#57: Determinism & Neo-Determinism; Freedom-Handicaps; and Liberalism

I’m talking about the philosophical theory called “Determinism,” a doctrine that is as at home in the European Enlightenment as Socialism is. The notion usually shows up as one half of a problem, 0ne of the most popular and enduring philosophical chestnuts with which to entertain and puzzle undergraduates: the free-will/determinism conflict.

The Determinism in question is usually called “Causal Determinism” because it emerges from reflections on nature and the way it is governed by causal laws. Once people became aware of science as an accumulation of related laws, they also drew the conclusion that there exist no exceptions to law-governed behavior. The underlying faith of science is that all natural change is law governed, whether we happen at any point in time to know which laws are actually in play or not. A further implication of this faith, some have thought, is that human behavior, no less than that of the planets, is itself fully law-governed and therefore fully determined. It would seem that this line of reflection inexorably leads to the conclusion that there is no free will.

The reason lies in the strong, if cryptic, intuition that “being free” means “being able to have done otherwise.” Was I free when I chose my Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks? On this intuition, I was free only if it’s true that I could have done other than I did, by buying, let’s say, a Cafe Americano. But, argues the causal determinist, since each of us is a machine and thereby governed by immutable causal laws, we could no more refrain from the Caramel Macchiato than a ball rolling down a hill can arbitrarily choose to stop or a clock arbitrarily change the time it is showing.

I think that I’m not going too far in saying that, all things considered, Causal Determinism has not taken any damage in this 400 year conflict. It has a very strong case. At least a part of the reason for this is that the increasingly powerful secular-scientific lobby has successfully pushing the view that Causal Determinism implies some very specific moral, social, and political positions. Among these are the following two BIG ones:

1) The law should only be an instrument of protection and rehabilitation, not punishment or justice. The law should protect all of its citizens, law-breakers included, from each other. Law breakers are not to be punished, since punishment presumes that the criminal had choice, which enlightened people understand is not the case. Law breakers are broken or maladjusted machines, to be repaired or readjusted, not made to suffer.

2) Since people could not have done otherwise, they are never free, and, since never free, never responsible for what they do.

Now, the move from Causal Determinism to the moral, social, and political policies is, I think, completely unwarranted. The former can be true, which I think it is, and the latter still be bad policies. This is not a new idea, it was already argued very well near the end of the 17^th c by John Locke. The view is called “Compatibilism” because it holds that freedom and Causal Determinism are compatible.

A Compatibilist maintains that people can in fact be free. They are free, he says, whenever they could do other than they do, given that they want to do the other thing. Being free, he argues, is simply nothing standing in your way of doing what you want to do. He doesn’t care why you want what you want, just that nothing is stopping you from going after it. When that is the case, he says that you’re free. The causal determinist does care about why you want what you want, and he doesn’t care whether it’s true that nothing is stopping you from going after it. All he cares about is that your past and your body are determining what it is that you want.

I think that Locke is in the right on this, but Hume, some 75 years later, elaborates and clarifies his point. We never ask whether a ball rolling down a hill is free or not. And, more specifically, we never complain that a ball lacks freedom because it is incapable of suspending or violating the laws of motion. That is, where an inanimate object is concerned, we don’t think that the object’s leaving the control of the laws of nature would constitute “freedom” for it.

The reason is that balls rolling down hills don’t have goals or objectives. The ball is not, as Aristotle thought, “trying to get to it’s home” (his explanation of gravity). We do, however, speak of “setting an animal free” and of animals being in “captivity.” Perhaps this is no more than anthropomorphization, perhaps not, but it indicates that we apply the notion of freedom only where we believe there exist wants, desires, goals, or objectives. “Freedom,” thus is a very limited notion, applying only to one’s ability to satisfy one’s wants or achieve one’s goals. As Hume puts it, freedom is either this or it is nothing (meaningless). It is true that our wants and goals are the causal results of our personal histories, our genetic endowments, and our others physical inheritances, but to say that we are “free” is nothing other than to say that nothing stands in the way of our satisfying those wants and achieving those goals.

But Locke and Hume don’t have to be right on this question, since I’m quite willing to grant Causal Determinism to the Enlightenment’s Liberal descendants for the moment because what puzzles me is not their being Causal Determinists or even their extending this theory to moral, social, and political doctrines, but rather their apparent inconsistency.

Conservatives are constantly disturbed and offended by what they perceive to be “double-standards” being applied by liberals. What is a “double-standard”? It is applying one set of expectations for, say, moral behavior or rationality to one population, while applying another lesser one to another. Here are some obvious examples:

1) The rich and the poor. Characteristically, rich criminals are excoriated with the entire vocabulary of blame, while the poor are exempted from any responsibility.

2) The white and the black (or Hispanic or gay; strangely, Asians do not seem to benefit from this application of the double-standard as the former).

3) The male and the female.

4) Israel and the so-called “Palestinians.”

5) And, lately, we have noticed the same phenomenon occurring with respect to the Tea Party and the vocal Left.

Not least, it is very apparent in 6) the different treatment being accorded to Bush and Obama.

One half of this double standard is perfectly understandable in terms of the Enlightenment legacy of Causal Determinism. People who are the causal products of their histories are not responsible for what they do. Blaming these people would simply be unfair. One could see these positions already explicitly stated in Julien de la Mettrie’s The Man Machine, as well in as in his other writings. Nothing new, nothing unexpected.

But the other side of the double standard is really difficult for these descendants of la Mettrie to defend. Are not the rich, the white, the male, the Israelis, the members of the Tea Party, and, of course, Bush, not equally products of their histories?

The existence of this difference in treatment is so dramatic that it would seem that even the most ideologically brain-damaged Liberal would find herself suffering some cognitive dissonance, but this does not seem to be happening. How can this be? I have a modest answer here.

I think it is because Liberals are not traditional Causal Determinists at all, they are what we might call Neo-Determinists. But, you say, if this is true, why have they not come out and published their new doctrine, the philosophy of Neo-Determinism? The reason, I think, is that while this new doctrine does have some significant political advantages, it also has serious disadvantages that would become quite obvious once the doctrine was brought to the surface. More on this below.

Now, I do believe that Liberals hold, along with everyone else, that responsibility varies directly with degree of freedom; but I think that Liberals also harbor an unspoken commitment to the view that personal freedom and responsibility together actually vary with membership in certain select populations. This barely visible theory, if it can even be called that, is that freedom (and responsibility) varies directly with 1) money, 2) race, 3) sex, 4) education, 5) intelligence, and 6) political affiliation. This means that people with more money are more responsible for what they do, white people more than “people of color”, the better educated more than the less, the smarter more than the stupid, and Conservatives more than Liberals. The precise size of the responsibility discount being applied for each category will vary with the Liberal involved, and these degrees are never very precisely identified, but they are definitely there. And lest you think that “being more responsible” is a “good” thing, for the Liberal mind it is not, it only means “being more hateable and blamable.”

Liberals must keep this doctrine unspoken since it has very unflattering implications for themselves and their supporters. While, on the one hand, the protected groups have the benefit of being able to misbehave with impunity (they cannot help what they do), they only gain this benefit at the cost of being identified as handicapped by either their poverty, their race, their sex, etc, etc, etc. Hence, the cost of being a “protected” group is being, in effect, Freedom-Handicapped.

Thus, Neo-Determinism brings with it the embarrassing implication of Freedom-Handicappedness. But the important point to be noticed here is that Freedom-Handicappedness is a price that Liberals are happy to pay for the privilege of being able to hate and excoriate other populations. If the liberals just remained traditional Causal Determinists, then freedom would become simply impossible for everyone equally. But, on the doctrine of Neo-Determinism, freedom becomes apparently once again possible and available, though it happens to be the case that a large portion of humanity does not have access to it.

That most liberals actually do hold to Neo-Determinism is, I think, indirectly confirmed by the remarkable contempt they display towards even their own side. Of course they show contempt for their own: their own are un-free puppets to be manipulated. This follows from their doctrine.

So much for Liberals. As far as traditional Causal Determinism is concerned, here are a few more remarks.

De la Mettrie hit the nail right on the head with his image of the “man-machine,” for it is this image that underlies traditional CD. It is because man is no more than a machine that he is not free, is fully determined in everything he does and thinks. Some philosophers of the time took the most obvious course by simply denying the CD premise, that man is “no more” than a machine. They granted that a significant part of every person is “material” and thus subject to the laws of nature, but, then proceeded to insist, each person also contains a mind or soul or spirit that is exempt from those laws. Our freedom, they insist, lies precisely in our being a “mental” as well as “material” being.

This is, however, a very risky move to make just for the sake of free will. There might, of course, be other reasons for making it as well, but buying free will at the expense of incurring all the risks and problems associated with a commitment to “mind” seems imprudent.

For one thing, in order for “mind” to actually be capable of supplying freedom, it must be assumed to be exempt from the control of causal laws. But what this means is that more exists than just the natural world. Applying Hamlet’s line, according to the “mind” supporter, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We can easily imagine Immanuel Kant making this claim, since he believes that he has been able to leave room for the possibilities of God’s existence, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. But Kant doesn’t think that Horatio (or any of us) can ever know that these possibilities are or are not realized. The “mind” supporter does think that he knows that mind is real and is the source of human freedom. The mind supporter thus buys human freedom at the cost of expanding the universe into one that is both natural and non-natural, law governed and non-law governed. This is a hell of a price to pay for a freedom we might well be able to get pretty much for free. And it is for this reason that Compatibilism seems such a bargain: human freedom made possible without the overhead expense of maintaining a soul! What a deal!