I
spent a long time writing notes on a big post yesterday on my thoughts on free will, and ended up not getting anywhere concise enough to actually clean up and post. Free will is a pet philosophy problem that I keep returning to, like a dog to its vomit.
Some people think we don't have free will. Generally, they think the idea is somehow incoherent -- that is, it's not just that humans beings happen not to have it, but that it is in principle impossible, like a square circle.
Why does anyone even care about the concept of free will? It seems that the question is really whether we are morally responsible for our actions. Presumably, if we don't have free will, this would have fairly serious repercussions for the way we think about praise and blame, reward and punishment, not to mention less concrete aspects of our identity and movement through the world.
So are we responsible for our actions? The thing is, we very, very obviously are, in the sense that we respond to the consequences of our actions. What it means to be responsible is to be able to identify reasons and then act on them. We don't send rocks to jail for falling on people and killing them, because rocks do not respond to reasons like jailtime. They will fall and kill people in precisely the same numbers whether or not they are classified as felons.
Human beings, however, respond to reasons. This is really all there is at the heart of the debate. It is impossible to act as though you did not have free will, and virtually impossible to treat others as though they didn't. All the hypothesizing about determinism and libertarian free will is a distraction from what matters, which is whether we are acting as mindless brutes, or as agents sensitively tuned sieve forms and causes out of the relative chaos of the universe. Surprise -- if you can read this, you have free will.