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Freewill is one of those things which is an integral part of our being. Its existence is necessary for our morality, gives us our criminal justice system and is what make us humans so very different to the other animals. Or so it is said. It is certainly generally accepted that we have it, although there is no doubt that the idea of freewill carries with it a lot of problems, paradoxes even. Gilbert Ryle said, many years ago, that decisions were either determined the result of a Newtonian process of cause and effect or made at random. He could see no third way. It is difficult to argue with this. It is equally difficult therefore to see what freewill is, because those who believe in it say that our choices are neither determined nor random. Take the usual question - although different people may make different decisions faced with the same problem, could I personally have made a different decision? I hope not, because it was one which was based on my then perceptions of the possible outcomes and the weight they carried with me, coupled with my ability to grapple with the information gathering and reasoning processes involved at that time. If I had made a different decision, it would have been perceived by me to be a decision which had somehow been foisted on me - one which had indeed come out of the blue. I would have to conclude that someone-else had taken over my mind or that I was doing the mental equivalent of playing dice, because it would not have been the decision I would naturally have arrived at. But surely freewill is an integral part of our lives? Well, our legal system does not demand a philosophical debate about freedom of will before arriving at judgement. The law gives a dispensation for things done under duress i.e. actions which are genuinely imposed on me by a third party or those which result from some mental disorder which prevents me from seeing the world around me as others see it. Other than in these cases, however, the cry "I couldn't help myself" is not normally a sufficient excuse, although it may be relevant in sentencing. Why? Because a failure to abide by the rules simply because we did not rate them as important enough to outweigh the contrary sway of our other emotions is exactly what calls for a sanction to be imposed - precisely to help to protect society from lawlessness and to give me the motivation this time and next to decide differently. Our long experience tells us that it is necessary to persuade people to do 'the right thing', at least within the limited range of actions governed by the law. Of course you could say that this is a form of duress and so limits the scope of our ability to choose. And the truth is that it is. It is nonetheless a form of duress of which, as a society, we approve. The civil law is even less picky when it comes to free will. In brief, all that is required to obtain damages for a breach of contract is to show that loss has resulted from the breach and that the breach was not induced by the plaintiff or caused by some overwhelming set of circumstances which neither party could have predicted. The Defendant's state of mind in committing the breach is not an issue. Even insanity is not a defence to such a claim unless the defendant was insane at the time of the making of the contract and so lacked the capacity to enter into it. Religion though takes a different line. It is based necessarily on the premise that I have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, where right is defined as a series of absolute rules imposed on us by a god of some description. It presumes that my actions are neither wholly determined by past events nor randomly occurring. If they were, then I could not be blamed for them, although quite how original sin or indeed Calvinism fits in here, I shall have to leave to the theologians. Religion on the whole, however, claims that because my moral actions are neither pre-determined nor random they are therefore somehow peculiarly mine and so I am responsible for them. Religion, however, accepts that we do not naturally follow its rules. Whilst it tries to put conscience and moral duty in a separate non-earthly compartment from our emotions and our reason, religion has nonetheless found it necessary to give us some earthly motivation to abide by its commandments. That motivation is either fear of the consequences (hell v. heaven) or love for god and/or our neighbours, both of which, when I last looked, were standard-issue emotions. Now obviously it is possible to use our reason to see, in a clinical way, whether or not a decision would comply with a particular moral code, but that is a trivial part of what is required to make a decision and hence to exercise one's supposed freewill. Using reason without emotion is like having a map, but not wanting to go anywhere. You have somehow to decide actually to comply with your intellectual finding. How can that be possible in the absence of motivation? And motivation comes from our emotions, an assertion which has empirical evidence to support it - we now know from quite a lot of research that people who, by reason of brain damage, are no longer motivated by their emotions find it virtually impossible to make any sort of decision, never mind follow the golden path of morality. So then if our morality is inspired by our emotions or indeed by some other form of spiritual desire, how can we choose between the competing pressures which swirl around in all of us and be blamed or praised accordingly? If on any particular occasion the moral path has an overwhelming emotional or spiritual weight in its favour then, in following it, I would simply be responding to that particular pressure: hardly something to warrant Brownie points. If it doesn't induce that pressure to act, then I don't see how I am to be blamed for failing to follow its strictures. Saying that I should be blamed because I had the freedom to choose makes no sense in the absence of the emotional or quasi-emotional oomph to put that required choice into effect. So the whole concept of freewill seems to me to be hollow, to have no meaning. Although most people, if asked, would say that we have freewill, morality, in the secular sense, can exist without a basis in freewill. Morality is simply how we want and expect each other to behave. That can obviously vary across time and across borders. If it is so changeable, is this then a poor relation of the absolute morality typical of religion? I would suggest that the opposite is true. Although there is criticism that this is only a relativistic morality, with everyone being right whatever they think, it is in fact essentially a democratic process. The nation, organisation or group of friends to which you belong decides (informally and over time) on its mores. And there is pressure, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle, to abide by those standards. We are expected to act by the standards of that group. The variation between different codes of morality is however limited, at least in the long term, by the outcome of the application of that code in real life. If we have a code which encourages murder and theft, then we will not accrue the advantages which come from a society where those things are discouraged. And so such a moral code would be at a significant evolutionary disadvantage. It will not survive in the longer term. Societies in which cooperation is the code will in the end win out over the others. Now that is not to say that a society which encourages cooperation as between its members but is aggressive towards other societies will not have success. We have seen many examples of this over the ages. Indeed, it is quite obvious that cooperation begins at home and becomes less and less likely in respect of people we do not know or with whom we have no relationship. But, as someone who prefers peace to war, I take encouragement from the widening of our circle. We have quite detailed knowledge of other countries, other societies and are able to see them as not dissimilar to us. They are after all human beings. Travel, whether actual or virtual via the television, has broadened our minds by showing us that different does not necessarily mean worse or better. As Steven Pinker has, I think, shown quite effectively, we actually live in a less violent world now than in the recorded past. So then the notion of a relativist morality is not in fact fraught with the theoretical problems which absolutists and some blinkered philosophers would suggest. The distinction between religion and secularism has been brought into sharp relief by the war against "aggressive secularism" being waged by various religious leaders. Christians of every flavour, and even the Muslims in the person of Baroness Warsi, the vice chairman of the Conservative Party, in a speech when she went to Rome recently to meet the Pope, have been complaining for a while now about aggressive secularism. They don't seem to see the irony of the expression for a group of people known for their aggressive proselytism across the centuries and across the globe. It all started, I suppose, when the atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others, started to weigh into religion and hold up to the light what they regarded as its true character. Christians in this country, and the Pope from Vatican City, however, continue to assert that the UK is a Christian country and Europe a Christian continent, that we ought to recognise this fact and be grateful to the Church for its role in our upbringing. They say, without a twitch of an eyebrow, that religion promotes peace, tolerance and comprehension between people. They state that our law, our moral principles and our art and culture are all derived from the unchanging morality presented to us by Christianity. In other words, all that we are, our national and European identity, we owe to the Christian religion. But it seems to me that this is a distorted version of history because quite obviously we cannot say that the law or morality of yesterday, the Judeo-Christian moral code, would be in any way acceptable today. We would have the justification of God (see Joshua, Judges etc. in the Old Testament) for genocide(1), rape as a weapon of war(2), deliberate killing of civilians, including children(3), and other acts which would trigger the issue of indictments by the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague and, of course, slavery. Slavery was expressly authorised by the Old Testament(4), condoned in the New Testament by Paul in his letter to Philemon and, although controversial amongst the Church fathers (Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinus and others approved of it, whilst others did not), it was practised over very many centuries by various Popes. We would even now have the death penalty for a multitude of crimes both major and minor, civil and religious, and especially blasphemy, a situation encouraged by the Church. Think the Inquisition. We would still have a law against homosexuality. In 1300, it seems that the law said that the penalty for homosexuality was to be burnt at the stake. It was only in 1861 that it finally became a non-capital crime, and we have had to wait until this millennium for equality before the law - at least before the law of the land, because canon law has still not caught up. It is still a mortal sin according to the Catholic church and the Church of England can't seem to decide quite what to think. I will leave their specious claims to be responsible for the great works of art and science to another day. Suffice it to say that art follows the money and, remind me, when was it that Galileo was finally exonerated by the Catholic church for his heresy in saying that the earth orbited the sun? That various scientists, like most people at the time, were religious does not mean that religion enabled them to be do their research any better or come up with better theories of how the world works. Which all means that we shouldn't feel grateful to Christianity or any other religion for the formation of our national character. The truth is that its absolutist moral rules did nothing to help us to be the relatively tolerant and fair society which we are today in the UK. And of course, we see the opposite of this in countries still the subject of strong religious influence. The various religions have of course changed over the years, in Europe at least, despite the fact that they shouldn't have, being based on an absolute code of morality. But skilled 'interpretation' of their moral code has enabled them to fit in with the requirements of a more tolerant modern society more easily. It is, however our humanity, our sense of empathy and fairness, which has overcome the inflexibility of religious rules and has given us the motivation not to follow religion's doctrinaire precepts. To the extent to which the church is now different to its predecessor, it ought to thank that same human instinct, seen in the reluctance of ordinary people to take its dogmatism too seriously. Here, think of the low birth-rate in Italy and other Catholic countries since the ready availability of contraception. In reality this democratisation of morality has forced the Church to change over the centuries, and has succeeded in bringing about a religion which is less anti-social, even if still irrational. So then, Christianity has not defined our society. Society has redefined Christianity. Should we be worried though about our relativistic morality? In my opinion yes, because it can change in ways which would, in my view, be for the worse. But would I swap it for the absolutism of religion again? Certainly not. There is a well-known quotation from Winston Churchill: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.". I would suggest that democracy is the worst way of arriving at a moral code except all the others that have been tried. So then, from all that I have written you may think that I am advocating a straightforward causal link between what has happened in my life and what I will decide to do in the future. A causal link there may be, but straightforward, I am happy to say, it is not. Let us first get out of the way the idea that genetics explains everything about us. There have been studies of genetically identical twins now for very many years who, for one reason or another, have been brought up by different parents, often in different parts of the world. Whilst certainly there are similarities between them - they of course look identical, and there is certainly a genetic component to the way they behave, detailed studies have shown that their genetic make-up does not by any means account for 100% of their behaviour. In fact, according to the last estimate I saw, it generally accounts for no more than about 30% of peoples' behaviour. The rest is down to the way they've been brought up; the lives they have led. It seems to me that there is in fact a fascinating process which is involved with living our lives. It makes predicting with certainty what we will do at some time in the future, and even in the next few minutes, so complex that in practice it is impossible. Using the most powerful computers we find it virtually impossible to get anything more than an approximation of the weather for the next few hours. Chaos theory rules - the flapping of a butterfly's wings producing a hurricane on the other side of the world - and that same complexity exists in our own lives. We are constantly in a state of flux. We come into contact constantly with outside sources of information, other people's ideas and influences. We may simply see a friend in the street or leaf fall from a tree and, as a consequence, our next thought will be different to what it would otherwise have been. And the mightiest computer will not have the processing power to tell us in advance what the ultimate outcome will be. But it is not just a matter of determinism in the narrow sense of event following cause following event. This is where our self-consciousness and our intellect come in. We are able to respond not just in a robotic, mechanical kind of way to what has happened, but to hold the situation up to the light and examine it. We consciously apply our reason to what is going on. We can see it in the context of our lives. Our reason enables us to give us a best estimate of the likely outcome of what our emotions and instincts are proposing. And this awareness will, in turn, feed back into the decision-making process itself. Curiously, though, this also means that we can let randomness in as well. What if our thoughts are, in part, the consequence of random interactions between atoms or molecules in our neurons? It is after all quite a possibility given the quantum nature of the world at atomic and sub-atomic level. One may think that this would lead to madness but, in fact, what may be random, uncaused thoughts (in moderation) could have a beneficial effect. The point is that our thoughts are ultimately the subject of our intellectual verification processes and so a randomly produced thought need be no more dangerous to our sanity than a suggestion read in a book or a discussion with a friend. And it could be just as productive of rational change. If we conjecture that such randomness is inherent in our brains then, perhaps, it is a significant way of making us look at things differently - it may be a source of our creativity. And, of course, without creativity we would not be where we are today. Let's just hope that our intellectual verification system has built-in ways of avoiding random changes to its software. Maybe there's a factory reset button? Now whether I am really in charge of what goes on in my life in some incomprehensible way or whether it is, as I think, a sequence of events so complex as to be unpredictable, in which I take part through my consciousness of what is happening - as a sort of overseer - may never be the subject of universal agreement. What I do know, however, is that I am an interested, and sometimes slightly detached, observer of how my life unfolds. And so, whatever the cause of our ability to see things in new and different ways, I am very grateful for it. I would not like boredom to set in. 1. Joshua 7:20,21 (Battle of Jericho); 8:1,2 & 24 - 27 2. Numbers 31:18 3. Numbers 31:17 4. Leviticus 25:44 - 46; Joshua 9:23 PJB 21 January 2010 revised 2 December 2012; 26 November 2013 *For a fascinating lecture in the TED series by Paul Zak on the evidence for oxytocin being the molecule which motivates us to act morally, click on the following link - http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html 1 December 2011
For some more thoughts on the nature of morality please click here |