Are you an agent, or are you determined?

Or, what your preferred belief system says about you personally.

I wrote this post with a playful spirit, and paint in very broad strokes, so please don’t consider any of the below to be an authoritative last word on the free will/determinism debate. It’s designed to be a nudge to think about your default mode of thinking, with some political palm-reading thrown in there just for fun.

Basically, and a very small tangent is forthcoming, I am offended by elitism in philosophy. On the one hand, when you write a philosophy paper, you expect the critique to be very particular. Philosophers, as a rule, are incredibly picky. Are you mixing the definition of a word, saying it means one thing and then using the same word to mean another? Is your argument circular? Are you misrepresenting the nuance of Kant’s point?

This pickiness is great. It leads to greater clarity and brighter ideas. On the other hand, though, this can lead to the “um, ACKCHYually….” problem where everything is picked apart for sport. And then non-philosophers (and even people who study philosophy!) feel self-conscious about bringing up any philosophical topic because we’re like hyenas on the prowl. We don’t want to meaningfully engage with the ideas; we just want to rip something apart.

On the occasions where I decide to write about philosophy in this space, my goal is to be non-elitist about it. I’ll save that for the technical academic papers written for a very specific audience. Philosophy is a field that attempts to tackle the big questions in life across all areas (truth, God, death, living a good life, free will, how the universe works, and so on). Given that most of us care about at least some of these big questions, but most of us don’t have the time or inclination to study Spinoza for fun, I think philosophers need to do a better job of being more approachable.

End tangent. Let’s get on with it!

Agency Perspective

If you believe that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, then you have the benefit of agency. You've got bootstraps, and you can pull yourself up by them. If you're in a terrible situation of some kind, you're probably at least partially to blame. This is the agency perspective.

For example, if you lose your job and start having money issues, someone with an agency perspective has to swallow that they were probably at least somewhat responsible for the job loss (maybe they didn't like their manager and didn't hide it, or they were expendable). It would be rare, with this perspective, that the job loss would have nothing to do with them.

They would have to own up to the financial issues that follow, too. Did they save their money for emergencies, or did they live paycheck to paycheck, or above their means in some way? Did they save food for emergencies? Did they make lifestyle cuts upon the job loss?

Deterministic Perspective

On the other hand, if you believe that everything that happens to you is a result of situation, circumstance, and all the bits and pieces of the past, you have the benefit of peace. It's not your fault that you lost your job, and it's not your fault you're struggling with money. You could not have behaved any differently than you did; each step was the result of a determined sequence. You lie in this flow, and the water ushers you onward. This is the deterministic perspective.

For example, if you are an addict, it is a disease that possesses you like a virus. Your will is irrelevant; you did not choose your past, your environment, your life circumstances, or your biology. There is nothing you could have done. Therefore, you are not to blame for being an addict, because you did not choose it. You were helpless to its possession of you.

There is nothing to own up to because there is no fault. Your rehabilitation is treated like any other medical issue. You might be quarantined, the substance is removed while you are under close supervision, and you undergo therapy and group sessions.

Pros and Cons

There are clearly pros and cons to each approach. If you hold the agency perspective, you basically have free will. You are the master of your own destiny. You get the upside of being the cause of all the good things that happen to you. But with great power comes great responsibility. The downside is that you are responsible for the bad things that happen to you.

It is, in some way, your fault that you're an addict, or that you have no money. You ended up in that situation because you, as an agent, made bad choices. Sure, bad things happen beyond our control, but that's just a sliver of our experience.

If you hold the deterministic perspective, you are basically not responsible for the good or bad of your life. This can be an enormous relief; the burden of great responsibility is lifted from your shoulders. If you make a bad decision, you don't have to beat yourself up about it - you couldn't help but make that bad decision. If it happened, there was no other option but for it to happen.

And you can still try harder next time. Even if your actions are in some sense determined, it does not mean you'll never grow. It is natural to grow. The mistakes that had to happen lead to the growth that also had to happen.

The downside is that you don't get to take credit for your successes, and more importantly, you don't get to be an agent. Even if you feel like you're making free choices, that doesn't mean you are.

Which way do you lean?

These are both legitimate perspectives; philosophers have been arguing about free will and determinism for a long time. I don't think we'll be able to say one is absolutely correct. However, you can learn a lot about yourself by your base assumptions on this issue.

For example, if you are fully on the free will side of things, you are probably right-wing or right-leaning (no handouts, every person for themselves, bootstraps). If you are fully on the determinism side, you are probably left-wing (handouts, addicts can't help themselves, social programs).

Empirical science seems to support determinism in a simple way: if every effect has a cause, then every future effect has a cause, too. If these causes and effects are predictable, and if future behaviour can be predicted (hypothetically; we can only do this to a small extent right now), then our future actions are determined.

Interestingly, faith or religious belief seems to go in the other direction. You'd think believing in a God or gods would give someone a deep sense of fate: this was meant to happen. I know a lot of religious and spiritual people who use deterministic language like this. However, agency is crucial in at least a few religions.

I'm most familiar with Christianity, so I'll go there. The goal is to get to heaven, right? But it wouldn't be fair if you weren't choosing your actions. If everything that happened to you was determined to happen to you, then whether or not you go to heaven, hell, or purgatory has nothing to do with you. You're just blown by the winds.

But that's not how Christianity works. Your choices matter deeply, and God rewards your good choices. You choose to have faith. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac would make no sense if he were simply determined to murder his son; the whole point of the story is that he made the (horrible) decision to take the leap of faith and murder his son. God rewarded that choice (See Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling for an Existential twist on this tale).

My point here is a small one. I'm not trying to cover the ins and outs of the free will/determinism debate (what a project that would be!). Instead, it's introspective. What view do you hold by default? Or do you hold both? Can you change your view (and if you changed from a free will to a deterministic view, is that itself not evidence of free will)?

What kinds of thoughts do you have when you encounter an addict, a homeless person, a criminal, or someone on welfare? Sympathy for their crappy circumstances, anger at their uselessness? Something in the middle? Do you encounter this person differently when you know them versus if they're a stranger?

I know several (former) addicts, and the responses are interesting. The health care system here in Canada treats addiction like a disease. Some people do, too. I think it’s easier for family members and loved ones to treat it deterministically, because then difficult moral issues that spring up from the free will side can be sidestepped. Some encourage them to convert to a preferred religious system. Others recommend healthy habits; reprogramming the body and mind. Still others lay blame, or treat with paternalistic sympathy ("oh, you poor lost soul").

If it matters at all, I don’t hold any firm position here. I find I’m quite persuaded by deterministic arguments made by people like Sam and Annaka Harris, and I love Spinoza’s hard determinism. Yet free will features heavily in moral debates. For example, I’m quite interested in virtue ethics (virtuous people are more likely to do virtuous actions, so developing virtue is key in moral development), which is a heavily agent-based approach. I also, rightly or wrongly, tend to instinctively hold free will attitudes: I believe I’m the captain of my life ship, so to speak, and I take credit for my wins and blame myself for my losses.

Like so many of these issues (and maybe even all of them), the truth involves both sides and is not simply either/or. Yet I am deeply unhappy with compatibilism, which tries to form a (wimpy) compromise between free will and determinism. As always, there is more to read.

-Allysia