Can human beings act “freely” and so be held morally responsible for their actions?
In my previous post, I shared my journey back into the world of philosophy. As promised, here is the essay I wrote for the course-end assessment.
Can human beings act “freely” and so be held morally responsible for their actions?
Our law-governed society presupposes that every mentally healthy person possesses free will, “the power to perform free actions” (Mele 2009); thus one is considered morally responsible for his actions. However, contrary to the widely accepted assumption, many philosophers and scholars have long suspected that we might not be so free.
In the free will debate, the scholars have traditionally been categorised into two groups depending on how they define freedom of action in relation to determinism, which is the thesis that any specific event happening at any given point in time and space is pre-determined by both the laws of nature and the effects of causation: Compatibilists or soft determinists believe that determinism allows us to have some degree of free will, whereas incompatibilists, or hard determinists, deny compatibility between the existence of free will and the truth of determinism.
Thomas Hobbes expressed his compatibilist view in one account: “A free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will, and that liberty is the absence of external impediments.” (Hobbes 1654, cited in Timpe, no date) David Hume offered a similar account in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1748): “By liberty, then, 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 hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains.”
As is evident in the above quotations, Hobbes and Hume both define free action in the same way, that is, it simply means the absence of physical obstacles to the agent’s choice of actions.
It could be argued that the limited scientific understanding of consciousness at that time allowed this overly simplistic definition to be reached.
In recent years, determinism has become increasingly popular due to the rapid advance in the two fields of science: cognitive science and computer science. One of the key ideas which played a role in setting off this trend was William James’ theory on emotions proposed in What is an Emotion? (1884). Andrea Scarantino and Ronald de Sousa state that James’ idea — emotions are phenomena which occur when our bodies react to the sensory inputs, not the other way round — broke the long tradition of the Western philosophy on this topic, where “the great philosophers — Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Locke — all understood emotions to involve feelings understood as primitives without component.” (Scarantino and de Sousa 2018)
James stated: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful.” (James 1884, cited in Scarantino and de Sousa 2018, sec 3)
His theory — often labelled ‘James-Lange Theory’ because his and Carl Lange’s theories were both similar and proposed around the same time — drew some criticism due to its counter-intuitiveness and possible undermining effect on the value of emotion. (Scarantino and de Sousa 2018) Although James was a compatibilist and believed in free will, his theory can easily be interpreted as that the conscious mind does not cause actions, but rather, actions cause the conscious mind; thus, it is quite likely that he contributed to disproving it.
Another notable work that cast doubt on free will is a series of neurophysiological experiments by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. Simon Blackburn summarises the results of his experiments as follows:
By making measurements of the electrical activity in the motor cortex, or part of the brain involved in the initiation of action, Libet discovered an increase of ‘readiness potential’ for an action, measurable around one-third of a second before the subject’s conscious decision to move. The subject would report deciding to press a button at one time, but the electrical measurement showed that the neurological events setting the action in train were already underway before the time to which the subject referred their decision. It seemed to many that this showed that it is not our own acts of will that cause our actions, but unconscious processes, powers behind the throne as it were, preceding our conscious decisions. (Blackburn 2009)
Meanwhile, in mathematics, Alan Turing proposed an abstract model, known today as the Turing machine in his paper On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936). The Turing machine is an imaginary computing device, which he believed to be capable of simulating the human mind. Michael Rescorla states: “In the 1960s, Turing computation became central to the emerging interdisciplinary initiative cognitive science, which studies the mind by drawing upon psychology, computer science (especially AI), linguistics, philosophy, economics (especially game theory and behavioral economics), anthropology, and neuroscience.” (Rescorla 2020)
Using such an interdisciplinary approach, neuroscientist Anil Seth has attempted to elucidate the mechanism of consciousness. In Being You — A New Science of Consciousness (Seth 2022), he argues that the world we perceive — both outside and inside ourselves — is a bundle of constantly updating predictions, which he calls ‘controlled hallucinations’, created by our brains based on the Bayesian inference — a method of reasoning used for making optimal inferences under conditions of uncertainty — and also suggested that these predictions are the cause of one’s voluntary actions. He expresses his view on free will in an account:
I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants. (Seth 2022)
A person wants a cup of tea and makes one. He did not make himself want tea, but rather, the ‘want’ occurred — because he was dehydrated, because there were tea bags in the kitchen, because he knew how to make tea by observing other people do it when he was a child, because society had made tea drinking a convention sometime in the past, because somebody had decided to use tea plants for a beverage in some far-away place a long time ago, and so on: all those innumerable factors in the circumstance and the past together led him to make a cup of tea now. Yet, despite this acknowledgement of the deterministic fact, Seth insists that this person’s act of tea-brewing is a ‘voluntary action’ because the state that his brain is in, as a result of having processed countless sequences of predictions and responses throughout his life, is what he is.
A similar thesis was proposed by David Hartley(1749).
Richard Allen states
[I]n Hartley’s account, the performance of a voluntary movement is not a dualistic, two-stage process, with an executive ‘faculty’ of the Mind, the Will, first issuing an instruction that the body then carries out. Rather, a movement becomes voluntary through the living being’s interaction with the ‘innumerable’ […] associated circumstances’ of its environment, […] In this light, ‘will’ does not name anything substantive: it is a word we use to describe an ‘idea, or state of mind’ amounts to. (Allen 2021)
Seth suggests that the feeling ‘we could have done differently’ occurs, even though we could not have done otherwise due to the deterministic nature of the world, because this recognition of alternative possibilities is useful for our brains when we encounter a similar situation in future. He also states that this ‘phenomenology’ was developed evolutionarily to improve our chance of staying alive — the biological imperative for all living organisms.
Some might criticise such views as something that reduces the human to a mere machine. However, Seth’s and Hartley’s arguments should be understood otherwise. We might be machines, but not ‘mere’ machines because of our innate natural drive to improve ourselves. Even though we do not have free will as an executive power of the mind, we, as a person and not as a conscious mind, can act freely upon the future predictions produced by the brain for better outcomes. Some people might refrain from committing crimes for fear of the punishment, or dive into a river to rescue a drowning child, driven by the urge to do the right thing. Both actions, taken intuitively or with full awareness of the reasons, would be understood as free actions from Seth and Hartley’s perspective. I find their arguments thoroughly convincing. Therefore, I agree that human beings can act freely. However, considering the fact that a human’s free actions are not caused by his conscious mind but happen as the interactions between him and his surroundings, we cannot hold a person morally responsible for his actions on the false grounds that he acted upon his free will. That being said, I argue that he, nevertheless, should be held morally responsible for his actions on the grounds that it benefits society. It is because I believe that morality is a device which came to exist to propagate humans’ prosocial behaviour for evolutionary purposes, and for that reason, a ‘moral society’ can be considered the same as a society equipped with systems which nurture people’s innate prosocial propensity with rewards (inclusive of non-punishment) and punishment.
Reference list
Allen, Richard, “David Hartley”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/hartley/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Blackburn, Simon, (2009) The Big Questions — Philosophy. 1st end. London: Quercus Publishing Plc. pp 34–35.
Hume, David, (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [online] Salt Lake City: Project Gutenberg. (sec 8, para 73) Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662/ (Accessed 05 January 2024).
Mele, A. R., (2009), “Free Will”, Encyclopedia of Consciousness, Academic Press,
William P. Banks (ed.), pp 265–277,
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00031-1/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Rescorla, Michael, “The Computational Theory of Mind”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (sec 1, 2). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/computational-mind/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Timpe, K., “Free Will”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161–0002, (sec 1), Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/freewill/, (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Seth, Anil, (2022) Being You — A New Science of Consciousness. 1st paperback edition. London: Faber. pp 216–221.
Scarantino, Andrea and Ronald de Sousa, “Emotion”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (sec 3). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/ (Accessed 05 January 2024 )
