Moral Psychology, Volume 4 by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Author:Walter Sinnott-Armstrong [Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-262-52547-3
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Constructing a Scientific Theory of Free Will

Roy F. Baumeister

Do people have free will? The question has attracted considerable debate over the centuries and continues to excite interest, not least because its implications spread across many fields of study (philosophy, psychology, neuroscience) as well as having profound implications for daily life (moral and legal judgment, religiosity).

Yet perhaps it is the wrong question. In attempting to construct a scientific theory of free will during the past several years, I have come to think that that simple question will never find a simple answer that satisfies many. There are several different, independent disputes regarding the question, and so many of the most strident assertions miss the points being asserted by their opponents. Different definitions of freedom and will point toward very different answers.

Moreover, the question “Do people have free will?” seeks a yes or no answer, but most psychological phenomena turn out to exist on continuums. Freedom probably comes in varying degrees rather than all or nothing. A further difficulty is that the idea of “will” as an entity is controversial, and what is involved is more likely a set of processes rather than a thing. Hence perhaps a more appropriate question would be “To what extent and in what sense(s) can humans act freely?” If that question fails to excite, one might add, “And what inner processes make those actions possible?” Those processes are the reality behind the idea of free will. Depending on your point of view, they are what free will is and how it happens, or they are the natural phenomena that are mistaken for free will.

Definitions and Goals

This chapter is intended to summarize my and my colleagues’ attempts to construct a scientific theory of free will, which must be considered a work in progress. I am not seeking to rehabilitate any theological notion. Rather, the goal is to ascertain what it is that people actually have and can do. In a sense, I seek to learn the genuine psychological phenomena that have given rise to the notion of free will. Thus, my goal is that of a psychologist seeking to describe a phenomenon rather than that of a philosopher seeking to settle a conceptual dispute. I am assuming that people use the term free will to refer to a certain way of acting, and my goal is to describe that way as well as possible. Deciding whether that qualifies as free will in a rigorous sense of the term is a different task and not my goal, though it is useful to note relevant connections.

Following the Lexicon of Terms (Haggard, Mele, O’Connor, & Vohs, 2010), I think of free will as the capacity for free action. Free action means that the person could do different things in the same situation. In essence, the question of whether someone acted freely is a question of whether the person could have done something differently. This is highly relevant to moral judgment and moral philosophy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.