Emerson Green and Alex O’Connor are both popular philosophy of religion personalities and Green made a video today critiquing Alex O’Connor’s hard determinism. O’Connor seems to believe that free will is incompatible with determinism and that determinism is true (meaning that free will is false). Green responds to an argument that he makes for this conclusion, which basically boils down to the claim that nobody can control what they want or will to do, and our wants determine all our choices and behaviour, unless we are coerced to do something. We only ever choose the courses of action which seem most compelling to us. What determines what seems most compelling to us? That will depend on whole host of factors that we have no control over, including intelligence, upbringing, environmental pressures acting on you in the moment, psychology and personality. We often think that we could have done otherwise in hindsight, but given exactly the same conditions as obtained at the time (both outwardly in the environment and inwardly in the brain), would you have been able to want to do otherwise? The answer to that seems to me to be no, because given exactly the same conditions, exactly the same thing would have seemed compelling to you to do, even if you can, through hindsight, recognize the action to be unwise or immoral or simply not in accord with your goals.
Emerson Green is a compatibilist (the belief that free will is compatible with determinism) and defends that view in response. Green anticipates the argument above by saying, “I really don’t think that whether or not we have free will, depends on whether we can impossibly self-create our genes, early environment, all our desires and so on.” He contends that hard determinists are “attacking a maximalist version of control that no one should defend.” He then sketches a compatibilist version of free will. “In ordinary life, if I say I did something of my own free will, what do I mean? I just mean that it was up to me. That my actions were in accordance my desires, that no one else made me do it, that I was doing what I wanted to do…” Green goes on to argue that we can achieve “self-authorship” as a result of being able to influence ourselves to choose to be a better person or a worse person. He then claims that we can still be the source of our actions even given O’Connor’s argument. To argue this, he appeals by analogy to a garden hose. The garden hose does not generate water from nothing, but we can still coherently call the hose a source of water. The hose is not the ultimate source of the water, but it is still obviously a source of water.
This debate depends on how one defines free will, as Green pointed out, but there is good reason to define it more “maximally” than he does. In order to yield moral responsibility, I think that free will must include the ability to do otherwise, not in the sneaky, equivocating way that compatibilists seek to give us that ability in light of determinism, but in the way we ordinarily mean when we say it. What does that mean? When we think about whether we could have done otherwise, we mean that there is a possible world where, under exactly the same conditions, we chose a different course of action. In order for that to work, you must be the author of your actions and desires in a more maximalist sense. Arguably, there also needs to be something nonmechanistic inside you that is not subject to the laws of cause and effect of the external environment, that allows you to do this. It is from this dualistic worldview that our concept of free will comes. If determinism and physicalism is true, then this is impossible, because your brain (and therefore, mind) is then just part of the environmental conditions that caused you to act a certain way. To put it another way, the only way for you to do something freely is if your brain (and mind) is not just part of the predetermined conditions that cause what you do. To put it yet another way, any distinction between “you” and the predetermined conditions that influence you is a false dichotomy (such as when compatibilists say that something is “up to you”). That is what determinism and physicalism implies.
There is a thought experiment by Harry Frankfurt, where he imagines that there is some kind of device or action by another person (“Black”) (like a brain implant) that will cause a person (“Jones”) to only take one action.[i] Jones happens to choose that action, so that the brain implant never activated to force him to do so. This is meant to prove that we can have free will without alternative possibilities, because our intuition remains that he chose freely even though he could not have done otherwise. But this way of understanding alternative possibilities is just equivocation. He could still have chosen to try to take another action, even if he would then have been forced, meaning that the thought experiment does retain alternative possibilities, which explains our intuition that he still had free will. If the brain implant had taken away his ability to even try or even decide to do something different, then we would no longer have the intuition that he retains free will. If you still think that the thought experiment retains our notion of free will, consider the following. In order for the brain implant, or some other action by “Black” to “activate”, Jones would need to do something different, or at least begin to do something different from the action that Black wants him to take. However restrictive you make the condition that Black puts on Jones, Jones would need to do or think something which would alert Black that Jones is going to do something different or activate the brain implant, meaning that he can still do something different. So, Frankfurt has not shown that free will can exist without alternative possibilities.
But notice that Frankfurt’s thought experiment creates exactly the conditions which there is not in a deterministic world, that there is some causeless or causally suspended operation of deliberation and choice that functions provided there is no coercion. It presupposes what it is trying to prove. Determinism controls all our choices through prior causes that have nothing to do with us, meaning that, in the language of the thought experiment, Black’s brain implant is activated all the time. There is no such thing as human behaviour without Black’s brain implant being active. “Cannot do otherwise” is just a way of capturing the idea that we are forced to do what we do by things beyond our control. Frankfurt’s way of conceiving of alternative possibilities is not what we ordinarily mean by it. The thought experiment illustrates that our ability to have done otherwise must be internal and the only way it could be that way is if there is something in us which is exempt from the cause and effect of things around us. If we are subject to the same mechanistic world of cause and effect of the things around us, then there is no difference between any machine and us, except in terms of sophistication. We do what we are programmed to do, no more and no less. Sure, we have the ability to be self-controlled and to change and to do better, but whether we actually do so is determined by things that we haven’t chosen.
The primary problem I have with compatibilism is that it does not seem significantly different enough from hard determinism to yield the type of free will that gives one moral responsibility. Whether you’re talking about sourcehood, selfhood, dispositions, or desires and intentions, none of these get you to responsibility, because none of them imply that you could have wanted or done otherwise (in a way that does not equivocate on what we ordinarily mean by “doing otherwise”). If physicalism is true, then your internal environment ( your brain, body and nervous system), in fact, you yourself and everything about you, is just part of the web of cause and effect, part of the conditions which determine what you do. It is a category mistake to talk about things being “up to me.” That “up to me” is drawing a distinction between a self and things I don’t control. But you don’t control yourself either. There is a “self” in the sense of an awareness of being a separate being from other beings in the world. But there is no self apart from the mechanistic world of cause and effect. When they say something is “up to me” compatibilists are subtly presupposing something in the human person that exists apart from the mechanistic world of cause and effect (while at the same time thinking that’s not what they’re doing). It is once again a dualistic paradigm rearing its head. Ironically, Green’s thought experiment about the garden hose shows exactly why he is wrong. The garden hose is the source of the water, but it is obviously not responsible for the fact that water is coming out of it. His thought experiment shows precisely why sourcehood does not result in free will or responsibility.
[i] Frankfurt, Harry, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” In Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 21-22
Andries Louis Joubert 
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