Back to Basics 1--Freedom and Free will

Does freedom exist at all? (Note:  I will not address questions of responsibility.)   I think it would be near impossible to answer anything other than yes.  Circumstances of people possessing  what seem to be prima facie huge differences of political freedom, economic freedom, social freedom, and physical freedom (among others) attest to some basis for placing the semantic onus of the differential claims about these things on the overt common term "freedom" rather than some disguised alternative.  This result is metaphysically significant if true, for it says that the term "freedom" might underwrite some type of conceptual play with disparate personalities crowding the one metaphysical stage.  (I certainly stand to be corrected on that bold claim; maybe I'm naive and need more a more subtle account such as Ruth Millikan's "unicept".) This post will try to establish what entity freedom might be thus understood as a type of existing thing.

Since about 1990 I have subjected my intro students to an extended thought experiment whereby freedoms are stripped or diminished one-by-one, and which is re-run with different parameters  to expose what factors are involved in the destruction of  a particular type of freedom.  I will only sketch a backbone of the narrative to indicate how it works to support my overall metaphysical thesis.

You are a US college student walking to your car you are kidnapped by a helicopter which takes you on an extended trip.  In the copter you are of course trapped, and your freedoms (if any) are restricted only to movements inside its belly, and so your freedom (if any) is automatically reduced to a small physical freedom of movement within what free will you may have to determine that.  Any other potential freedoms are suspended until you are out of that situation.

Finally you are unceremoniously dumped out into Tiananmen Square.  Reflectively you realize that your political freedoms are nullified.  You are here illegally, and have neither a legitimate relationship to the Chinese government nor your own, since you have been placed here illegally and thus lack any effective status for citizenship with respect to any country.   Your law-determined relationship to any government has been severed, and so you are a person without a country and subject to the whims of treatment of any country you have been cast into.  And this is the People's Republic, with minimal regard for illegals.

 

This already indicates that your political freedom is a function of your standing in relation to a particular government (or -s by multiple citizenship), and that this relationship is severed by your illegal movements as kidnapped and abandoned (as opposed to legal ones by being a tourist and the reciprocal recognition of citizenship via customs, which of course maintains your political freedom within restraints of the laws of the country you are visiting).   But this also indicates that what political freedom you may be granted is largely a function of the opportunities afforded you as a legitimate citizen or visitor of a government.

You are set down In Tiananmen Square amid locals whom you attempt to communicate with by gesture--but one that is an inadvertent insult (an "ok" gesture that might be a "bird" to them)--and so your social freedom to communicate is diminished as evinced by their angry reactions.  Why?  You don't know Mandarin or the culture.  Your lack of ability is the foundation of your lack of freedom to communicate.  But here your inability may be compensated by others'  extra ability by being bilingual--thus restoring your freedom.  Here the nature of the opportunities for social freedom--that others exist and  may have compensating abilities for your lacks--may also restore freedom to some extent.

Still, these two steps are indicative of two factors that are relevant to freedom--necessary abilities of those entities to which we might  attribute freedom, and opportunities that are necessary as well for the actual attribution.  Again, these are internal ability factors insofar as we wish to refer to entities that  might possess them, and external factors as opportunities that are equally essential.  So these are relata in a potential relationship, and so freedom is an actual or potential relationship that is necessary-condition dependent upon the existence of relata but not reducible to those.  An analogy:  whom I call "my brother" and I truly exist (John a criminal justice Associate Professor in Tennessee; I in Wisconsin); our biological sibling relationship may be something we believe to be true; yet one or the other might have been unbeknownst to us adopted.  The existence of relata such as abilities and opportunities (we are alive in Tiananmen Square; the US government exists) does not guarantee the relationship exists (we are in China illegally).

Main thesis:  therefore, freedom, actual or possible, is a functional relationship between relata that is not exhausted by the question of the existence of relata, but by more nuanced questions of the nature of the existence of the relationship (in some proper way) between the relata.

The next move of the thought-experiment shows much of the metaphysical subtlety of this claim, because it exposes one basic freedom that is transitively necessary to social and political freedom:  physical freedom.  (Yes, the asymmetrical transitivity is claimed to be metaphysical among all these types of freedom: political requires social which requires physical freedom.)

You are apprehended and thrown into solitary confinement.  Like the helicopter's belly, the cell limits your physical opportunities.  Your physical freedom is greatly reduced.

I always challenge my students here with a simple question:  Can Usain Bolt (I was once a good sprinter--what a phenom he is) run a world-class 100m in that cell?

The answer is of course both yes and no, depending on whether "can" means ability or opportunity.  (Here's a place to show how ambiguity of terms leads to confusion; reserve "can" for ability and "may" for opportunity and the answers to my question are clear!)

But then I ask, as I freely step left and left and left to a wall, if I am free--which of course I am--up to the wall.  But then I am not free to step left.  But I ask: who can you imagine (an exercise of logical possibility for my students) who might step left?

Hulk smash!

Point made:  because of the intimate interrelationship between physical ability and opportunities, the nature of what constitutes physical ability in part determines what are opportunities here in a way that the more remote metaphysical externality of social and political relata may not.  Superman, after all, is freer than all of us in part because his abilities constitute the extended set of so many more physically-relevant opportunities than we have.

So here (I'd say) we have the first clear metaphysical analog of the intimacy of how free will abilities may in part also constitute relevant opportunities.  If one posits that indeterminism is an essential part of free will ability, then the only opportunities that count for freedom are likewise metaphysically open to the future.   If one more compatibilistically fits ability within the confines of (say) reasons-responsiveness or Lewisian weak ability to have done otherwise, then the relevant opportunities move into the realm of possible worlds.  Still some set of opportunities  seem relevant to ability for freedom to exist in any case.  (There are deep axiological issues for what constitutes not just conceptual sufficiency here but also dialectical sufficiency, but these I wish to address at least in part later.)

I should state explicitly that I am not thereby insisting that the relevant opportunity set must be opportunities plural.  That requires much further argument.  Frankfurt (for example) might say in a strong actualist sense that an ability to identify appropriately with one's only opportunity is sufficient for freedom.

So here it is.  I present a general conceptual  metaphysical model  for freedom as a relationship:

Freedom x = ability(-ies) x + opportunity (-ies) x

where the nature of the relata (x as mental, physical, social etc.) as necessarily plural in some metaphysical sense is left open (as is the possibility that the question of plurality might vary from freedom-type x to another x as instantiated; in later posts I will specifically refer only to those plural incompatibilist versions of free will as FWa, and all other versions FWb, which map incompatibilism and compatibilism respectively).

This is not entirely a new proposal.  J. L. Austin, P. H. Nowell-Smith, Anthony Kenny, last month's Justin Caouette et  al have long advocated for consideration of both factors in some way.  But there have been few if any published proposals (that I'm aware of, and need correction otherwise)  to advocate for freedom as metaphysically a relationship of some sort, even though there recently has been a strong focus on the ability(-ies) component in terms of dispositional powers and the like as (seemingly) sufficient to address problems about freedom.  But such a focus is only half the story of freedom, and this is my thesis here.  I should also say that I'm not claiming some sort of radical insight--in fact I think the underlying assumption of many discussions of freedom tacitly assume this conceptual model.  But I do think we need explicitly to embrace this model--or as I offer here, a chance to criticize it (acknowledging Double-type utter conceptual skepticism about free will  as well, which I wish to more directly address as an alternative in another post).

One very plausible option to my proposal is found in so-called (by Levy, e.g.)" quality of will" accounts of free will.  These might well be counterexamples to my underlying assumption that freedom of any stripe has the same conceptual shape by associating the term with psychological structures of mind that are axiologically appropriate entities for designation as free or by value-deviance thus excluded  from being free (so for example legitimate and free "deep-self" expressions as opposed to unfree psychotic  and dissociated ones).  But even if that's right, then I still think that my picture of externalist freedom crucially based on physical freedom is correct, and for some (mind-body) reason free will is a completely different animal, probably because the values associated with external freedom and free will are themselves very different by free will grounding personal responsibility and the like.  But that would be a significant result as well, because we would then see that free will differs from other types of freedom on axiological grounds that drives the metaphysical claim for what free will is, and I do have sympathy for such a move (see my remarks on defining "death" primarily by value-choices in earlier posts).

(Much of this post was first presented at a UW-Madison Colloquium in 2005, appropriately on April 1; I am indebted to Juan Comesaña and Carolina Sartorio (now at Arizona) for that invitation.)

 I'm anxious to see what Flickerers think.

Comments

[David Duffy]

It's some time since I read Freedom without Responsibility, but seem to recall some discussion of the tendency of nonhuman animals to seek freedom, move to where their opportunities to act are maximized, search out open situations. I suppose that counts as an ability - perhaps A+O+A:O is better.

[V. Alan White]

Thanks David; could you say a bit more about that last suggestion?

So far I'm getting the impression my first post has some good company with Hume's First Treatise, if not in content, then maybe reception!

So let me just say this. My post is motivated by the fact that I've long puzzled if freedom had one conceptual shape or model in its various appearances. Examination of external kinds reveals a lot of commonality among political, social, and physical freedom, and even suggests an asymmetrical metaphysical supervenience among them. The close association of physical ability and opportunity is also suggestive that freedom of this particular type has its relata as more intrinsically bound together than other forms dependent on it. I wonder if FW is more like physical freedom in that regard, preserving distinguishable features of ability and opportunity while very intimately relating them, or whether FW is some sort of entirely different creature than these external forms. I apologize if all this wasn't clear enough in the original post.

[David Duffy]

Just that freedom may not be that useful as an entree to dissecting human type FW - we see it in the behaviour of lower animals, as per the amusing examples in Brems (2010).
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/14/rspb.2010.2325.short

Several of the branches in the lovely diagram of the genealogy of freedom at
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com.au/2015/0/a-guide-to-skinners-genealogy-of-liberty.html
seem to me to apply to other animals as well as to humans (and so too some of the reactive attitudes). It also seems to me that freedom is essential to acquisition of reliable knowledge (by persons or organisms), but not free will as such.

The very intimate relation between ability and opportunity (an "extended phenotype") that you alluded to may mean the interactions need to be explicitly included in your metaphysics, but I am not quite sure how one does this (A:O was the interaction term for your linear model!).

[Tamler Sommers]

"I wonder if FW is more like physical freedom in that regard, preserving distinguishable features of ability and opportunity while very intimately relating them, or whether FW is some sort of entirely different creature than these external forms."

Alan, I hate to be the guy that complicates things further rather than just answering the question, but I'm wondering what kind of question you're asking

Is this a question about how people ordinarily use or think of the term 'free will'?

Is it a question about how people SHOULD use or think of the term 'free will'? In other words, regardless of how people do think of the term, is it a question about what's the most useful way to talk about free will?

Or is it a question about what free will actually is, regardless of how people use the term or how useful it is to use the term that way? (In the sense that I'm looking at a bird right now and I want to know what kind of bird it is?)

I can make sense of the first two questions, but I can't make sense of the last one. I honestly have no idea what that questions means or how we could possibly go about answering it. But sometimes it seems like the free will debate is mostly over that last question.

[Bruce Waller]

Alan, Just a quick comment, as many of you can no doubt sympathize, am currently bogged down with departmental paperwork. I like your case, and it opens up a great discussion concerning degrees of freedom and/or free will. The connection between opportunity and freedom is indeed important, which is why it seems to me that Isaiah Berlin's positive liberty is just as basic as the negative liberty he celebrates, and in many instances perhaps even more important. On the importance of freedom of physical movement for freedom, might that depend on the species? For the white-footed mouse it is essential; but it seems to me that Stephen Hawking -- with very limited physical movement -- probably enjoys much greater freedom than I have. And I like the idea of freedom as involving related elements (though we might not agree on which elements). David, thanks for posting the Brembs link: I like his work very much, and had not come across that article. But it seems to me that Brembs is arguing against any radical break between human free will and the free will of other animals (which I like); and the freedom/free will distinction seems designed to facilitate drawing a distinction that might not be beneficial. Tamler, as always, a great question; but is there really a gap between the second and third question? It seems to me that James would say no, and Peirce would say yes. Could Alan say: I think this is the way we should use free/free will given our current best understanding of the world, and thus this IS what free will really is? Could Brembs meaningfully say: this is the way we should use "free will," given our best biological understanding of humans and other animals, because this better reflects our current best understanding of what free will really is? Sorry if this makes no sense, it's been a long day. Thanks for an interesting post, and stimulating comments.

[Paul Torek]

David, thanks for that link on Skinner on liberty. It wasn't hard, to find but here is a corrected link:

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/a-guide-to-skinners-genealogy-of-liberty.html

[V. Alan White]

Thank you Paul, Bruce, Tamler, and David. My semester is in the second week, and so classes, meetings, and the despair of dealing with a Governor who just yesterday tried singlehandedly (and thankfully unsuccessfully) to rewrite the 100-year old mission statement of the University of Wisconsin to exclude "search for truth" and "public service" in favor of "human resources" and the Wisconsin "workforce" has left me a bit discombobulated and bereft of time to comment. So please bear with me until I have a bit more time this weekend to decompress and breathe deeply.

Let me make some broad claims about freedom and free will in relation to my apparently more-puzzling-than-I-thought-it-would-be post--including some puzzlement I meant to convey.

I meant to show that whatever state of affairs in the world that might answer to being instances of freedom, some like political, social, and physical freedom seem to be ones that receive firm empirical grounding for such identification par excellence. Of course the more anthropocentric ones like political freedom seem more artificial than social and physical freedom, which are grounded in kinds of animal life that we share with some other species. My central idea is that freedom, if anything, is a function of how animate beings interact and are sorted into categories of behavior and ontological status that warrant being called "free" in a certain way. This is an inherently value-laden use of the term that is not present in other uses such as "free variables", "degrees of freedom of particles", "free-fall", etc. Being free politically, socially, even physically free *matters* in some value-infused way that many other uses of the term do not. My little thought-experiment attempts to identify some more external types of freedom that matter to us, but which also have identifiable relata that are rooted in reality in producing a relationship between them that grounds that "mattering". In that way identifying freedom of this ilk is like identifying what constitutes death--there are facts of the matter that constitutes what "death" refers to, but what matters for identifying death cannot be read off those facts. The state of affairs of there being more than one person constitutes the metaphysical opportunities for social freedom, but what constitutes the abilities of effective communication between those entities is necessarily a function of the values attached to any possible relationship-interaction between them. If one person expresses negative-value interaction with another by clubbing them to death, well, I guess that's a kind of freedom to communicate that, but doesn't instantiate anything like optimal values of free bilateral communication. But then it seems that the nature of the relationships between relata that are called more or less "free" is in part a function of what the relata can do (ability to club someone, ability to request something), but also how that plays into value judgments about how such possibilities are deemed "free(er)", along with associated more final value judgments (clubbing someone is a bad way to criticize; requests to shut up my dear Governor Walker are more civilized).

My original crude thoughts about this started in 1990. In 2002 I picked up Phillip Pettit's simply brilliant A Theory of Freedom and in the first few pages thought--well I've been undercut and beaten to the punch. But after reading it I realized that Pettit's thesis is basically a metaphysically underdetermined one that relies on large-scale assertions about values of freedom that can be attached to any number of particular metaphysical accounts. It is a wonderful book. In a way what I wish to recommend here is a serious metaphysical underpinning of it, in terms of ability and opportunity(-ies), that metaphysically extends the nature of free will coherently into the realms of the physical and social and political freedom.

Well, if and only if free will can be thus understood. But if free will cannot be coherently analyzed by a relationship of ability and opportunity, then "freedom" is only a value-related appellation as applied to all its thus-included references, and pretensions to a unified metaphysical account of freedom and free will ought to be abandoned.

Particulars:

David: thanks for the link to that page. I am much in sympathy obviously to such a connectiveness of different kinds of freedom. My own position is that the appositeness of reference is primarily a function of values, and that facts (abilities/opportunities) play into that in some further assessed way (maybe pragmatic?).

Tamler: I apologize for any lack of clarity. My OP tried to emphasize the large-scale empirical facts that seem to undergird external forms of freedom and question whether any forms of internal accounts answer to that. Nothing more.

Bruce: My deep appreciation for your remarks. Your point about Hawking is well-taken, but actually helps make my point. Hawking requires some minimum (as you suggest) physical ability to communicate (eye movement) that can be amplified by the extra-abilities due to social freedom (computers, 24/7 physical care) to restore his full freedom to communicate. There are even brain-implants as you know that can be read to restore communication for people who might not have even the minimal physical ability that Hawking has. But those are physical implants that work on purely physical brain mechanisms. Some minimal degree of physical freedom--assisted in some cases by the extra abilities of others--is necessary for anyone to have social freedom. And what degree of social freedom, and how it is assessed as further valuable--Hawking was on Big Bang Theory tonight; I am hardly relevant on this blog--is another matter.

Paul: took me a while as well to tap into David's nice link ala Google. Thanks for that!