Sending "Free Will" on Holiday

The phrase "free will" has a remarkable hold on the imagination. I've come to wonder if it isn't time to give it a holiday.

Any philosopher knows that the questions "Do we have free will?" and "Is determinism true?" need to be kept separate. All the possible combinations have been argued for: we're free, even though the universe is deterministic; we're free but determinism is false; we aren't free, perhaps because the universe is deterministic; we aren't free and the universe's joints are loose. But even though philosophers are familiar with that dialectic, other folks aren't and have a hard time getting a grip on it. The idea that asking about free will is the same as asking if the world is deterministic is persistent in something like the way that questions about mental life seem to be all but inextricable from beliefs about "souls" for many people.

To this we can add another persistent assumption: that free choices have to be consciously made. This lies behind some common interpretations of recent work in neuroscience. It seems that we begin to act on our decisions -- at least some of them -- before we're conscious of what we've decided. A simple example would be deciding when to push a button. The evidence suggests that we initiate the motion before the decision registers in consciousness. This is often seen as providing some sort of evidence against free will.

Suppose we set the phrase "free will" aside. Instead, think about what we might call a "well-functioning agent." Think of someone who's a good model of the sort of agent/decision-maker you'd like to be—someone who pays attention to relevant facts, who doesn't ignore consequences, but who's flexible, adaptable and able to be spontaneous when the occasion fits. This is the sort of person John Martin Fischer calls "reasons-responsive," and who has a variety of other traits we think well-rounded deciders ought to have. Does anyone really think there are no such people? And why would abstruse discoveries about fundamental, highly abstract physical laws persuade us otherwise? If you think you either are or have a good shot at becoming a well-functioning agent, do you really care if you have "free will" in some slippery metaphysical sense? If so, why? Better yet, what exactly is this extra issue?

As for the neuroscience, forget for the moment about inconsequential "decisions" about when to push a button and think of something you care about. Suppose it turns out that when we make even those kinds of decisions, the action that goes with them starts a fraction of a second before we're consciously aware of what we decided. Would that mean there aren't any well-functioning agents? It's hard to see why. If paying attention, gathering evidence, listening to others, imagining consequences and the like all make a difference to the eventual outcome, then why should we care if all this gels below consciousness? Is it at all likely that discoveries in neuroscience will show that deliberation, planning, imagination, etc. don't make a difference to what we decide? And suppose that we're capable of reconsidering if the evidence and occasion call for it? The neuroscience about the point where consciousness enters the picture is fascinating, but what does it really have to do with whatever we really cared about when we decided to think about free will? And once we get clear on what we really care about, how much does the phrase "free will" really add?