People have free will

Imagine that you are in a plane, and the flight attendant is asking you whether to have water, juice or coffee. You choose coffee because you want to keep your head clear so as to deal with some lengthy and jumbled paperwork. Is it your free will that drives you to choose coffee? Or you’re destined to drink that coffee because you need to keep awake to do the work, and the flight provides coffee, and you know coffee works well for you? You have been told to finish the work by your employer before boarding and you must do it to keep your job. Is that the reason why you choose coffee? Actually, if you trace back further, you may find that you need the job because you have to pay your house loan, you buy a house to get married and you get married because you meet someone and fall in love with him or her. You can’t find the very beginning of that coffee choice, but you realize that you have no choice but to choose coffee in that plane. If you are the kind of people who think outside the box, you may find that everything goes in a certain way like a chain and people loose the control of their own life. Fortunately, chances are that you won’t get lost in the endless digging. You just thank the attendant, drink coffee, and dive into work.

But philosophers are not satisfied until they ask the question out: do you have free will when choosing coffee? Do people have free will in making choice? Determinists deny free will, libertarians eulogize free will, and in this paper, as a believer of both free will and determinism, I will expound why free will is real in spite of the almighty power of determinism.

Determinism means 1) The universe is ruled by the law of cause and effect, which means nothing happens without a reason and an event leads to another event. 2) Fundamental sciences reveal the key to everything in the universe, and all is pre-arranged in some certain order that human can’t change. I agree with the law of cause and effect and deny randomness, but also, I support that human have the agency to desire, choose, act and take charge. That is, people have free will.

Before further explanation, there is a need to clarify that beyond the physical world, in which physical reality is located by time and space, there is a non-physical dimension in human life, be it is called mental state, spiritual world or non-physical features. Basic laws of nature depict how particles move, how time goes forward in an irreversible way and how order turns to disorder, or the process of entropy increase. What I want to emphasis here is the non-physical part, by which people feel, analyze, judge, value, decide and act. Physical entities exist in physical world and are identified by temporal and spatial features, while non-physical entities are in non-physical world, unmeasurable but efficacious in shaping people’s behavior. Physical entities can be seen as the ingredients and non-physical entities are the tools by which the information is processed and a final action is committed.

After making a basic distinction between physical entities and non-physical entities, I will restate that the law of cause and effect is undoubted. I’m not challenging the causation by supporting free will, rather, it’s the basic for my argumentation below.

First, I will explain what free will is and how free will is verified. Unlike physical entities, free will is an abstract, metaphysical concept. It can’t be touched in the way that we pet a dog or grabbed in the way that we catch a bee. But non-physical entity does not mean its nonexistence. 

I define free will in three aspects: agent’s intention, action and responsibility acceptance. Out of the intention of S, S does A, and S shoulders the moral responsibility of the result of A. It can’t be said that S has free will if S has an intention, instead, only S finishes the action and accepts the consequent result can we claim S has free will. The three steps is exactly how things happen. Things happen with an original intention, and then real actions to substantialize the intention, at last consequences of the actions. To be more clear, S has free will iff:

1.S has an intention to do A 2.S does A as an action 3.S accepts the result of A and individual responsibility

I will take the coffee example to explain the three terms. That “S has an intention to drink coffee” equals “S plans to drink coffee”, and the “plan”actually is an expression to imply “result”. To make a plan means to analyze the current situation, and consider the future demands of oneself, thus to find an optimal solution. The need to finish the work and the supply of coffee and the effect of coffee are the current situation; the future employment is the future demand, and an optimal solution would be “the intention to ask the flight attendant for a cup of coffee”. Before the attendant asks, S has the plan to answer “coffee” after being asked. 

The second step is action. S articulates “coffee” is the action of substantializing the former intention. The last part is the acceptance of the result and responsibility. The result is that S is very likely to get coffee(if coffee is not accidentally used up), finish the work(if S works as usual because the workload matches S’s usual performance) and keep his employment in the future (as least in a short future). Only by satisfying the three steps can free will be verified. In this whole process, free will connects every single element, organize the three parts and endows meaning to the individual physical action. If there is no free will, all elements will move aimlessly and lead to more results. For example, the fact that there is coffee supply and another fact that there is work to be done are irrelevant elements, just like two separate moving particles in a huge box. The box also contains “coffee helps people awake” and “work needs clear head”. If there is no free will, the particles of information are distributed in disorder, and according to entropy increase theory, as time goes, the distribution will be more even as more information pieces appear and thus harder to connect. But the power of agency to filtrate, collect, and reorganize these particles shows a procedure of decreasing entropy, turning disorder into order. 

But that’s not enough. If we adapt to a deterministic perspective, we may stop here because there is a great chance to prove the existence of free will. But we can go further. If free will is real, what will happen next? Before answering this question, we need to go back a little. It should be mentioned that the acceptance of the result and responsibility is synchronous with the action. Determinists tend to claim that no punishments and appraisal is necessary because how people behave is pre-determined by scientific laws. It’s a challenge to all legal systems and moral duties and a negation of all human civilizations. Determinism denies all efforts human has done and ignores the structural system human has built-the order. It is the free will of agents that guarantees the moderate increase of entropy.  Actually, the established basic natural laws, numbers, patterns, classifications, nominations… all knowledge is the incarnation of human’s free will. The infeasibility of determinism lies in its uncertainty. Statistics unfolds the future for human beings, so people who believe determinism tend to rely on science and data, excluding the agency of human beings, but what science tells us is probability, not certainty. According to their theory, if punishment is not reasonable, rehabilitation may work well by reconstructing the demanding environment and meeting necessary demands. However, the first challenge is that no one knows exactly what produce a conducive result. The second challenge is that to have the intention to rehabilitate someone is a reverse effort against the forward-going direction of time. Determinism dose not go against time. It runs after the irreversible time. So determinism provides no solution to order because it naturally stands with time, and time leads to disorder. 

But free will gives a more feasible solution. When people commit an action, it should be known that at the very moment, he or she accepts the result of the action and meanwhile admits his or her own responsibility. People should be punished for criminal behaviors and be praised for their benevolence because their individual free will stand behind their actions. Actually the legal system can be seen as the crystallization of the common free will of people. When individual’s free will becomes incompatible, say a robber and a target, then the free will of the robber should be suppressed in order to protect the common free will. Meanwhile, such suppression is a deterrent for those who have similar free will. Punishments prevent them from substantializing their evil intentions before it is too late.

To make a conclusion, free will cannot be seen as an illusion just because it shows itself through real actions rather than appears itself directly. It is free will that makes uncertainty certain and resolves multiple choices with a single answer. Free will processes physical materials and leads to the final action. If one tends to do something and really does it, then we can say he or she accepts the consequence and shoulders all consequent moral responsibilities because his or her exclusive free will makes him or her do so. Free will guarantees the moderate increase of entropy, maintains the order and endows meaning to all human behaviors. The existence of free will should not be doubted.