Free Will and Determinism

Is Compatibilism a Naturalist Cope?

If you’re reading this sentence right now, it’s because you saw a link to this piece somewhere and decided to click on it. Maybe you found the title intriguing. Maybe you thought the picture was kind of cool. Or maybe you just didn’t have anything better to do. In any case, you decided to click on it. And if you’re still reading this sentence, it’s because you’ve decided to read on. Maybe you’re really interested in the subject. Maybe you found my tone appealing. Or maybe you found it grating but, once again, had nothing better to do. But in any case, that’s what you’ve decided.

Or is it? As a matter of fact, I’ve encountered some people who claim that you don’t make choices or decisions at all!¹ Their reasoning goes something like this. Causal determinism is true. Everything that occurs is determined to happen by the prior state of the universe plus the laws of nature. But if causal determinism is true, then you don’t have free will. And if you don’t have free will, then what you call decisions are actually just the products of external causes that are ultimately outside your control. As the Merovingian says in Matrix: Reloaded (2003), choice is an illusion.

Some philosophers—most, in fact—disagree with the central premise in this argument. They think that even if causal determinism is true, we still have free will.² These philosophers are called compatibilists. Their opponents, who think that if determinism is true, we don’t have free will, are called incompatibilists. Now maybe this is just because I’m very susceptible to peer pressure, but I think the compatibilists are right. I don’t think there’s any conflict between the truth of causal determinism and the claim that human actions are freely willed.

As it turns out, though, some people disagree pretty strongly! Several people have told me recently that compatibilism was just a “naturalist cope,” a comforting story people tell themselves to deal with the horrors of a deterministic universe. Now if you happen to think that, well, you’re wrong. But I doubt I’ll be able to convince you in a short piece like this. What I’ll aim to do instead is just try to give you some insight into why the compatibilist position seems so natural to so many people. And if you think it still sounds like a cope, well, whatever. I guess you were determined to anyway.

Who’s Will and Why Should I Care If He’s Free?

If I’m going to talk about the debate around free will and determinism, I should probably start by explaining what the debate’s all about. There are a lot of people out there who say that compatibilists and incompatibilists aren’t really disagreeing about the facts, they’re just disagreeing about what to say about those facts. The entire debate, these people claim, is idle wordplay.

I don’t think that’s quite right, but there’s at least a grain of truth here. Compatibilists and incompatibilists aren’t necessarily disagreeing about what the world is like. Both might agree, for example, that causal determinism is true. What they’re disagreeing about is the concept of free will. The question compatibilists and incompatibilists are trying to answer is: What is that? What is free will? What distinguishes them is that they come to different answers to that question.

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “How does one go about answering a conceptual question like that? Is there even any answer to those kinds of questions?” Glad you asked! In a sense, investigating concepts is what philosophers have done since day one. This is, after all, exactly what Socrates doing when we went around the agora asking people annoying questions like “What is knowledge?” “What is justice?” “What is love?” He was asking what these concepts were all about.

The twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point that, when we investigate a concept, we need to make sure we at least start from how it’s used by people in everyday conversation. Otherwise, whatever we come up with will be unmoored from what anyone actually means by it. Wittgenstein went as far as to say that most of philosophy resulted from linguistic confusion like this. Philosophers were, he claimed, bewitched by language.³

In asking about the concept of free will, then, we want to make sure we start by considering how people use it. What does it refer to in everyday life? What role does it play in our practices? Why did we come up with it in the first place? If we proceed without keeping that in mind, we’re going to end up changing the subject. We’ll just end up talking about a different concept. But then whatever we say will be irrelevant: no one was asking about that to begin with!

A typical definition of free will you might find in an encyclopedia of philosophy is that it’s the ability to exert control over our choices. And I’d say that’s more or less what we mean in everyday life. So far so good! It’s worth noting, though, that we actually don’t talk that much about free will in everyday life. Outside of philosophy, the term is pretty uncommon. We’re actually a lot more likely to talk what we choose and about what we decide than about what we will freely.

That said, we do sometimes invoke free will. Sample sentence: “It wasn’t peer pressure, Mom, I did it out of my own free will!” And another: “You did it out of your own free will, so now you’ll pay the price.” A closely related usage might be the following: “No one forced them to go to the cinema; they chose to do it freely.” These are the kinds of things we say on those rare occasions when we invoke free will in everyday life. And I think they’re very, very instructive!

Why? Well, all these examples have to do with exerting control over our choices. But in this case, what we mean by “control” is something like the absence of coercion, interference, or undue influence. You perform an action freely, you perform it out of our own free will, when no one is making you do it. I’m not the first one to point this out, of course.⁴ But what it suggests is that when you take free will to be anything else, you’re just changing the subject. You’re allowing yourself to be bewitched by language.

As I hope you can see, this is a point in favour of compatibilism. Why? Well, we obviously can and do distinguish between actions that are coerced and actions that are uncoerced. Whether causal determinism is true is just irrelevant here. If doing something out of your own free will means, roughly, not being coerced into doing it, then it’s also compatible with your actions being causally determined. Problem solved!

Stop That, You’re Just Playing With Words

Maybe you didn’t find that very convincing. Maybe you’re convinced, more than ever, that I’m just playing with words. But no! I think incompatibilists are the ones doing that. As I pointed out earlier, we talk a lot more about choices and decisions than about free will. But some non-philosophers go so far as to say that choice itself is an illusion. Now it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the sheer depravity required to think something like this. But it will help me make my point to say a few words about it.

Let’s go back to our Wittgensteinian insight. And more broadly, let’s think about how language works. Human beings discover things in their experience of the world. And they realize it’d be very useful if they could communicate about those things. So they attach words to them that allow them to do that. What’s the meaning of those words? Well, whatever they’re used to refer to! There’s no further secret thing that we might discover. The meaning of a word is what it’s used to designate. That’s all there is to it!

Now with this understanding of language in hand, let’s ask: Might choice be an illusion? Might it be that we’ve somehow failed to pick something out by our concept of a choice? That it just doesn’t correspond to anything? That we’re hopelessly deluded when we talk about choosing between this or that or deciding to engage in such and such an activity? Well, let’s think back to what we just said about language.

In everyday life, we encounter two very different kinds of things in ourselves and in others. We find that some of our actions are voluntary. That is, they’re performed intentionally or on purpose. Some examples include going to work, playing the piano, and poisoning your neighbour’s yappy dog. Other actions, behaviours, and processes, are involuntary. They’re not performed intentionally or on purpose. Paradigm examples here are tics, spasms, and tremors.

What’s the difference between these? Well, we exert conscious control over our voluntary actions! What you believe, desire, and value affects what you do: whether you go to work or stay home, whether you play the piano or watch a movie, whether you poison the dog or just murder your neighbour. In contrast, we don’t exert conscious control over involuntary actions. Your muscle spasms and hand tremors won’t just stop no matter what you believe, desire, or value.

Now suppose you’re in a situation where you have to perform some voluntary action. You need to go to work or stay at home. Ever been in this kind of situation? They happen all the time, right? Seems like we might want to communicate about them sometimes. Maybe we should come up with a word to refer to those! And hey, what do you know, I have just the word: CHOICES. These are CHOICES. They can’t be illusions; they’re right there in front of us. I’m literally making some right now!

We are often faced with a range of options. In those circumstances, we perform voluntary actions. This means that we make choices. That’s just what that word means. Because they’re voluntary, what we believe, desire, or value determines what we choose to do. This means that, as long as no one is interfering with us, our choices are under our conscious control. And hey, what do you know, that was our definition of free will: to have control over our choices!

I hope you can see that the truth of causal determinism changes nothing to any of this. Even if determinism is true, it’s not like we can suddenly forego making choices. Things won’t just happen without us! And even if we do forego making choices and just sit around, well, we’ll have chosen to sit around! And whatever choice we make, it’ll be one that’s under our conscious control.⁵ So not only do we have free will even if determinism is true, but we can’t avoid acting with free will no matter what we do! As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, we are “condemned to be free”!⁶

Conclusion

Wittgenstein thought that most philosophical problems resulted from linguistic confusion. Philosophers take words out of their ordinary contexts, twist them beyond recognition, and then drive themselves mad trying to solve the problems they’ve created by doing so. He saw his task as a therapeutic one. He wanted to cure philosophers of their self-afflicted confusion, “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”⁷

People like to say that compatibilism is just obfuscating wordplay. But if what I’ve said is correct, then the incompatibilist position might be the single clearest case of linguistic confusion in the history of philosophy. You can’t come to the conclusion that free will doesn’t exist or that choice is an illusion unless you’ve unmoored those concepts from the contexts where they find their meaning. These are the kinds of questions that arise when you ignore the use of a word and start looking for some magical secret meaning hiding behind it.

Now I’m sure you still have plenty of objections: “What about the ability to do otherwise?” “What about being the source of one’s actions?” Yes, yes, I know, I know. Like I said, my main goal here wasn’t to give you an exhaustive defense of compatibilism. It was just to give you a sense of why it seems so intuitive to so many people. I’m certainly not under the illusion that I’ll have convinced everyone; you may very well still want to tell me why I’m wrong in the comments. And that’s fine! You are, of course, free to do so.

1. As far as I know, no public intellectuals go as far as to say that choices are illusions, but they will say that free choices are illusions. See, notably, Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012) and Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

2. The 2020 Philpapers Survey found that nearly 60% of respondents leaned toward or accepted compatibilism, whereas less than 20% leaned toward or accepted incompatibilism. See Bourget, D. & Chalmers, D. J. “Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey.” Philosophers' Imprint, Vol. 23, No. 11 (2023).

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 52 (§ 109).

4. See A.J. Philosophical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954), p. 3–20. The same analysis appears throughout the empiricist tradition, most notably in Hobbes and Hume.

5. Several philosophers have made the point that the truth of causal determinism can make no difference to practice. See, for example, Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 95-96.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 29.

7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 110 (§ 309).