The term free will is widely taken to mean freedom of choice, control such that an individual could have acted otherwise, or true origination of action, although we can and will define it in a number of other ways over the course of this book. Nevertheless, whichever way free will is defined – the libertarian definition, the compatibilist definition, the reactive-attitudinist definition, the illusionist definition, to cite just four instances – the conceit of free will has betrayed truth, intellect, and our capacity for fairness and morality.
“Is it fair, he keeps asking, to hold both of them responsible? Life isn’t fair” (Dan Dennett, ‘Daniel Dennett reviews Against Moral Responsibility by Bruce Waller’).
“There is a deep cultural connection”, writes the philosopher Bruce Waller, between strong belief in self-creation and free choice, and extremes of poverty and wealth and an absence of genuine opportunity for large segments of the culture. The greater the commitment to these conceits, the more the “absence of genuine opportunity, … the greater the disparity between rich and poor, the weaker the commitment to equal opportunity, and the meaner the support system for the least fortunate”. As Waller and the author have independently demonstrated, belief in free will appears to be partially or wholly driving such unappealing characteristics as personal and national vanity, indifference to poverty and inequality, increased cruelty and aggression, greater contempt for ideals of fair play, less concern for protecting the innocent – in other words greater indifference to miscarriages of justice – and heightened toleration of injustice.
The vanity of freedom of the will helped create poverty and destitution, at least in large parts of the West – and in particular the US and the UK – and today it justifies vast inequalities of power, privilege and wealth. It is the affectation of free will which ensures that so many at the bottom are denied any chance of social and economic advancement. In influential work Daniel Dennett, for example, has defended free will with the argument that luck averages out in the long run, and so in consequence everyone in America – rich or poor, black or white – gets just as many chances in life. Dennett suggests that over his long life he has suffered just as much as anyone, and thus no one gets to claim to be any less privileged or less fortunate than anyone else. Free will theorists, secular and religious, advise us to write off between 1 and 20% of our fellows. Some go so far as to argue that justice for the minority should be determined solely by the majority, and even that justice for the majority cancels out injustice for the minority. Other free will scholars seek to split mankind into two types, and deny to the one form the consideration and fairness that we, the apparently more perfect form of human, claim for ourselves. And we shall see arguments from the leading modern free will philosophers that “there is room for the thought” that you and I can take credit for our wonderful health and fine characters, with the deeply distasteful implication that it is to others’ discredit when they are born diseased, or into a toxic environment.
“Is [the system] fair enough not to be worth worrying about? Of course. After all, luck averages out in the long run” (Dan Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, p.95).
Free will justification is fundamentally the inability to admit that others have been, or will be, less lucky in life than you. Belief in free will – whether that be belief in free will as free choice, or belief in a free will that eschews free choice – means never having to acknowledge your own great good fortune, or recognise the far greater misfortune of others. It should surely be sad enough that some have forced upon them the losing hands in the lottery of birth and upbringing, while many of us – generally the wealthier, the better-educated, the more attractive, the lighter-skinned – coast though life with barely a hiccup. But to then feel the pressing need to tell untruths about those who suffer misfortune… what does this say about us?
To argue that we don’t need fair, we just need “fair enough”? To suggest that unfairness is “not to be worth worrying about”? To make up stories about those who didn’t get the breaks we did – stories about how “luck averages out” in human life? That they freely chose their own misfortune? That “there is room for the thought” that the child with the progressive motor neurone disease is somehow to blame for being in a wheelchair?
To remain silent when moral philosophers argue that justice for the 99%, or the 80%, wholly extinguishes injustice for the 1%, or the 20%? To say nothing when free will scholars write that the unlucky losers in the lottery of biology and environment are not our fellow humans, that moral and economic apartheid are acceptable and necessary, that truth must be sacrificed to expediency, and that there is no need to extend fair play, or equality, or opportunity, to those not like us?