The Problem of Freedom

... I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which He has impressed on our minds such notions, ... that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world ...
- Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637. John Veitch translation, in Ihe Rationalists, 1974)

Are any human actions really free? Halley's Comet streaks across the sky every seventy-five years, like clockwork. It is utterly predictable, its motion the result of purely physical causes. That is the nature of physical things. If you know enough about them, you can predict very precisely what they will do. In fact, all events that occur in the physical universe, are predictable in this way, for all such events have causes.

So, it could be argued: All events have causes; all human actions are events; so, all human actions have causes. Now whatever actions are caused cannot be free. If a loud noise makes you jump and spill your coffee, you did not spill the coffee of your own free will. You were not free to spill it or not to spill it, your spilling it was caused.

And so it is with every "action" we perform -- it is caused, and therefore not free. So human beings are not free, nothing is up to us. Whatever happens, whatever we do physically, are events in the physical, causally determined universe of space and time. And so it makes no sense for us to blame or praise one another for what we do or fail to do, for none of it is up to us anyway. Moral judgments are just a waste of breath. Descartes believed the universe to be a tightly bound-up system of cause and effect in which everything, including people, obey rigid scientific laws. And just as the motions of comets and planets can be calculated and predicted if we know certain "initial conditions," human actions, too, could be predicted, if we just knew enough about the humans involved.

This is not as outlandish a viewpoint as it seems. Freud, for example, believed that our actions are caused by unconscious forces over which we have little or no control, and Marx believed our lives to be determined by socioeconomic forces and the class struggle.

Are we free? or not?

Bibliography

Descartes Rene: Philosophical Works of Descartes, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1931. two volumes.

Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, The Rationalists, Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y,, 1974.