needs and moral principles based on them). That is, once the person arrives at the conclusion that stealing is not the best action for him to take, there is no further difficult process of choosing left, unless there are several other alternatives to consider. At the end of the process, if all the supposed alternatives have been considered, the choice has effectively been made.

 

This is because, for a rational person, determining what is morally best is a matter of integrating an understanding of what best means for him and his knowledge of the relevant situational facts. It is not a matter of arbitrarily acting according to some rule in disregard of those same facts.

 

Once morality is taken out of the realm of robotic duty to rules disconnected from reason, the whole issue of free will and moral responsibility loses its aura of mysteriousness. It becomes simply a natural extension of the idea that we know actions have consequences and that we can, to a significant and predictable degree, largely determine what consequences occur by appropriate action. We then see that moral responsibility is not something imposed on us by some outside agency, but is rather a simple recognition of the fact of causal responsibility in a moral context, in a context where values are at stake and may be gained, kept, or lost depending on how we act.

 

Free will also loses its mysteriousness in such a context. No longer do we have to think in terms of whether we are or are not free to adhere to some arbitrary rule imposed by some outside agency, but we can now think in terms of whether there are or are not constraints on our actions that arise from and tend to misdirect our actions away from what we would choose were we free of those constraints. That is, we think of free will in terms of whether we are free to do what we think is best or are somehow derailed from such actions by some psychological compulsion or some external force such as the really ugly giant with the machine gun aimed at our head.

 

Put another way, when morality itself is properly understood, it provides a context in which the ideas of free will and moral responsibility make sense when they themselves are re-formulated to fit the new idea of morality. Responsibility becomes something we seek rather than something we see as a burden or a threat to our happiness. Responsibility means that we are in control of some important aspects of what happens in our lives, and so means that we are not entirely subject to the whims of circumstances. We could only remove this kind of responsibility by removing our ability to act in any way that would affect the condition of our lives in a way that was systematic enough for us to understand. For example, if we live in a world where it is in fact the case that our actions simply make no predictable difference at all with respect to what happens to us, then we would not be morally responsible, but we would also be totally out of control of our lives and what happens.

 

But, under normal views of moral responsibility, it becomes desirable to avoid it, because avoiding it means avoiding the requirement of acting according to rules that are formulated in disregard of our genuine and legitimate needs as human beings. That is, under such views, we have to hope (and pray, in a sense) that situations will arise in which we can avoid acting according to the rules and yet not be held morally at fault for doing so. For example, if there is some absolute rule against eating beans, and you find yourself in a situation where you must eat the beans or die, then you will hope for some way to avoid moral responsibility for breaking the rule about not eating beans, so you can avoid starvation and retain your moral status.

 

A rational moral system makes no such demands. The function of a rational morality is to clarify and codify the rules and principles and a system of values you need to follow as the means of living well in the real world as a human being. This means that, if eating beans is necessary to your survival, you are allowed to eat the damn beans, no matter what some religious book says about eating beans. If your wife is dying of some disease and you know a cure for it that happens to be banned by some religious text, your moral responsibility is to use the cure.

 

Moral problems and moral conflicts still arise, even in the lives of rational people living according to rational moral principles, but most of the more serious ones, the ones that give rise to so much social strife, political oppression, and war, go away. Moral responsibility and human welfare (including your own in an essential way) coincide in a rational view of morality and moral responsibility, with the result that there is no living in fear of morality and moral responsibility, no fear of being free to follow some arbitrary rule that, at best, will not be the best for your life as a human being.

 

This is one of the reasons I frequently claim that religions of the conventional kinds are actually incompatible with the fullest development of morality. Any moral system that requires adherence to rules that an otherwise rational view of one's situation would not countenance is not a support for morality but rather a threat to morality, because it effectively drives a vicious wedge between morality itself and any reason for bothering with morality.

 

Once we understand the proper function of morality as something that benefits our lives instead as something that imposes pointless burdens on us, we find that the whole idea of a type of free will that is truly indeterministic is not merely unattractive, but actually something devoutly to be avoided, were it a real possibility, because any such indeterministic free will would mean a loss of control over what happens in our lives. We have precious little control as it is, much less than some people commonly think, but we need what control we do have, and we don't want to lose it because we one day made an incredible mistake when afflicted with metaphysical indeterminacy in a crucial moral choice. Of course, there are all sorts of other things that can cause our moral choices to go awry, such as brain damage, disease, emotional problems that are beyond our capacity to cope with, and so on. But, our best chance even for dealing with these threats to our moral consistency is lucid understanding of what's going on and action based on that understanding, not some causal disconnection between us and our actions.

 

The Feeling of Freedom

 

Let's look a little closer at the feeling of freedom that we experience. What is the experience of freedom? Is there some positive fact of reality that we perceive or apprehend, in a way analogous to perceiving the light from a fire? Consider a person tied up with a rope. He doesn't feel free. Why not? Because his attempts at movement are constrained in unusual ways. When he tries to move his hands to adjust his glasses, he can't do it because they are, let us suppose, tied behind his back. He feels the resistance to his attempted actions as a loss of freedom, which it indeed is.

 

Now, suppose we untie the man. Suppose he comes upon an opportunity to steal from someone with essentially no chance at all of getting caught. Suppose he doesn't steal not because of any ropes tied around him, but simply because he doesn't regard it as a good thing for him to do; he views it as being contrary to his interests, even though the monetary value of the loot would be very great. He chooses not to steal.

 

Does he feel unfree in this kind of situation? No. Why? Because he doesn't really want to steal, and so there is no sense of constraints on his actions. If he tried to steal and was somehow blocked from doing so by the sudden intervention of a thick iron door, then he would feel unfree.

 

Why the difference? Because he is blocked from doing what he has chosen to do.

 

The point here is that freedom is what we experience from the lack of awareness of anything acting against what we have chosen to do or acting against choosing what is consonant with our what we take to be our best judgment. Freedom is not something positive. If a ping-pong ball on a pool table is free to roll in any direction, it doesn't mean that we start with a ping-pong ball sitting on a pool table and then add freedom of horizontal motion as if it were an additional object or substance. There is nothing more to the situation of a ping-pong ball sitting on a table and a ping-pong ball sitting on a table that is free to move. The freedom of the ping-pong ball is simply an aspect of the kind of situation it is in, not something we add in to the situation to make it different from what it would be if we just had a ping-pong ball sitting on a pool table.

 

What this means, in observational or experiential terms is that there is no experiential or empirical difference between being able to do what we choose to do and being metaphysically indeterministic in our choices. That is, indeterminism has no empirically distinguishing markers that enable us to infer that we are not only free to do as we choose, but that we are free to choose in an indeterministic manner. In either case, there is not the slightest further information that we can be aware of.

 

What this means is that we simply cannot justify indeterministic freedom on the basis of our experience, ever. All we can justify, and all we really need to justify, is that we are free to choose according to our judgment of what is the best thing for us to do. That is as far as the data will take us because it is as far as the data can take us. Indeterminism cannot be justified experientially.

 

What is taken as such a justification is simple freedom to act as we choose. That is, the theory of indeterministic freedom is actually, in a sense, a result of conclusion-jumping, of accepting one idea as the explanation for our sense of freedom when a metaphysically much less radical view would work just as well in explaining the exact same experience. This is very much analogous to the accepting the idea that the Earth is basically flat on the basis of our daily experience. Metaphysical indeterminism is a handy idea for classifying our experience of free choice, and the idea of flatness is a handy idea for classifying our perceptual experience of the Earth around us. And, it is wrong for much the same reason. We cannot rationally conclude that the Earth is flat from such observation. All we can actually do rationally is presume that the Earth is flat because we see no reason to suppose that it is curved. Similarly, we cannot rationally conclude that freedom is metaphysically indeterministic. All we can really do is presume that it is because we don't perceive or otherwise notice any facts that would tell us that our freedom is more limited.

 

Finally, there is the Occam's Razor issue. In a sufficiently narrow sense, it seems parsimonious to suppose that our experience of freedom is an experience of metaphysical indeterminism. But, in another sense, this gives rise to a major problem, because we know that many things in the world are at least essentially deterministic. For example, we don't suppose that a nail being hammered into a board by a carpenter is simply moving into the board indeterministically, as if it spontaneously took it into its little nail-head to burrow down into the board. In general, most of the things we see happening in the physical universe are known to be deterministic.[7] Thus, we are forced to accept some degree of determinism. This means that, if we wish to claim that there are exceptions to determinism, we have to accept the burden of proof of showing that there are these exceptions.

 

And this means that, if we don't need to accept indeterminism, if we don't have specific information or reasoning that forces it on us, we will have a more parsimonious theory if we retain determinism alone, until some such specific information or reasoning is found. And unless such information or reasoning is found; there is no reason to suspect that indeterminism is even possible, and some that indicates that it is in fact logically impossible, as was indicated at the beginning of this essay in explaining what determinism is and implies.[8]

 

That is, until someone can prove a genuine cognitive need for introducing indeterminism into physics or metaphysics, we should strive to do without it simply as a matter of theoretical parsimoniousness, even if we are not convinced of the logical impossibility of indeterminism. It serves no positive purpose in any scientific theory (no, it has no actual uses even in quantum mechanics, since assuming an unknown determinism will do exactly as well as indeterminism) and it is deleterious to any rational philosophical system, since it denies cognition wherever it is posited (since cognition always depends on the equivalence of causal nature and identity, which indeterminism denies).

 

Conclusions/Summary

 

I've tried to deal with the idea of freedom, the feeling of freedom, the nature of freedom, causation, responsibility, and the general nature of morality, all of which undermine the idea that moral responsibility depends on any kind of freedom involving a true ability do to other than whatever we do. I think I've fairly well shown that freedom is simply acting on our judgment rather than under compulsion, internal or external, so that what we chose to do is what we choose to do. There is neither factual justification for, nor moral need for, any kind of freedom beyond this.

 

Appendix 1: Complete Causation

 

The complete cause for an event is everything that must be present or not present for the event to occur at the time and place where it does occur. By factors that are not present, I mean those that would prevent the event from happening. For example, if an orange released above the floor is to drop to the floor, there must not be a sturdy table in the way. Thus a complete cause in this case excludes the presence of a table or any other such blockage in the way of the orange. A complete cause is always exclusive as well as inclusive.

 

But, it is inclusive. If the orange is to drop to the floor, there must not only be no table or other sufficient impediment, but there must also be some sort of force that causes it to move relative to the floor, such as gravity.

 

Now, here's the thing: The complete cause for any one event necessarily includes sufficient causal factors to prevent all incompatible events. Thus, if the complete cause is sufficient to cause an orange to drop to the floor, it is also sufficient to prevent that same orange from rising to the ceiling instead. In this example, one of the main things preventing the orange from doing nothing at all is gravity.

 

Now, let's suppose that the situation at the time of releasing the orange is indeterministic. By this, I do not mean that merely our information is not sufficient to enable us to predict whether the orange will do nothing or fall to the floor, but that the nature of the situation is supposed to be sufficient to cause the orange to fall to the floor and sufficient to cause it to remain motionless. But this is a logical impossibility, because it requires two mutually incompatible sets of causal conditions. One is the set of causes, including gravity, that would, if allowed, cause the orange to fall to the floor. The other is the set of causes, including either a lack of gravity or some counter-balancing upward force, that would, if allowed, prevent the orange from falling to the floor.

 

A contradiction like this would be required in all cases, not just those involving oranges being released over a floor. Whenever you have the causal conditions for one event you must have sufficient causal factors to prevent any incompatible event. If you do not, then the conditions simply aren't sufficient to cause the first event.

 

The fact that there might be causal factors that, in a different situation, would cause the orange to fall to the floor is irrelevant to the sufficiency issue if there are causal factors in the situation at hand to prevent the orange from falling to the floor. What is sufficient to cause an event in one case may not be sufficient to cause that event if there are also causal factors that would, given free reign, produce some other event (or simply prevent the event in question).

 

I've been talking about oranges, rather than humans, deliberately, because the relevant principles and their application are easier to understand in such simple cases. However, they apply just as well to human choices and actions. Oddly, there is a school of thought that says much of what I just said, but which, when it comes to human choices, makes an about-turn and argues for indeterminate free will. It's as if they could not grasp that the logic of the simple case was inherently universal and not open to exceptions. Their view is that, while things must act according to their nature, the nature of humans is that they may choose indeterminately. I myself considered this view in my teens and rejected it almost immediately because the choosing process itself had to have causes, and so there had to be a fundamentally deterministic process going on. The law of identity says that things act according to their nature, and only according to their nature, to what they are, in infinite detail, at the time of acting. Thus, a human being choosing to do one thing does so, because, at the exact instant when the choosing process actually occurred, the exact mental state of the person at the time determined the outcome.

 

Obviously, there are many cases (far more than we tend to imagine, actually[9]) when we don't know why we chose to do one thing rather than another, but that's an issue of knowledge, not of causation. The fact that we are limited in our knowledge of deterministic causation doesn't change its deterministic nature, with regard either to humans or subatomic particles. Unpredictability resulting from ignorance is not the same as indeterminism, because indeterminism would be a failure of causation, not lack of knowledge.

 

Appendix 2: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

 

The formal theory of quantum mechanics is not indeterministic. It only implies that certain kinds of deterministic prediction cannot be made, without telling us why these predictions cannot be made. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us that we cannot obtain the kinds of knowledge that would enable us to make strictly precise deterministic predictions, but it cannot (even in principle) tell us that the particles involved are not deterministic, and we can't obtain this knowledge because of the nature of the particles themselves.

 

However, the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics holds that our knowledge is not only inadequate for precise prediction, but that physical reality itself is indeterminate in a metaphysical sense. Observationally, we can only say that there are, let us suppose, various probabilities of finding an electron in one of two boxes, but the Copenhagen Interpretation holds not that the electron is not really in either of the boxes before we detect it (which would suit me just fine), but that which box it will be found in is metaphysically indeterminate (meaning that even God-like omniscience about the present state of the universe would not allow for a reliable prediction).

 

This is where I draw the line. It is provable in scientific, experimental terms, that there is a kind of "information wave" associated with particles, and that the probability of finding a particle is highest at the points where this "wave" has the highest amplitude. Why cannot this wave itself be one of the determining factors in where a particle is found? We know it's real, so why not accept that fact and go with it? And why can't the detailed local structure of space itself also be one determining factor?

 

Quantum mechanics cannot possibly tell us that particles are actually indeterministic. It can't tell us this because indeterminism is not an observational/empirical fact. We cannot observe that particles are indeterministic, even in principle, because indeterminism, if it could occur, would not enable us to make any observations that we could not make under determinism.

 

The claim of indeterminism is a universal negative: "There is absolutely nothing, known or unknown, in all of Existence, that somehow precisely determines these events." Only universal negatives that have positives that yield contradictions (either internally or with known facts) can ever be proved. Since quantum-level determinism does not contradict any known facts (that is there are no observations that determinism as such would contradict), and since it is clearly not logically self-contradictory, we could never prove indeterminism even if it were true. There is a principle that describes the relationship of determinism, knowledge, and indeterminism:

 

            Indeterminism is indistinguishable from unknowable determinism.

 

This basic formulation is due to Ed Fredkin, though I formulated an essentially equivalent form of it myself in the 1970's or 80's before learning of Fredkin's work.

 

My own formulation was to the effect that because indeterminism can be emulated to any degree of accuracy by strictly deterministic means, we can never know when something is truly indeterministic by empirical means. Both formulations imply that we can never prove indeterminism because there could always be some unknown deterministic mechanism. One implication is that, by Occam's Razor, we should banish indeterminism entirely from physics as being both pointless and harmful to research (because, once you're certain something is indeterministic, you stop looking for explanations or explanatory principles).

 

None of this is directly relevant to ethics, and I wouldn't even bring it up were it not for the frequency with which desperate indeterminists, groping about for anything that can be made to seem to support indeterministic free will, will fall back on alleged quantum indeterminism as either proving that indeterminism is true or as providing (via "infecting" the brain with acausality) a basis for indeterministic free will. The point of this appendix is to support (if not prove) that there is no help in quantum mechanics for indeterminism in general or for indeterministic free will in particular.

 

And, even if we were thus "infected" with quantum indeterminism, would it be the good thing such people often seem to think it would be?

 

Well, the kind of benefit it would supposedly bestow is only freedom from fatalistic determinism or determinism by "outside" forces or compulsions. But, since neither fatalism nor compulsion is implied by determinism anyway, this is not much of a benefit.

 

Worse, it would further weaken our chances of managing our own minds. It is bad enough that actual causes interfere with our mental functioning and too often lead us to make poor choices. It would be even worse if there were points in our thinking where there was a true metaphysical disconnection between our minds and our choices so that, regardless of what we would rationally choose, we may still choose incorrectly for no reason at all. If your life or something of such value depends on choosing correctly, would we want to be free in an indeterministic sense to choose an obviously incorrect alternative? If you have a choice of pressing a button that you know would save your life and not pressing it, would you want to be free in an indeterministic sense not to press it?

 

What would be the point of such "freedom" from our own knowledge, beliefs, understanding, values, and deepest desires?

 

As far as I know, no indeterminist has ever given even a plausible answer to this question. There is a kind of mentality that would like this kind of freedom from themselves, but it is a form of mental illness, like that of Kierkegaard or Tertullian (who is supposed to have said, of his belief in the resurrection of Jesus, “I believe it because it is absurd” [10]). It is irrational to wish for such pointlessly destructive "freedom" from deterministic causation, because such "freedom" itself would cause more harm than good, except possibly in decisions where little is at stake. But, such "randomness" can easily be obtained by flipping coins; we hardly need to have causal indeterminism in our own brains.

 

In short, there is no value to quantum indeterminism, even if it were real.[11] And there would be a lot of harm to it if it had a significant role in human behavior.

 

Feedback, discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan, ccogan@ou.edu