“By the standards of most life on Earth, cats have highly sophisticated brains. This gives them a range of behavioural options – a degree of freedom, we might say.”
“It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo.”
“These abilities have evolved through natural selection because they are essential for survival: animals need to weigh different factors, explore available options, pursue new alternatives when old strategies don’t work. Together these abilities give all animals, including humans, an entirely natural free will, one that we need precisely because we are not rocks. We are complex organisms actively pursuing our interests in a changing environment.”
“Paralleling the measurement of intelligence, we could call it the freedom quotient: FQ. Such a scale should give us new insights into the factors that hinder or enhance our efforts to shape our lives. In other words, FQ should tell us how free we are – and how we can become even more so.”
“One prevalent idea is that freedom requires a supernatural ability to transcend the laws of nature, because otherwise we would appear to be mere puppets of cause and effect. This makes free will into something mysterious, which would set us apart from the rest of creation. As this notion contradicts everything we know about the world, it is no surprise that ever more people are concluding that free will must be an illusion.”
“Yet all around us, every day, we see a very natural kind of freedom – one that is completely compatible with determinism. It is the kind that living things need to pursue their goals in a world that continually presents them with multiple possibilities. Our intuitive sense that we have free will is based upon this behavioural freedom. And unlike the old mystical idea, this natural ability to shape our future is central to our own wellbeing and that of society. This is what FQ sets out to capture.”
“There is not yet one single dominant view or definition: different scholars from different traditions tend to emphasise different aspects. But when we join the available dots we get a fairly clear sketch of what FQ might aspire to measure. And it is simply this: the ability to generate options for oneself, to choose, and then to pursue one or more of those options.”
“This three-phased approach is a simplified sketch: the messy reality is that these phases overlap and interact with each other (and with a lot else besides). But it does provide a loose framework within which to consider the kind of underlying capacities that we need in order to exercise natural free will.”
“The first phase, in which we generate options for ourselves, is associated with creativity and innovativeness; perhaps also a kind of openness or intellectual adventurousness.”
“By contrast, the second phase, the ability to weigh options, is what we ordinarily consider to be the capacity to reason.”
“The third phase, pursuing the chosen option, requires different capacities again – mostly what goes under the heading of willpower, such as the ability to delay gratification, which for chickens means up to a six‑second limit and for great apes, including humans, somewhat longer.”
“If you are able to imagine a number of options for yourself, weigh them with regard to your interests, and then commit yourself to the one that seems the best, you are exercising your free will.”
“Attempting to smooth out inequalities in FQ – and to raise the FQ of everyone – should therefore be a goal of schools and of social policy. This ties in with the idea of ‘positive liberty’ — the idea that a person should be free, not just from restraints, but through having the skills and opportunities to actively pursue a fulfilling life. Of course, all this assumes that a higher FQ is a thoroughly good thing. But we have good reason to think that this is indeed so, both from society’s point of view, and for each of us individually.”
“Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University and a leading advocate of a naturalised approach to free will, has argued that our capacities for reason, self-control and so forth evolved to enable us to live in complex societies. The notion that we need a significant part of our free will in order to follow rules might at first sound counter-intuitive. But it is actually a familiar idea: we know, for example, that a strong will is required to resist temptation. Often those temptations are to do things that violate social norms, such as coveting your neighbour’s ass or punching him if he covets yours. Hence it is a good guess that prison populations will have lower than average FQs and – equally – that raising FQs would reduce crime.”
“We could of course use a different name for what FQ is describing: perhaps ‘psychological freedom’, ‘inner freedom’, ‘autonomy’ or ‘agency’. But I think there are good reasons to stick with the old term. Although there is one strand of thinking in which free will is juxtaposed with determinism, there are also other, more everyday uses that are much less metaphysical. One recent study, for example, found that ‘the folk concept of free will is defined by the capacity to choose based on one’s desires and free from constraints’. Another found that ‘conscious, rational choice and self-control seem to be integral parts of what people perceive as free’.”
“Even when theologians use the term ‘free will’, they are still referring to something very close to what FQ describes. It is with our will, they might say, that we choose to give into temptation or instead to take the path of righteousness. I agree. The difference is that in the Christian tradition, our wills must be absolutely free – not caused by anything such as genes or environment – as only then could it possibly be warranted to send sinners to hell for eternity. With FQ, by contrast, we can recognise that even the freest will is still limited, and that everyone is ultimately a part of life’s great web of causes and connections.”
“Thus why a doctrine of total depravity is important, that the Fall effects us from flesh to spirit, penetrating ever aspect of the great web of causes and connections, permeating our bodies, our hearts, our minds, our families, our societies, our world.”
“Here again the comparison with intelligence is revealing. For much of the past 2,000 years in the West, intelligence was conceived in terms of a God-given faculty of reason that set humans wholly apart from other creatures. ‘Intellect’ and ‘will’ were seen by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, as the two pre‑eminent faculties of the soul, which did not depend at all on the body.”
“Now we know differently: we know that we have evolved through a long process of natural selection and that we share our faculties to varying degrees with other animals. Upon realising this, we did not conclude that there wasn’t really any such thing as intelligence – rather, psychologists set about putting it on a scientific footing. Similarly, we should not say that there is no such thing as free will, just because it is not how the theologians imagined; rather, it is time we put it, too, on a scientific footing.”