Are we free?

What’s your view on free will? Do you have one – and, if so, how much confidence do you have in it? Does it matter what you think?
Most people don’t worry about questions like this. ‘Free will’ sounds like the kind of abstraction only a philosopher could love. Words like ‘choice’, ‘blame’, and ‘punishment’, by contrast, have a painfully pragmatic edge. Yet all these beliefs are, at root, about the same thing: the degree to which our choices are or aren’t free.
Consider a murderer. More specifically, because there’s no such thing as an abstract murderer, consider an adult who plots to shoot their neighbour dead, does so, and is then caught and found guilty of committing this crime. What should be done with them?
Your answer is likely to depend on how far you think they were or weren’t responsible for their actions. Self-evidently, someone who commits a terrible crime while in the grip of an acute psychosis should be treated differently to someone who clear-headedly plans it over many months. Or should they? In one sense, someone suffering from a mental illness is no more or less responsible for who they are – their genetic inheritance, their family circumstances, the events and influences surrounding them – than a cold-blooded killer is for their character and place in society.
As the philosopher Gregg Caruso puts it in Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, a book-length dialogue between Caruso and the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, “the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control”. On the basis that nobody can or should be blamed for things that are beyond their control, Caruso suggests that nobody can freely choose their actions in a way that makes talk of blame and punishment meaningful.
As a result, Caruso advocates for a “quarantine” model of justice, treating criminality as a pathology resulting from genes and circumstances. For pragmatic reasons, he accepts that killers should be kept away from others. But the appropriate way to frame their actions is in terms of public health, not punitive justice.
This is all very well. In another sense, however, Dennett argues that the very fact that we can discuss such ideas – that people can read and write books exploring them; that we can weigh up arguments and evidence, then reach our own conclusions – suggests a fundamental form of agency based upon self-reflection. Nobody chooses to be born, or the world they’re born into. But this doesn’t mean there is no such thing as choice; simply that no choice is perfectly free. Free will is a capacity we gradually and effortfully grow into: an imperfect, incremental negotiation with our circumstances that is precious precisely because it’s so constrained.
As Dennett puts it, “there really are people with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious”. No one is born with true self-awareness or self-control. But our gradual maturation is significant precisely because it entails a rational animal becoming capable of such things. This capacity is unique to our species, not to mention compromised and imperfect. But so are most things ‘worth wanting’. Equating free will with perfect self-control is a philosophical chimera.
For Caruso, it’s the notion of self-control that’s wishful thinking. Why? Because any and every capacity we possess is only ours thanks to forces we don’t control. If you’re unfortunate enough to lack the insight, willpower or opportunity to practice self-reflection, you cannot and should not be held responsible for this lack any more than if you’re lucky enough to be disciplined and virtuous. “Either actions are subject to present luck (luck around the time of action), or they are subject to constitutive luck (luck in who one is and what character traits and dispositions one has), or both,” Caruso writes. It’s luck all the way down.
As you may have guessed, I lean towards Dennett’s side of the argument, albeit with caution. It seems self-evident that nobody is wholly responsible for their actions: that we are born and die within a vast, unchosen universe. But this doesn’t mean that whatever we are, or may become, is dictated by the past in a way that empties ‘choice’ of meaning.
As Dennett puts it, “your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.” We are free – or, at least, capable of growing towards freedom – in the only sense that matters, in that we are capable of understanding reality sufficiently well to play a part in shaping its future. Freedom isn’t about overcoming the universe’s dictates. Quite the reverse. It’s about recognising the permeability of the boundary between the self and everything else – then exerting some measure of influence in the light of this knowledge.
Dan Dennett died at the age of 82, on 19th April 2024. I was lucky enough to speak to him a few months before this, discussing his lifelong explorations of cognition, technology, and evolutionary theory alongside his final book, I’ve Been Thinking. We covered a great deal of ground – and, in particular, the troubling potentials of technologies like Artificial Intelligence. The more we are deceived, he believed, the less free we become. A choice made upon the basis of misleading or inaccurate evidence does not belong to us: it has, in effect, been rigged or pre-decided elsewhere. Free will is thus a pragmatic, collective project: one predicated upon education, information, self-reflection, and the pursuit of knowledge.
At the end of our conversation, Dennett turned towards an intimate theme: parenthood. “My children are both adopted,” he told me. “But I love them with the intensity of any biological dad. I can remember a moment in the early life of our eldest, when she was a little girl, maybe two years old or less, when I detected some possible threat, and it suddenly struck me, ‘Oh, my goodness, I think I would kill to protect this child.’ And it scared me, almost. But it also thrilled me, because it was a recognition of the intensity and depth of emotional attachment. And that’s what life is all about.”
We do not choose our parents or children, our circumstances or opportunities, the wellsprings of sentiment that define us. We are chosen by them. But how we make sense of this – the love, the hope, the fear, the inevitability of loss – is up to us in the only sense that matters. In as much as we are able to know ourselves, and one another, we are free.