Behavior and Free Will, Unconfused

2008.07.07   prev     next

Last February’s Uncommon Descent article, “Do personal beliefs change behavior?,” was brief but still managed to confuse the heck out of me. Here are my attempts to de-snarl the subject:

1. Telling test subjects something, just before their decision, influences that decision to some degree — OK. But how long-lasting is the effect? And how effective would it be if the decision was much more gravitous? Could intelligent human subjects possibly know that they are expected to go along with the experimenters’ suggestions, and would they know that the experimenters surely wouldn’t allow anything really bad to happen as a result of the experiment? This test may not really indicate much.

2. Could the general association of free-will-doubting with unethical behavior be a cause-effect reversal fallacy? What if persons who have built-in mental preferences to be constructive and cooperative like the idea of free will, because it allows them to take ultimate credit for their constructiveness and cooperativeness? And what if persons who have built-in mental preferences to be destructive and uncooperative dislike the idea of free will, because it blames them for that destructiveness and uncooperativeness?

3. Aren’t arguments that we should believe in free will (and therefore act more ethically, or something like that) part of our environment? Is telling people that such-and-such is true, and thereby influencing their behavior, a demonstration of free will, or of social determinism? Wouldn’t a person governed by free will be immune to your attempts to influence their behavior by telling them “you have free will” (or anything else for that matter)?

4. UD cites Richard Dawkins as saying that “punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down,” but offers no specific counter-argument to this assertion by Dawkins. The surrounding context implies that we can legitimately punish criminals if they have free will to choose their acts, but not if they don’t. In other words, UD appears to agree with Dawkins that punishment makes sense only in the presence of free will — they disagree with him just about whether humans have free will.

Both UD and Dawkins, as far as I can tell from this article, neglect the scenario in which humans have no free will, but punishment makes eminent sense as a deterrent. Your car doesn’t know when you kick it, and can’t anticipate being kicked. Humans do, and can. Even if they don’t have free will.

If Dawkins’s The God Delusion contains such arguments as the one attributed to him in this UD article, then it certainly might (if believed) have a counter-productive influence on its readers’ behavior, as the UD article suggests. But belief in free will is not the antidote to Dawkins’s influence — a little common sense is all that’s needed.