August 08, 2014

#BattleFest2012: Free will: just an illusion?

1 hour 20 minutes

Free will is at the root of our notions of moral responsibility,

choice and judgment. It is at the heart of our conception of the human

individual as an autonomous end in himself. Nevertheless, free will is

notoriously hard to pin down. Philosophers have denied its existence on

the basis that we are determined by the laws of nature, society or

history, insisting there is no evidence of free will in the iron chain

of cause and effect. Theologians have argued everything happens

according to the will of God, not man. And yet, when we decide we want

something and act on that, it certainly seems as if we are choosing freely. Are we just kidding ourselves?

Some of the most profound contemporary challenges to the idea of free

will come from neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and

biologists. They argue we are effectively programmed to act in certain

ways, and only feel as if we make choices. Some argue, for

example, that we can easily be nudged into certain types of behaviour if

only the right stimuli are applied. It is widely believed that

advertising can make us buy things we don’t need or even want. Stronger

forms of this reasoning can be found in the idea that early

intervention, usually before the age of three, can determine the sort of

adult a child will grow up to be. Without such intervention, we are

told, their future will be determined by genetics, by their environment,

by the way their parents treat them.

Nevertheless, common sense still gives strong support to the idea

that we have free will. We understand there are relatively large areas

of our lives in which it makes sense to say we could have acted

differently, with correspondingly different results. The law recognises

this too: it is no defence to say you stole because your parents were

cruel to you. We feel remorse at opportunities we could have taken but

did not. And we do sometimes choose to do the right thing even against

our own interests: in extreme cases some even lay down their lives for

others and for ideals. Jean-Paul Sartre argued, ‘the coward makes

himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is

always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the

hero to stop being a hero’. Is the idea that we might be born cowards,

or heroes, an excuse for not facing up to our moral responsibilities? Or

is free will really an illusion, the by-product of a vain belief that

we are all special?

Speakers:

Joe Friggieri professor

of philosophy and former head of department, University of Malta; poet;

playwright; theatre director; three-times winner, National Literary

Prize

Dr Daniel Glaser head,

special projects, public engagement, Wellcome Trust; honorary senior

research fellow, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College

London

Neal Lawson chair, Compass; author, All Consuming; former adviser to Gordon Brown; co-editor, Progressive Century

Dr Ellie Lee reader in social policy, University of Kent, Canterbury; director, Centre for Parenting Culture Studies

Chair:

Angus Kennedy

convenor, The Academy; author, Being Cultured: in defence of discrimination

Recorded on Sunday 21 October 2012 at the Battle of Ideas Festival at the Barbican in London.

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