Defining Free Will: Seman...

Defining Free Will: Semantics and Nuance

(06:50) what's Free Will well well I don't know I hadn't thought about it I just took it for granted but as soon as you start thinking about it you suddenly realize my God I haven't thought about this before what about this what about that what do I really mean by free

(07:06) [Music] will the definition of Free Will is very important because this tends to be a debate that actually does hinge a lot on semantics semantics are important semantics are about meaning if we don't actually understand and agree on what we're talking about then then we're not

(07:24) actually going to talk about anything uh meaningful the problem with the term free will is that it means so many different things to so many different people the cardinal sin when debating Free Will in my view is to be talking past one another because we're operating

(07:38) on different definitions of free will now because there are so many Notions of Free Will in the debate it's important for participants in the debate to settle on a single notion the problem with free will is that the term itself is loaded because of course that of that word free

(07:55) in front of it you know free of what most people don't have a definition of Free Will and the reason for that is because they haven't thought about it it's a tough question right for me I would say it's more of like legal consequences less people they are telling you what to do the ability

(08:12) to choose the clothes I want to wear the religion that I want to have the place I want to live I think we think we have free will but nobody's will free we just want to get to the next check or feed our family or whatever we have to do cuz we have to do that they are thinking of

(08:31) freedom in a political sense in a or an economic sense which are totally different concepts I can't buy a billion dooll home so in what sense am I free to do that right that's one sense of free but that doesn't say anything about the causes of my behavior at the level of

(08:49) physics that doesn't say anything about determinism or compatible ism when you ask what is Free Will the first thing I like to make clear to people is we need to distinguish between freedom of action and freedom of will we are free to act Whenever there are no constraints out there in the

(09:18) world preventing us from acting someone holding us down someone coercing us someone constraining us or maybe we're compulsive or other things are preventing us from doing it freedom of will is a deeper thing than that and my account of it it is the freedom to create the will you express in action we

(09:39) could be expressing a will we already had all the time but where did it come from to what extent was it my own creation and to what extent was it the creation of the World Around Me fate physics biology upbringing when you're born you you are a package of genes that have built a

(10:03) body and you didn't choose a single one of those genes you don't choose your environment because at least I don't remember choosing to be born in the household that I did there was no multiple choice quiz behind like John rs's veil of ignorance where you just

(10:17) choose right it's just you just end up where you are and you chose none of it I think the average person the average person on the street believes that it's not the result of their past their upbringing their brain chemistry antecedent conditions that existed prior

(10:35) to their being born from my own personal subjective inner perspective on my actions I feel like my deliberations are up to me I feel like my choice is up to me I feel like I could have deliberated differently I could have chosen differently when I make a choice it

(10:52) feels like I have this sort of transcendent ability to be above and to make a choice other than what I could have made so we all feel that way and it is intuitive for us to think that well I'm free to make my decisions I could have done otherwise in a particular

(11:08) circumstance or another and therefore if you actually talk to to them in terms of you know do you think you have free will it's like yeah sure I do so how do we Define the term free will the historical philosophical debate features several distinct Notions Free

(11:27) Will perhaps the most common one is the ability to act and to refrain so suppose one's in certain circumstances if under those circumstances one is able to perform an action and able to refrain from performing that action one is Free Will yet another notion of Free Will is

(11:45) the ability to act in accordance with good reasons one issue for that notion is that it doesn't divide the participants in the debate because everybody believes that we're reason's responsive what we want here with Free Will is at some points there's more than one pathway and we can choose either one

(12:05) the most important definition of Free Will is the could have done otherwise definition and that's the kind of free will that most people think they have the ability to do otherwise but a lot of my compatibl friends disagree one of the central mistakes in the thinking about

(12:28) the question of whether I could have done otherwise isn't thinking that the question is properly addressed if we ask in exactly the same circumstances if we could rewind the tape of History would we do the same thing that is in fact of no interest at all so who's right in these definitions

(12:48) well I don't think that's a right question I don't think we can ask who's right or wrong because anybody can Define any word any way they want the more relevant question is whose definition of Free Will is more appropriate there's lots of ways of defining Free Will where we don't have

(13:09) it and who cares because it's they're they're just not interesting important they're not morally important ideas and the single notion that most participants in the debate have settled on over the last quarter Century or so is the control and action required for moral

(13:26) responsibility so one has free will if one has the control and action required for moral responsibility for that action Free Will is what you have when you're a morally responsible agent now there's an added complication here that's that there are different senses of moral

(13:42) responsibility and one wants a notion of free will that actually divides the participants in the debate so the notion of moral responsibility does the trick here is a notion of moral responsibility that involves deserved blame and praise perhaps deserved reward and Punishment