Nonsense of Free Will

Richard Oerton

Description

Did Myra Hindley deserve to be punished? Does any criminal? Is belief in free will an essential foundation for morality, or an excuse for unwarranted cruelty? Is free will a myth and, if so, can we let go of it?In this entertaining, accessible but deeply serious book, the author brings a refreshingly original approach to the age-old conflict between free will and determinism and comes down firmly against free will. But what does 'free will' mean? And if we rejected it, what would the consequences be?The author, a lawyer who has worked both on law reform at the Law Commission and in private practice, and has written legal and other books and articles, has turned to a subject which has interested him for over half a century. He strongly believes that it does not belong exclusively to philosophers. These questions should be of concern to everyone - and no one who is willing to look at them objectively should be afraid to judge for themselves and reach their own conclusions.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of mind

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780887449
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR ‘THE NONSENSE OF FREE WILL’
Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, and Free Will:
“Most people are completely taken in by the illusion of free will. Happily, Richard Oerton is not among them. The Nonsense of Free Will is a wonderfully clear – and very clever – little book.”
Professor Ted Honderich, Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London:
“There are philosophical, scientific, scholarly, novel, determined, American, pompous, dotty and other books on free will and determinism. There are also a few books that are lucid and informal introductions for ordinary readers and let you know that your free will does not exist. Richard Oerton’s may be the best of these.”
Joshua Rozenberg, lawyer and legal commentator, formerly legal editor of the Daily Telegraph:
“This book is superbly written and a delight to read. Starting as a clearly reasoned treatment of determinism, it merges seamlessly into a critique of English criminal law and penal policy, and ends with a plea for society to abandon what the author sees as its irrational belief in free will.”
Dr. Stephen Cretney, D.C.L., F.B.A., Q.C., LL.D., Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, formerly Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bristol University, and a Law Commissioner from 1978 to 1983:
“This fascinating book explains and discusses one of the most difficult questions underlying criminal liability – are we right to work on the basis that all sane people can exercise ‘free will’? Richard Oerton explores the free will v. determinism debate with remarkable and rare clarity. This is not a book only for academics: it is of vital interest to all who want to think about the way society is organised.”
Richard Double, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania:
“[What] I loved about your book [is that you] have an unsurpassed grasp of the deep issues in free will and reach the most reasonable conclusions, without becoming sidetracked by the philosophical jargon that impedes professional philosophers.”
Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, USA:
“Oerton has written a terrific book, a must read for anyone interested in the free will debate and why it matters. He reaches all the right conclusions, for the right reasons, stated most felicitously … a delightful read – unassuming, straightforward, informed and funny.”
For the full review, see:​ http://www.naturalism.org/resources/book-reviews/the-rise-of-the-new-determinists

Copyright © 2012 Richard Oerton
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is dedicated
to my grandchildren, Lily and Grace, Eve and Gabriel, and Louis Jacob
and
to the memory of Louis Jacob’s father, James Oerton, forensic clinical psychologist
“ I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
“Then you should certainly lecture on Philosophy”, said the Dragonfly, and he spread a pair of lovely gauze wings and soared away into the sky.
Oscar Wilde, The Remarkable Robot, from The Happy Prince and other stories , first published in 1888.
Contents
Preface
1. Introductory
I DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL
2. What is determinism?
3. What is free will?
II CAN WE RESCUE FREE WILL?
4. Could he have done otherwise?
5. What about conscience?
6. What about choice?
7. What about religion?
8. What about chance?
9. What about mind, brain and consciousness?
10. What about falsifying predictions?
11. Do we form ourselves?
12. Can the human mind evaluate free will?
III DO WE REALLY BELIEVE IN FREE WILL?
13. Our ambivalence
14. Just a little bit … not too much of it?
IV IMPLICATIONS OF DISBELIEF
15. Reason and emotion
16. What have we got to lose?
17. Determinism and morality
18. A determinist view of oneself and others
19. Why doesn’t free will self-destruct?
V DETERMINISM, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
20. The real causes of crime
21. The incoherent aims of sentencing
22. Society’s need for retribution
23. Towards a rational penal system?
VI LAST THOUGHTS
24. Free will and religion: some parallels
25. The nonsense of free will
26. Beyond determinism?
Epilogue
Notes
Preface
What do we talk about when we talk about free will? A recent book which touches on this subject says, “Tell most people they don’t have free will, and they will defiantly tell you you’re wrong” 1 . I guess this is true. But I think it’s true also that if you were to ask them to explain what exactly it is that they claim to have when they claim to have free will, they would flounder. While I was writing this book I asked one of my grand-daughters, who happened at the time to be studying an aspect of Roman history for her A levels, what she understood by the term “free will”. She answered kindly but firmly, “Oh no, Grandad: I’ll tell you anything you want to know about the Catiline conspiracy, but not free will.” It seemed a wise reply.
If this book has a main theme, then this is it. Free will is indefinable, and it’s indefinable because it is an incoherent idea – a nonsense, literally a piece of non-sense. If free will were a comprehensible concept, the job of a free will denier would be to examine it with a view to showing why, despite its comprehensibility, it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in human beings. In fact, however, my purpose is rather to show that it is not a comprehensible concept at all, but a self-contradictory one, so that it is intrinsically incapable of any existence.
Attempts to define free will seem to resolve themselves into definitions of an absence. Free will is what exists if something else does not exist. In its popular conception - the only conception which will bear the weight we put on it - free will is what exists in the absence of determinism. (As we shall see later, this isn’t the conception advanced by “compatibilist” philosophers, though even they conceive it in terms of an absence - in their case, an absence of external compulsion or mental illness.) But this sort of negative definition is not acceptable. I suppose you can define peace, rather crudely, as an absence of war, or war as an absence of peace, but you can say much more than that about war and peace: you can, if pressed to do so, explain more or less what constitutes the one and what constitutes the other. Not so with free will.
The nearest you can get, and the nearest I could get in this book, to defining free will is to show, by means of examples, the effects which its exercise is supposedly capable of producing. Whatever else is true of our idea of free will, it must be true that, if we possess it, we really might have acted in ways different from the ways in which we did act. Because of free will, Hitler really might have shown particular benevolence towards the Jews, spoken disparagingly of the Aryan race, and insisted that Germans already had more lebensraum than they knew what to do with 2 . And since free will must mean not only that people might do good things instead of bad, but equally that they might do bad things instead of good, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, instead of acting in such a way as to win themselves a Nobel Peace Prize, really might have conspired together to plunge the whole of South Africa into civil war. And my grand-daughter, instead of responding in the way she did, might have said to herself, “Poor old sod, I don’t know what he’s on about but, preoccupied though I am with thoughts of Cicero and Catilina, I’ll try to answer his question”, and attempted (perhaps without much success) to do so. And these things might have happened - really might have happened, might really have happened - despite the whole history of the universe and the way in which that history produced, formed and bore upon the individual people concerned up to the moment when they did what they did and didn’t do what they didn’t do.
We’ll say no more about my grand-daughter (so goodbye, Eve), but the idea that Hitler, Mandela and de Klerk might really have behaved in the ways suggested in the last paragraph is so implausible that most people would reject it out of hand. Where does that leave them? It is at this point that many would seek refuge in some sort of compromise. Some might say that our free will consists in the ability to make the best of the hand which history (in the shape of our heredity and our past environment) has dealt us; but of course this ability, its nature and strength, must itself be a part of that same hand and so, come to that, must be our conception of what “the best” is. Other people, while reluctantly accepting that complete free will is impossible, might still want to assert that some (incomplete) free will must exist somehow, or somewhere; but, as I hope to show in the book, a belief of this kind would be of no practical utility even if it were tenable.
The fact that free will is conceived ne