Is Freedom an Illusion?

What if everything you’ve ever done was inevitable — shaped by causes beyond your control? In this episode, we explore determinism not as a physics problem, but as a moral one. Why do we blame people? Why do we take credit? Nietzsche called it all a mistake — four great errors that have warped how we see the world and ourselves. But was he right?

We also take a sharp turn with Sartre, who thinks even in a determined world, freedom can still mean something — if we’re willing to own our choices without excuse.

This isn’t a debate between science and free will. It’s a challenge to how we judge, punish, and live with ourselves and others.

Transcript

In 2006, at her appeal hearing, a woman coerced into committing a crime argued that she was not truly responsible for the actions she took, and that while she knew she was committing crimes, her boyfriend had threatened her with harm to her and her children if she didn't go along. How much can we hold someone responsible for their own actions? Some part of us is probably inclined to say that this woman was free to act. And so what she did was her choice, no matter what coercive force her boyfriend brought. But another part of us might say, what else could she have done? When someone has a gun to your head, you're not really free anymore. The consequences here matter. If she was free to act, she is guilty, but if she was not free, she is therefore not guilty. Every choice we make is influenced by factors beyond our control. Our biology, the environment, our culture, and more, all play sometimes large parts in our decisions. So today, I thought it might be useful to ask if we live in a seemingly predetermined universe. Do we really have any agency at all? How responsible can we ever claim to be for anything that we do? Whether a crime or building a successful business? All of these depend to some extent on factors beyond our control. So, how much can we claim responsibility for simply being lucky or unlucky? Welcome back to American Socrates. Today, we're asking the question: do we really have free will? Another way to think about this is from the side of not having free will, which is the side of determinism. Now, determinism is sort of a scientific, philosophical understanding of the universe. It's one that we're all familiar with, and in many ways already accept. We've been taught determinism from a young age. It's a way of looking at the universe that allows us to say that one thing follows from another, that cause follows effect. There's a determination here. The universe is set and governed by certain laws, by certain order, whether you look at this from a secular physicist's point of view, or whether you look at it from a religious point of view, God has a certain plan, a certain way of creating the universe. Either way, it's determined. The universe is built so that our behaviors follow from certain rules. So to put determinism somewhat succinctly, we might say that it's the idea that every event is the result of some kind of prior cause. Like nothing just spontaneously happens out of the blue, but something else ultimately was the cause of that thing. If this is the case, if everything has a cause, then we should be able to look backwards and reason in reverse to find the predetermined course of the universe. So if you spilled your coffee this morning, well, that's because you had to have made coffee first. And if you made coffee, someone had to have grown the beans. And if someone grew the beans, that was because, you know, culture and tradition, people drink coffee, you know, so on and so forth. There's all these different causes that had to have all occurred in order for you to have spilled your coffee cup this morning. In a certain sense, then, we could imagine that it was inevitable that you were going to spill your coffee. All of these events would have to come together, and lo and behold, they did come together, and therefore, you spilled your coffee. That's what we mean by determinism here. It's not exactly fate, but it is a scientific way of understanding that the universe has causal relationships with other things and that nothing just magically happens. Let me hit on that point a little harder. Determinism, while it's the idea that everything is predetermined in a course that really can't be otherwise, it's not the same thing as fate. Fate ultimately tells us that things have to happen a certain way. And that's not quite what determinism is saying. Let me try and tease out the difference for us here. Imagine a row of dominoes. Determinism says that for each domino is going to fall because the one before it fell, and that one's going to hit it and it's going to push it forward. And so they're just going to keep falling as one domino smacks into another. Everything happens then because of causes. The physics, the habits, the biology, our environment, all of those causes come together to make things happen. If you knew every detail, you could all ultimately predict what's going to happen next. But you don't necessarily know all the details. Fate, on the other hand, says that the last domino is always going to fall, no matter what, right? It's fated to fall. It's destined. It's written in the stars, decided by God, something like that. And that's not what determinism is saying. You could stop the chain of dominoes by taking out a domino or two in the chain, and that's the end of it. A new cause has intervened and prevented the final domino from being knocked over. So fate is not exactly what we're talking about here. If we were to say, like, you got into a car accident because of all of these determined factors, that doesn't mean that you were fated to get into the car accident, right? It's not like if you had decided instead of getting in a car that day, you were going to go up to the 99th floor of some building and just wait that day out, you would have still managed to get hit by a car somehow. That's not what we're suggesting. Determinism then, is cause and effect. It is a fixture of science. Fate, on the other hand, is a fixed outcome, no matter what the cause ultimately is. Determinism is the story we're writing as we go. And fate, then, is the ending already printed, no matter what our choices are. So let's jump back into this idea of determinism then. Newtonian physics suggests that the world is kind of built like a machine, you know, the whole universe. Every action has a cause, and that the entire universe runs according to these fixed and set laws. Now, other later philosophers are going to pick up on Newton's ideas, notably Kant and then later Nietzsche. And they're going to try and build a sense of morality with this understanding in mind, a sort of machine-like understanding of the universe and how that affects us. Nietzsche is going to take this as far as it can go. So, for Nietzsche, just like physical objects don't move unless something makes them move, Nietzsche is going to say that our choices don't just happen. Something causes them to happen. You think that you picked what you were going to have for breakfast this morning, but the reality is a whole combination of factors brought you to the point in which you were always going to pick what you picked for breakfast. Were pushed then by these causes, our upbringing, our biology, stressors in our lives, particular desires, all of these things come together in such a way that drive our actions in a way that leaves almost no room for choice. They're not really our decisions at all anymore. They have become determined. Another metaphor for this might be the example of a pool table, where one ball hits another and it causes that ball to move. No magic, no choices here. The cue ball didn't decide to knock the eight ball into the corner pocket or something like that. But when we come to think about ourselves as human beings, we tend to break ourselves out of that same framework. Everything in the universe seems to be determined except for human beings. And this is going to be the problem that we're really trying to grasp here. What is it about our free will that seems to slide us out of the deterministic universe that we generally accept about everything else? Now, imagine yourself snapping at a coworker right at the end of work for some reason. You're just in a foul mood. Well, what was that? Was that your free will? Did you make the choice to be angry in a bad mood and to snap at people? Were you hungry? Were you tired? Were you stressed out? Maybe even raised in a family that didn't teach you how to handle your anger or even how to identify it? If that's the case, then many of the reasons why you might be rude to somebody were determined long before that moment. You didn't actually make that choice yourself. You didn't say, like, you know what? I'm going to be mean to this person right now. What instead happened was you got pushed into doing that. And so determinism then is functioning the same, at least according to Nietzsche, and human beings as it is for like Newton's laws and of physics. Now, we could pause here and ask the question, is there any evidence for this being the case that we actually do live in a determined universe? And is it's got to be more than just an assumption of science, because what if science is wrong about that? Well, there is at least some evidence that we do and some evidence that even our human choices are, in fact, determinations of the universe. Scientists, for example, can see your brain getting ready to make a choice before you're even aware that you're making the choice. Now, this connects back to Nietzsche by saying that we think we choose first and then we act on those choices, but experiments seem to suggest that it's actually the other way around. We're starting to act before we even have an explanation in our conscious mind of what it is that we're trying to do. We're reacting before we're even consciously aware of what's happening. If that's the case, then somehow the decision's already being made without our conscious input. For example, in studies like from Benjamin Leet and others, participants were asked to press a button whenever they felt like it. Scientists recorded brain activity. So you can imagine the participants in this were in some sort of CAT scan machine or MRI machine while they were pressing this button. So scientists were recording this brain activity, looking for their readiness potential. They found, started up about a half a second before the person consciously decided to press the button. The brain then starts moving before the mind says go. In other words, most of our decisions are reactions of our brain rather than conscious decisions that we are making, at least according to this study. Imagine you're driving a forklift or something, and you might think you're in control of the forklift, but there's a slight delay between the joystick and the machine's movements. It turns out the forklift is already starting to turn before you think you've turned it. Your conscious mind is starting is playing catch-up here. It's catching up with what your brain is already doing. It's already making decisions for you. You're already acting and reacting before you're aware that you're acting and reacting. So if determinism is true, then does our personal responsibility still hold? If it doesn't, then what can we say for things like morality? Okay, let me slow down here and take stock of where we're at. If the universe is entirely determined, and none of our actions are the result of our conscious choices, it's hard to say that there's anything like a morality that exists in the universe. This is what Nietzsche is ultimately building towards. Morality doesn't exist. It is something that we made up for some reason. The idea here is that determinism is making our choices for us and that we have very little control, if any, at all, in the decisions that we ultimately make. So our next question should naturally be, how are we supposed to react to this? If determinism is true, how should we feel? Well, one way is to say like, well, determinism is definitely true, and nobody's responsible for anything that they do. And so we need to like work to change people's motivations, change their incentives. It's not like we have to just let people do whatever they want to do, but the idea of punishing them because they made a guilty choice is false. There are no motives here because nobody's making any choices. You would have to treat everyone as some kind of inevitable result of things beyond their personal control. Even in psychology, you could say something like behavioralism might work along these lines. We're going to zap you with electricity every time you have certain feelings. And that way, you'll learn to not have those feelings because you'll be so afraid of getting zapped. Another reaction that we might have to this is to say determinism is false. It's just not actually true. The universe isn't written on a plan. There is no determined structure for the universe or maybe if there is, we don't know what it is. We do have free will. We do have choices to make. If this is the case, yes, we can be held guilty, but we're going to have the trouble later on of trying to determine how exactly it is that we both exist in what seems to be a determined universe and yet ourselves not determined. That's a bit like saying that all human beings are somehow supernatural. We are all somehow not part of the natural universe, even though we exist in the natural universe. And that seems to be a contradiction. Our third option is to say, well, maybe determinism is sort of true. This is what's known as compatibilism, or sometimes it's called soft determinism. This idea is that, well, determinism is true under certain situations, but it's not universally true. It's not absolutely true for everything. There are certain places, certain aspects of the universe, where things have some flexibility. There are choices that can be made, and that's where the conscious mind might be able to come in and influence those sorts of determined world. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. So now I'd like to take a deeper dive into Nietshe's argument against free will and see what it has to say. We're going to focus on one of his books in particular, The Twilight of the Idols, specifically the sections on The Four Great Errors. The four errors, as he labels them out, are the error of confusing cause and effect, the error of false causality, the error of imaginary causes, and the error of will. The first one, the error of confususing cause and effect, is where we misattribute our actions to free will when they're determined by these underlying causes. We think we act because we feel something. Like I punched the wall because I was angry. But Nietzsche likes to turn that around. Maybe your body was already building up steam and the punch came before you even had words for it. You punch the wall to release this energy and then later came up with the idea that you were angry in order to justify what it was that you did. It's like quitting a job. You say you decided to quit, but maybe the truth is, is that the low pay, the long hours, and the lack of respect were already happening. So deep down, you were already being pushed out. You just gave it the name of quitting after you had already been pushed out of the job. Nietzsche's own example involves the Cardinal Coronero, who had a fad diet during Nietzsche's age. He was popular because Coronero himself lived to be well over 100 years old. The diet, he said, consisted mostly of meager meals. But was that diet right for everybody? Nietsche points out that we assume a causal relationship here between Karanaro's eating habits and the longevity of his life. The reality is more likely that he has a slow metabolism, which caused Coronaro to both live a long time and to eat very little. If you didn't happen to be born with the right genes for having a slow metabolism, this diet is not going to extend your life even a little bit. Morality, Nietzsche argues, works exactly the same way. It's like saying, do this and this and you will be happy, do otherwise, and you won't. Well, rather, it may be that happy people do those things and unhappy people don't. But just the doing of those things is not what's going to make you happy. Being unhappy and starting to do these things isn't going to save you from yourself. Because moralists are ultimately confusing cause and effect here. They think that the doing of those things is what causes happiness when in reality, happy people do those things and not happy people don't. The second error, according to Nietzsche, was the idea of false causality. We often imagine a little voice in our head, but we call ourselves for our soul, and that's piloting our bodies to somehow from inside our brain. But Nietzsche says there is no pilot. There's just the plane. You didn't choose to be forgiving. You didn't choose to be proud. You didn't choose to be angry. Those traits were simply built in you over time, by your childhood, by your habits, by your body chemistry, by your culture, all of it. This isn't to say that you don't have some reflective place here, but that you can't ascribe motive to your actions as if they were solely on your shoulders. No one is an island unto themselves, and so you're pushed and pulled in many and varied directions without your control and without your consent. This fact of humanness limits the value of a concept like motive. Your motive is really beyond your control and so not yours at all anyway. It's like thinking you can control your truck completely as you drive down the highway. Sure. You can steer it. You can hit the brakes. You can give it gas. But there are other factors that will ultimately control the direction of your truck, like the terrain, the load that's in the truck, the way the load is structured, the weather, maybe bechanical malfunctions, road construction, all these sorts of things are going to be factors that are going to force you to drive one way or another or pull your truck off the road without you being able able to stop it. Those shape where you end up just as surely as the decisions that you make from behind the wheel. The best we could say here is that motive is not a real cause. It's just an intention, and that by itself, it ultimately causes nothing. The third error, which is closely related to the last one, is the error of imaginary causes. We want life to make sense. And so we invent reasons, even fake ones, to help us explain why things are the way they are. You hear it all the time. I got sick because I had negative energy. No, like, you caught a virus, and that's what caused you to be sick. Or blaming your car breakdown on bad luck when actually you had been skipping your oil changes for the past two years. It's comforting. It's just not true. Now, before you make this all political, it should be noted that this is a human problem, according to Nietzsche. So you might hear a right wing person say, America is in decline because we've abandoned faith in a Christian God. But this links complex, economic, cultural, and global shifts down to a single spiritual cause. It's emotionally powerful, but it ultimately ignores material causes like automation, corporate consolidation, failing infrastructures, and things like that. Meanwhile, on the left, you might hear someone say something like, if we just raise awareness, the system will change. But the idea that change flows naturally from consciousness raising ignores the material and political forces, resisting that change. Again, it's comforting, but it doesn't account for the structural power dynamics or entrenched interests protecting those dynamics. Nietsche's fourth error is the one that we' really building towards here, the error of will. This is the big one. Nietzsche is going to say that free will is in fact a myth. We don't choose what we want. We don't choose our past, we don't choose our instincts, we don't choose how we react. Everything pushes us from our own biology, to our upbringing, to our society. But maybe we could push back here and say, no, Mr. Nietzsche, if free will doesn't do anything, if it's just feel-good nonsense, then why has it persisted for so long in so many diverse cultures? He would probably reply to us, though, that we made up the idea of free will to justify punishment. If you're bad, you have to choose it. If you're good, you earn it. And that's how we get blame, pride, guilt, and shame. Free will, he said, is an invention of moralists. To ascribe motives to actions in order to hold people accountable. If someone hits you in the face, you want just cause to hit them back. And so you say, they must have had control of themselves, and they must have hurt you intentionally. And now, you feel justified in striking back. This isn't reason. This is rationalizing our behavior, according to Nietzsche. He writes, "Men were thought of as free so that they could become guilty." See, we love punishing people. We love seeing the wicked hurt. Generations ago, your ancestors would take picnics to go watch criminals be hanged and witches burned. Today, we watch movies where you're really happy to shell out hard-earned money to watch fictitious characters beat up on other fictitious characters for the dastardly deeds that are also imaginary. We call those movies superhero movies. You're literally watching other people who didn't do anything wrong, beat up other people who didn't do anything right and feel like you're enjoying yourself. We love watching violence done to those we perceive of as wicked. But if we didn't choose, if we're not free to choose, then maybe we should stop judging people like the way we do. If Nietzsche is right, then the way we talk about responsibility, punishment, and even success is probably broken. He writes, no one is accountable for existing at all or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The determination of his nature cannot be disentangled from the determinism of all of that which has been and will be. Purpose is lacking. Nietzsche's not saying you're a robot. He's saying you're free will story is actually just a cover-up, a way to feel and control when your choices are actually shaped by causes that you didn't choose. Science is beginning to back up Nietzsche. Maybe it is time to rethink morality, not so that we can let people off the hook, but to build a system based on truth and not some sort of comforting fiction. But we're not done with this yet. Sartre is going to have a counterargument trying to protect at least some aspects of free will. Jean Paul Sartre's gonna introduce a sort of existentialist idea here. You know, existentialism works on the idea that existence precedes our essence. You are what you are before you know what you are. You exist as a certain being, before you know whether you're a man or a woman or an American or something else. Humans, he says, ultimately define themselves through their actions. Even in a determined world, we have to interpret and give meaning to events that in turn, shape our actions and then ultimately our reactions. Now, if I think of someone as a king, I'm going to treat them differently and then if I think of them as a lowlife. And so just the way I think about somebody can ultimately affect the physical actions that I take in the world. This leads us to this concept of his called radical freedom. We make choices, but our choices are always ours. We have to make decisions as ourselves. We are put pressure on. There are definitely deterministic world pushing us here, but the ultimate choice in how we decide to recognize things, how we decide to think about things, what we consider those things to be, is entirely our own. So we make choices despite these social or environmental constraints. If we contrast this with determinism, we see that freedom starts to take on the aspect of a burden. We don't have something that we can rely on. Nietsche's idea was very freeing in and of the sense that you can act however you want, and it's not entirely your fault. Whereas this one says, like, actually, however you act is entirely your fault. You're the one making these determinations. You can either reflect on what you're doing and make certain good decisions or not and just go with whatever you want to think of. If you just go with whatever you're thinking of, Sartre calls this bad faith. It's a denial of your autonomy. It is a denial of your authenticity in the universe. It's a denial of your responsibility. So starts offering us a kind of compatibilism here. Let me try and explain his compatibism using another analogy. Imagine a train on the tracks. The tracks are set. They are determined. The train can only go along the tracks and it's going to take it to one particular destination. But how it gets there, how fast it goes, whether it derails or not, those are decisions that we get to make. We can't change the tracks necessarily in this metaphor, but we can make different decisions given those fixed rules. In this sense, we can hold people morally accountable, even though they exist in a deterministic framework. Yes, there are certain fixed laws of nature, but you have the ability to reflect on those laws and make decisions within them. This hearkens back closer to what Kant would say than what Nietzsche would say. Kant gives us the idea that, yes, while we do have these fixed laws of nature, we can figure out what they are and we can adjust our attitudes accordingly. Starts going to take that a little bit farther and say like, well, we can actually sort of describe what it is that we're looking at. And in that recognition of it as this or as that or is something else, we can make different decisions. Recognizing someone as a king, I might show them more respect. You know, recognizing someone as a lowlife, I might show them less respect or something along those lines. With this understanding in mind, then, free will and determinism are not actually mutually exclusive. People are going to be mostly held responsible for the decisions that they make, given the fact that they could have reflected on these decisions and made other choices. So let me end this with a summation using another extended metaphor here. Imagine a game of pitch and catch. One person is responsible for catching the ball. Who is it? Is it the pitcher or is it the catcher? We could make the argument that if the pitcher doesn't throw the ball anywhere close to where the catcher is, then the catcher could not have been responsible for catching the ball. On the other hand, the pitcher could throw the ball directly at the glove of the catcher, and the catcher could still make a mistake and not catch it. There seems to be a shared responsibility here in creating this situation of the ball being caught. A hard determinist would still argue that even those choices are determined by other factors. And yet, at the same time, we still feel like there's some kind of agency here. There is some place for our conscious mind. It didn't develop the costly, caloric development that it is if it does absolutely nothing and has no impact on anything. If we could all just make our decisions without a conscious mind, nature would have selected us for that. So in some way, the very existence of a conscious mind points to the idea that it does have some sort of causal agency within the universe. So what can we do with all of this? Well, the universe is going to be either determined or not determined, and it's not for us to decide whether it is or it isn't. It is helpful, however, to reflect on these, because if we are judging people too harshly, knowing that some things that were out of their control can mitigate the amount of guilt that we assigned to people. So simply looking for other circumstances that might affect their decisions allows us to be more kind and more forgiving. It allows us to be more kind and forgiving of ourselves, that we are not the horrible people that sometimes we act like. We do not have to identify, then, with the worst aspects of ourselves or identify other people with their own worst aspects. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit amecrates.buzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.