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Why is Freedom So Important To Us?

John Shand explains why free will is basic to humanity.

Much has been written about whether or not we have free will. That is not my topic here, but it has a connection to it, in that I want to ask why so much has been written on the matter. Whether we are free or not seems very important to us.

Let’s first suppose that we are not free – that there is no such thing as free will. Let’s further take that to imply that there is no sense in which we may be held responsible for what we do, any more than a tree or a rock may be held responsible when it falls on our head. It either falls, owing to some previous cause, or it does not. It’s a purely factual matter, devoid of any normative judgement as to whether it should or should not have happened. Let’s also suppose that the causes are all that is to be said about the matter. In that case, the entire universe can be summed up by an account of what does exist and what does and does not happen. Events either take place or they don’t. And that’s it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, the world is the totality of facts (Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, 1.1, 1921).

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To stave off an objection that might come into someone’s head here, we have to be careful in our language and pay attention to the way in which we use normative words such as ‘should’ or ‘ought’. We sometimes use these words in a non-normative sense; but the meaning in those cases is quite different. It may signal an ignorance of causes, for example. So suppose the jewellers have just returned your watch, after cleaning and servicing it. After a few days it stops: we might say that the watch should not or ought not to have broken down. What we mean here is that, given the servicing your watch has just been through, there should/ought to be no cause for it to stop working – while at the same time presumably not denying that there is a cause for the malfunction, we just don’t know what it is. But no moral blame attaches to your watch: it cannot be said to have made a mistake, or done something wrong in the sense of selecting poorly from various options. A watch simply does what a watch does (or in this case, does not do). Of the watchsmith, by contrast, we might say that he has done something incorrectly.

Having got that out of the way, in what follows the term ‘normative’ will be used to imply that it makes sense to say that doing something a certain way is correct or incorrect, and that the rule giving the correct way of doing it is not descriptive but rather prescriptive: it sets down how something should be done, regardless of what is actually done. Trees, rocks, watches, can neither ‘do things correctly’ nor ‘make mistakes’; they just do what they do. If what they do does not fit a putative law of nature saying what they ‘should’ do in a descriptive sense, then either we’ve misunderstood what happened or else we need to change our perception of the laws of nature, for it is one of these options which is mistaken or incorrect, not what happens. However, when we say of someone that putting ‘7’ after ‘2+3=’ is incorrect, we are suggesting, normatively, that they should have written 5 but chose to write 7, and that in so doing they did not correctly follow the rules of arithmetic. Generally, when a maths teacher sets a student a sum to solve, they are not just waiting to see what happens next, where one result is as good as any other, and no error can be made in what happens. Rather, in the normative case, they want to see if the student can give an answer that’s correct, or not.

Of course, it’s not arithmetic to which the minds of people turn when they think about our being free or not, but morality; and aesthetics too, that is, questions of taste or sensibility. More generally, in thinking about freedom, we think in terms of a panoply of values, and closely connected to that, meaning. It is value and meaning that would seem to be eradicated from the universe if free will goes, for without it we appear to be left with a world in which objects exist and things merely happen or do not happen, without the happenings having value or meaning.

First, consciousness is required for meaning and value. If you think that in the absence of conscious observers things and events in the universe could still have value and meaning, then you’re probably not thinking of our complete absence, but perhaps imagining that we’d still be looking on in some shadowy form. But suppose we’re not even there in that sense, and that no other creatures really value or ascribe meaning to anything. This would imply that nothing is more important, or significant, or valuable, or better, or worse, than anything else. If there are no human valuers, then there are no values. (There may be aliens who are able to value, so perhaps the universe would still have values and meaning to someone. Yet as far as we yet know, there are no aliens, so hanging the persistence of values and meaning on the hook of that possibility would be a gossamer hope indeed.)

Secondly, though, only if there is freedom to choose may anything be properly considered right or wrong, some things better or worse, some things to have a meaning because they’re more important or significant than others. So freedom of the will appears to be another necessary condition for there to be values, since only creatures with free will can choose between options of what should or should not happen. Only with free will is there the possibility of not just acting in accord with a rule but following a rule. So only if there is freedom can there be both ethics and aesthetics. Well, without freedom we would perhaps be left with the facts of our preferences and tastes, but with no normative implication – you cannot be right or wrong in respect to them; they would simply be situations that either are or are not. You either like cheese, or potatoes, or chicken, or you do not – there’s no point in arguing with someone that they’re not right if they don’t like what you do, or asserting that they’ve made a mistake, that they ought to like it. However, with values and meaning, there is such a point, for a (good) judgement of value or meaning follows a rational process, implying the possibility of normative judgement as to a correct or a mistaken view. This need not imply that one can come to a definitive conclusion, that is beyond question, but only that the debate is something that makes sense, because it might lead to one view rather than another.

Often those who are sanguine about freedom being an illusion we could happily live without, also say that accepting this position would eliminate the blame and resentment of responsibility, leading to a cooler, more rational way of dealing with attitudes and actions we take to be wrong. Whether it is possible or not to view people as devoid of freedom, and it is hard to see how that would be, the idea that the removal of free will from our lives would be good overlooks the other side of the coin – that it would simultaneously eliminate the praise and admiration that sometimes come with responsibility. Just as freedom to choose the bad would go without free will, so would freedom to choose the good, and any sense of praiseworthy achievements for which we could be given credit and be proud. We could neither rationally be castigated for the bad we do, nor praised for the good: all would just happen, or not happen. And this would not just apply to moral matters. Any actions that are praised or blamed could no longer be. If a person made great sacrifices, say in order to create a great work of art that was marvellous in itself and gave comfort or stimulation to millions, or made some scientific discovery after enormous labour, no acclaim could be given, either for the result or for the effort made: it just happened. Praise would be no more appropriate than it would be if directed at the sun for coming up and combining with the weather to produce a beautiful spring morning.

The denial of free will, and hence of moral responsibility, also potentially justifies the awful prospect of criminals not being held to account and punished for the wrongs they choose, but rather, being treated merely as broken mechanisms that need to be fixed (see for instance A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962). Indeed, the absence of freedom from our lives, or perhaps I should say, the firm belief that we are not free, that we have no genuine ability to guide our lives through freely-considered choices – would take us to an utterly different way of living, including being stripped of all values and meaning. We would no more have either of those than a rock does when rolling downhill until it hits something and stops. That would indeed be full non-significance, from our birth to our death: we would just be complicated rocks rolling down a hill until we stop. Such a terrible, barren prospect is the reason freedom is so important to us.

John Shand is an Honorary Associate in Philosophy at the Open University. His books include Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (2002), Arguing Well (2000), and, as Editor, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2019). For his understanding of free will, see ‘Free Will and Subject’ in The Polish Journal of Philosophy, Vol.9. No.1.