I Will Choose Free Will
Do we become meaner people without free will?
I recall there being a debate on now Senator JD Vance’s motivations when he switched from being a Trump skeptic to supporting MAGA. One of the responses was that he had always held that belief and had never changed it.
I’ve heard this again and again about people who might have been a good politician that somehow changed. They didn’t change, some will assume. This is the way they have always been.
Such a viewpoint is unsettling since it essentially disproves the notion of free will and the ability of individuals to make decisions.
The writer and philosopher Luke Burgis is never an easy read. He seems to operate about two or three levels above my intellect. That said his latest essay on the loss of free will in modern society is a worthwhile read because he is able to encapsulate what I’ve been seeing in the wider culture: that belief that people have free will, the freedom to make choices, even the freedom to make mistakes. That will lead our society down some dangerous roads, according to Burgis. In the following quote he talks about how this can remove any sense of moral responsibility, referencing the great 2002 movie Minority Report:
There is an ethical implication to agnosticism on this issue because it calls into question the degree of one’s moral responsibility of any action. If there’s no free will, every solution must be a top-down one. If people aren’t free to choose, then “people don’t change”-they can’t change. It’s fair to write them off forever or make irrevocable choices in relation to them. A society that loses its belief in freedom loses the ability to believe in conversion. It loses hope. It’s not a huge step before we have real-life pre-crime units.
Moral responsibility is non-existent and our criminal justice collapses. A person can justify any action because they were “born this way.”
The denial of free will is probably behind the view that if you’re born with a certain color of skin you have blind spots that you are incapable of seeing or escaping from unless you submit to programmatic training by the people who accuse you. You’re not free to know the truth because of your racial identity. Your ignorance is determined. At the very…
