Summary
Highlights
We perceive ourselves as constantly making choices, from trivial decisions like coffee or tea to significant life choices such as career or marriage. This ability to choose and control our actions is the essence of free will. It's fundamental to legal and moral responsibility, influencing how we judge and hold individuals accountable, and is central to our sense of agency.
The concept of free will faces significant challenges from certain scientific perspectives. Determinism suggests that all events, including human actions, are predetermined by initial conditions and natural laws, likening the universe to a mechanical clockwork. While quantum mechanics introduces randomness, this alone isn't sufficient for free will, as random processes still imply a lack of control over our choices.
Denying free will could lead to less blame and more humane criminal justice systems focused on rehabilitation. However, it would also invalidate fundamental concepts like apologizing, forgiveness, or consent, as these presume agency and choice. Without free will, human behavior would have to be explained purely by external physical and chemical processes, reducing people to passive 'patients' rather than active agents.
Different scientific disciplines explain phenomena at varying levels of description. The human and social sciences (anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology) unanimously depict humans as choice-making agents who intelligently respond to their environments. To understand why people attend class, vote, or keep promises, these sciences must presuppose the capacity for genuine choice among alternative possibilities.
Scientists determine what is real by asking if an entity or property is necessary to explain the world and if it coheres with the scientific worldview. Just as gravity and electromagnetism are accepted because they are indispensable for explaining physical phenomena, free will, defined as intentional agency, choice, and control, passes this test. It is explanatorily indispensable in the human and social sciences.
The speaker argues that explanations at different levels of description (e.g., humanistic vs. fundamental physics) do not conflict. While physics doesn't refer to agency, agency and choice are appropriate and necessary concepts for explaining human behavior at a higher level. Therefore, denying free will because it's not present in fundamental physics would be a 'category mistake,' similar to denying the reality of organisms or institutions.