Is Free Will Irrational?

Life seems purposeless without freedom--but how can we defend freedom against modern challenges?

One of the greatest obstacles to ideas of purpose in the modern world is the question of human freedom. More than ever, we see people arguing that human freedom is an illusion. Many argue that it’s best to just look at humans as physical things that can only react to natural laws. In this view, there’s nothing really different between a human choosing to act a certain way and a rock falling down a hill because of gravity.

A view like this seems to pose great danger for a purposeful vision of the world. If it’s the case that none of our actions are free, how can we believe that any of our actions are purposeful? If we have no choice between two options, why would it matter what we choose to do?

This problem demands an answer. We need to dive into the underlying philosophy of materialism and ask ourselves whether it’s really reasonable to view the world with an idea of free will in mind.

Modern and Classical Thought

In a materialistic view of the world, everything happens because of something in the past. An animal only does what it does because evolution led it to have certain instincts or drives. There’s nothing deeper than a long series of causes that led to this happening.

This is one of the biggest differences between a modern and classical view of the world. From a modern perspective, things only happen as a reaction to past events. The past is the only thing that’s relevant in understanding what is happening to us now. The future cannot tell us anything meaningful about why some things have happened. Everything is just a long line of dominoes

But from a classical perspective, many things happen for the purpose of bringing something about in the future. We can look to what a thing is meant to become to better understand its past. Rather than being irrelevant to explaining the past, the future is precisely where we get clarity about why a thing is the way it is. This view is called teleology, meaning “the study of ends” in Greek. To study a thing teleology means to try to understand it through its purpose.

The best way to understand human teeth, for instance, is to study what purpose each of them serves: We can see that some are for cutting up food into smaller pieces, some are for crushing food, and so on. Each is seen to have a clear purpose, and it seems impossible to say anything meaningful about them without first discussing this purpose.

Teleology was applied to both philosophy and science. (In classical thought, there’s not a clear distinction between the two.) There is a way to understand everything’s essence in light of its purpose. It is not limited to a certain subset of ideas or studies.

Causes in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

In classical philosophy, there was a notion of four sorts of causes: Material, efficient, formal, and final. The first three causes each referred to different concepts essential to understanding a thing: A thing’s material cause is what it’s made of, its formal cause is what it’s ultimately supposed to be like, and its efficient cause is whatever led to its existence. Lastly and most significantly for us something’s final cause is its purpose. This is what truly puts that thing into motion: By nature, everything living thing moves towards its final cause.

There are a few different sorts of final causes. The endpoint of a natural process is one example: The water cycle is one such case where the cycle clearly ends with that refreshed source of water. It seems natural to say that this happens for the purpose of bringing new water into nature. Though there might be ways of explaining it without referring to purpose, those sorts of perspectives seem confused.

Another sort of final cause is something reaching the perfection of its natural purpose. A bee that goes out, collects all the necessary supplies for its hive to make honey, and generally plays a useful role in the continued survival of its hive is living out its final cause. If we saw an injured bee that couldn’t do these things, we’d say that bee is not working well or otherwise that it’s not really doing what it’s meant to do. There’s a norm in mind that all things on earth seem to be meant to meet—when they don’t meet that, their purpose is unfulfilled.

Lastly, for rational beings (that is, humans), there is the final cause of intention. A human always acts with some sort of purpose in mind, whatever it might be—even something as simple as bouncing a ball off the wall repeatedly is done for entertainment or distraction. Thus, human actions can be judged against the scenario a person intends to bring about. We can call an action successful or unsuccessful depending on whether it succeeds in doing what a person means for it to do.

Purpose and Materialism

From a materialist perspective, a thing never really happens for a certain purpose. It happens because things before it forced it to happen. A person does not fall in love because it is good for them or because they are meant for someone else or anything like that. Instead, they fall in love because of a long series of events that led to certain chemicals in their brain firing so their genes could be carried on.

This is obviously a depressing prospect in the eyes of most people. Nobody wants to think that everything meaningful in their life is just the result of the random movements of atoms for thousands of years. However, it seems that there can’t be anything deeper than this from the materialist perspective.

The teleological view changes this. Instead of things simply happening as a reaction to the past, they actively work towards a certain future. We don’t just fall in love because of the laws of nature. Instead, we fall in love because it is good to do so and we are naturally drawn towards it. There is a clear sense of purpose to our actions—we do things for a reason.

Arguing Against Materialism

Some might argue that even though we might want to avoid materialism, there’s no good reason to do so. Yes, it’s depressing to think that everything is just a predetermined reaction to what came before it, but why lie to ourselves if that’s the way the world is?

There’s a simple argument against this: If it’s the case that all human action is predetermined, why is it that it seems impossible to make reliable predictions about human action? Many sociologists, economists, psychologists, and scholars in other fields have tried to make laws to understand human action, but these laws seem to fail almost always.

Is Materialism Rational?

Even if it were the case that human action is predetermined, it seems like there’s no way to understand humans as predetermined. The only reasonable way to try to understand human action is to look at it as free and rational. We aren’t driven by some basic set of natural laws: There’s obviously an intentional way that we act with the future in mind.

Someone who wants to believe in materialism could argue that there is no definitive proof that humans are free, either. And it’s true: Nobody has found an indisputable reason to believe that humans have free will. However, if it’s the case that there’s no smoking gun for determinism or free will, is it more reasonable to accept the position that has totally failed to explain human action or the position that has a reasonable explanation for why we can’t predict what people will do?

Regardless of all this, it’s also clear that we can’t live our lives thinking that our actions are predetermined. From an individual perspective, it seems that we have total freedom to choose whatever we want. We can’t simply ignore this freedom. There’s no way to take a “default choice” to every action without deciding what to do. At every moment, we have to make a free choice.

It seems, then, that we have to accept some form of freedom and some form of teleology to understand human nature. We don’t have any reasonable way to explain the way we are in terms of simple material cause-and-effect. In everyday life, we are free, and we have no choice but to deal with the consequences of that fact.