Free Will: Part I
Individual Rights, Personal Freedom, and We the People
“You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your choice.”
Author Unclear (but probably a behaviorist at heart)
A Prickly Challenge
Individual rights and personal freedom have been central to our history and basic to our political and social system. We are a country that historically has valued the idea of community - people working together for the greater good. At times, working together requires self-sacrifice, delaying gratification, or even putting our interests aside, as well as having a sense of purpose for the greater good. It is having the belief that acting toward the greater good will eventually be reinforcing for me even though my actions are not instantly rewarded (delayed discounting).
Robert Putnam and others have documented that the bonds of community in the United States have been eroding for some time. The character of our civic life has changed in ways that often seem to accentuate the individual, as opposed to WE, the community of people. We have been warned that we are becoming a society that is unable to create social bonds capable of sustaining our American Dream - our way of life.
If we are to effectively guide and evolve our culture to consistently engage in prosocial behavior and be rewarded by the greater good, we are going to have to revisit our concept of individual rights, personal freedom, and free will.
Individual Rights and Community Values
Putnam and Garrett in their book The Upswing (2020) document the progress made in expanding individual rights but noted that we have “regressed in terms of shared prosperity and community values.” They concluded from their data that the I-We-I swing “...has been reflected in our experience of equality, our expression of democracy, our stock of social capital. Our cultural identity, and our shared understanding of what this nation is all about.” One of the most important takeaways, and in our view, most promising, of Putnam’s and Garrett’s research is their conclusion regarding the complex factors contributing to the inverted U - transitioning from We to I and back to We again. Their longitudinal data demonstrated the changes are driven by “human agency.” In other words, cultural swings from selfish to community and back again to selfish are driven by individual and communal behavior. These changes are driven by the changes in the contingencies of reinforcement (the negative or positive consequences for my behavior) in place at a given time.
It is important to evaluate the work of Putnam’s and Garret’s documented correlation of individual increased rights and our decline in the shared greater good within the context of increased personal freedom and rights narratives that may have changed the contingencies in place that manage behavior. These narratives may have gradually supplanted our rule-governed behavior that historically has contributed to us engaging in positive community action as a reinforcing event. It may be the case that instant rewards and delayed or negative consequences for our actions replaced less intangible and delayed positive rewards. These observations can empower all of us, together, to start an evolutionary process to guide behavior change based on evolutionary science and the science of behavior informed by the social sciences and neuroscience. We need the unity of knowledge to be successful. We can do it by working together. This requires learning the behavior and skills associated with self-management (not responding impulsively) and delaying receiving an immediate positive consequence (delay discounting) for a later positive consequence. Both are learned classes of behavior.
What is so Prickly about Free Will?
Our codes of ethics assume that we can freely choose to act between right and wrong. We are taught that we have free will and with it “moral liberty,” which is the capacity to discern and pursue the good. If we do not, then we are morally corrupt, inclined to deviant behavior or have a mental illness among other things. The assumption of free will runs through every aspect of our personal life, religion, education, work, politics, welfare, law, criminality, and so on. It reinforces the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. If you do not make something of yourself then you must be deficient or oppressed. Even Barack Obama in his book The Audacity of Hope (2007) wrote, “values are rooted in basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.” Free will is not “I have my personal rights and I can do what I want” as it is often manifested in personal behavior. Free will is conceptualized as something a person has internally that guides their behavior. Like an internal innate moral compass that quite often may fail us. It is mentalistic, so it cannot be objectively defined and studied. This poses a challenge to define and know what free will is.
So what happens if this belief and faith in free will erode? The sciences have gradually demonstrated, through the accumulation of evidence, particularly in the brain sciences and in the natural science of behavior, that the replicated scientific findings are conclusive in the evidence demonstrating how our individual experiences with the environment shape our behavior and facilitate the creation of a unique synaptic biological/personal self that provides the biological framework for our personal behavior. Science is demonstrating a rather deterministic, but malleable view as to what shapes and maintains our behavior. Analyzing behavior has the basic characteristics of any objective science - direct observation, measurement, prediction, and control. We do learn our moral compass. It is shaped by our experiences.
Who is in Charge of my Behavior?
Why do we behave as we do? What makes me act? What gives us the idea that we are free to choose as we wish, that we have free will? These and other questions about human behavior have fascinated philosophers and others for centuries. Since the Middle Ages scholars have provided a wide variety of different answers to these and similar questions. Historically, most proposed solutions to the problem of free will and moral responsibility have attempted to establish that humans do have free will. But what does free will consist of? When we make decisions and act, we usually feel as if we are choosing to act freely. Other times we may feel, under certain environmental circumstances, that we cannot act freely. This usually occurs when we are being coerced or threatened or we are being emotionally manipulated. To formalize the idea of acting freely is to believe that your actions are free if you could have acted otherwise. The existence of free will seems to be required for having personal moral responsibility. Most people would agree that one cannot be morally responsible for actions that one could not help but perform. Does free will actually give us a moral compass to behave ethically?
Free will has been defined in many ways. Our favorite is the one provided by the Collins English Dictionary - “the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces - you took on the responsibility of your own free will.” Making an ethical choice implies free will; for we cannot choose between right or wrong unless we are free to make that choice. Is free will the capacity, unique to humans, that allows one to control their actions? Is free will what makes us morally responsible?
In the next couple of essays, we will address the puzzle of free will, determinism, individual freedom, and personal rights from a historical and scientific perspective. For now, we would like for you to look at the questions we posed above and those that follow and, if you are so inclined, make some comments and maybe provide your own answers or ask questions and post them. That will allow us to hopefully fine-tune our message to address those relevant issues that you bring up. In addition, think of the following:
Can we have moral responsibility without free will?
How would life be without free will?
How do I exercise my free will?
Is my belief in free will tied to my individual rights, personal freedom, and community values?
Is free will God-given?
Can I have a spiritual and personal life with God if I do not believe in free will?
How will I react if I learn that my behavior is shaped and maintained by the environmental consequences that follow my behavior?
Would that make me feel that I can then exercise more or less control over my own behavior?
We thank you in advance for your thoughts and contributions.
Pass it on and see you next week.
Francisco I. Perez, Ph.D.
Henry S, Pennypacker,Ph.D.
Faris R. Kronfli, Ph. D.
Our book Engineering the Upswing - A Blueprint for Reforming our Culture can be found at Amazon or at the Cambridge Center (behavior.org).
Thank you Mike for your comments and references. Just to clarify, we are not sociologists nor historians. Those social sciences give us an exquisite account of observed behavior but they do not establish a cause/effect relationship. They can provide us only correlational data - what may go together. We are behavior analysts - a natural science of behavior that can establish cause and effect relationships. It is a functional analytic science. As such we look at causes of behavior and establish a cause/effect relationship. So when we look at the historical record of behavior we can look at the factors (contingencies of reinforcement in place) that contribute to the change in behavior observed. Thank you for your reference of the Fourth Turning. Putnam takes a similar approach in his book The Upswing. He is a sociologist who demonstrated a correlation between the turns of I-We-I with changes in human behavior and concluded based on this observation, that was correlational, that human actions was the main driver of the turns he observed as well as others. Thanks again!
So in their books Generations and The Fourth Turning, leading generational experts Neil Howe (who'll have a new book out in July) and William Strauss (who has since died) showed that Americans have gyrated between eras of strong individualism (the 1920s) and strong community (the 1950s) many times. The crisis periods and the post-crisis periods are the times we come together, so 1933 to 1963 was a time of strong unity and we've been getting more and more individualized since 1964. It's a very interesting paradigm that I've been aware of since 1990, when I was 24.
(I view you gentlemen as sociologists, not theologians or moral philosophers, so I'll wait and see what you come up with in your next two posts before I decide whether to respond to your metaphysical or anti-metaphysical views.)