Definition: Mental faculty used by conscious beings to initiate autonomous action
Type of ethics: Theory of ethics
Significance: In traditional philosophical models of the mind, reason is used to evaluate one’s desires to determine whether or not they should be acted upon, and will is the faculty that carries out those decisions once they have been made. Thus, it is the will in conjunction with reason that makes morality possible on a practical level by preventing people from becoming automatons ruled solely by brute impulse and instinct.
One of the presuppositions of morality is the belief that a human being is a special kind of agent that is to be held morally responsible for its actions. A boulder that tumbles from a precipice and crushes the leg of a climber is an agent, because the energy that it has acquired is a source of change, the crushing of the climber’s leg. Nevertheless, the boulder is not held responsible for its actions, since it is not deemed a moral agent. Although there have been periods when animals other than human beings have been treated as moral agents, it is generally true that human beings alone are held morally responsible for their actions and thus are taken to be the only moral agents within the natural order. (This remark must be confined to the natural order, since many theists believe that God and other spiritual beings—angels, demons, and so forth—are moral agents.) The conviction that a human being is an agent in this special way is often explained by claiming that a human being has a will, a capacity to initiate action through the formation of mental events (volitions) that prompt the desired action.
Nature of the Will
Although philosophers who believe in the will are in agreement concerning its importance to moral responsibility, there is considerable disagreement over what kind of thing it is. Some philosophers (for example, Plato, Saint Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas) maintain that the will is a faculty that is literally a part of the soul. The will, according to this view, is distinct from other mental faculties such as the intellect and also distinct from its volitions.
Other philosophers (such as Baruch Spinoza and David Hume) reject the notion that the will is literally a part of the soul. These thinkers maintain that the attribution of a will to human beings is simply a shorthand way of saying that the human soul can form volitions and that these volitions can initiate action. In this view, there is no distinct faculty or part of the soul that stands behind its volitions; rather, the will is simply the sum total of all the soul’s volitions.
Regardless of the stand that one takes on the precise nature of the will, one still must deal with the two most difficult issues confronting any adequate theory of the will. The first issue is that of explaining the mechanism whereby volitions exert their influence.
This issue is one aspect of the larger philosophical problem of explaining how the mind and the body interact—the so-called “problem of interaction.” The second issue is that of specifying what it is about the will’s agency that distinguishes it from other agents in a morally significantway. This second issue is that of the will’s freedom or autonomy.
Problem of Interaction
Experience seems to indicate that bodily events can cause mental events and that mental events can cause bodily events. The unfortunate climber mentioned at the beginning of this essay experienced the bodily event of a broken leg and then experienced the pain, a mental event, caused by this physical trauma.
In fact, all sensations, all cases of tasting, touching, seeing, smelling, and hearing, seem, at least uncritically, to involve bodily events (in which the physical environment acts upon one’s sensory organs) that cause mental events (the actual sensory experiences).
By the same token, experience indicates that mental events cause bodily events. The mental event of willing to raise one’s hand does, under normal circumstances, lead to the bodily event of one’s hand raising.
The problem of interaction refers to the challenge of explaining this apparent causal interplay between the mind and the body. With regard to the will, the problem of interaction arises in terms of the need to explain how the mind’s volitions can give rise to bodily actions.
Although the problem of interaction was explicitly formulated at least as early as the fourth century bce in Aristotle’s De anima, attention to it intensified dramatically in the seventeenth century in response to René Descartes’s promulgation of substance dualism. Substance dualism is a theory of human nature that holds that human beings are composed of two radically different kinds of substances: mind and body. Descartes conceived of the mind as an immaterial (spatially unextended) substance and the body as a material (spatially extended) substance.
In addition, he maintained that the mind and the body can exist apart from each other.
Although the Cartesian philosophy grew in popularity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, concern over the problem of interaction grew as well. The radical heterogeneity of the mind and the body upheld by Cartesian dualism led thinkers to wonder how such radically different substances could interact. Descartes himself never fully came to grips with this issue; however, a number of solutions were developed by those who were either avowed Cartesians or were at least heavily influenced by Descartes’s philosophy.
The late-seventeenth century French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche attempted to solve the problem by conceding that the mind and the body do not really interact. The reason that mental events appear to cause bodily events is that God creates these events so that they exhibit the correlation that people experience.
Thus, the connections between willing to raise one’s arm and the subsequent act of arm raising must be explained in terms of God’s causing the arm to raise on the occasion of the volition that it be raised.
Insofar as it implies that mental events and bodily events are not true causes but are only occasions upon which God acts as a cause, this view is known as occasionalism.
The late-seventeenth century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz worried that the occasionalists’ supposition of God’s ongoing intervention in the world was an unjustifiably complex assumption that would destroy the possibility of there being laws of nature. He preferred his own view of pre-established harmony. Like occasionalism, preestablished harmony conceded that the mind and the body do not really interact. Unlike the occasionalists, however, Leibniz explained the correlation between mental and bodily events by supposing that the events occurring within a substance result from an internal principle of development that God placed in the substance from the outset and designed so that the events unfolding in the mind would be in harmony with the events unfolding in the body.
Athird response to the problem of interaction was that of rejecting the dualism that gave rise to the problem.
In the seventeenth century, this solution was attempted in two very different theories. First, the seventeenth century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes maintained that the very concept of an immaterial substance was a contradiction in terms, for substance could only mean body. According to this materialism, then, mental events are nothing other than internal bodily events; thus, the interaction of the mind with the body is always nothing more than matter acting upon matter.
Also rejecting the dualism of Descartes was the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Like Hobbes, Spinoza maintained that there is only one substance in the universe. Unlike Hobbes, however, he maintained that this substance should not be characterized exclusively as material, for spatial extension and thought are both attributes of the single substance constituting the universe. In keeping with this dual-aspect theory, Spinoza maintained that correlated mental and bodily events are really the same event viewed from different standpoints: the standpoints of thought and extension. Insofar as there is, at bottom, only one event behind any given mind-body correlation, the problem of explaining the interaction of distinct events dissolves in Spinoza’s system.
Regardless of which of these avenues one chooses to explain the efficacy of volitions, one still must undertake the task of explaining why the agency manifested by the will is of a special type that can support the attribution of moral responsibility. Although recognition of the will’s special agency is commonly made by referring to it as free and autonomous, there is considerable disagreement concerning the nature of this freedom and autonomy.
Freedom and Autonomy
Numerous theories of human freedom have been defended throughout the history of philosophy; however, it does not do excessive violence to the subtleties of these theories to classify them all in one of the two following categories: voluntarism and compatibilism.
Advocates of voluntarism note that people normally do not punish others for actions that they could not have altered, and they thus maintain that the agency underpinning moral responsibility cannot be one that is governed by causal necessity. With this in mind, voluntarists (also known as incompatibilists and indeterminists) maintain that the will’s freedom entails that its volition not be necessitated by antecedent causes or conditions. According to the voluntarist, if one could reproduce the external and internal conditions immediately preceding an individual’s choice, the individual would still be free to choose otherwise than he or she actually did. Thus it is that voluntarists such as John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1280- 1347) explain the will’s freedom in terms of its complete independence of causally determining factors.
In direct opposition to voluntarism, compatibilism maintains that it is possible for certain human actions to be both free and causally determined. Also known as soft determinism and necessitarianism, compatibilism admits that all human actions are causally determined; it maintains, however, that certain human actions are still free insofar as they are free from external constraint and compulsion. One’s walking to the corner to mail a letter is, in this view, free, even though it is causally determined by one’s beliefs, desires, and character traits. Were another individual to force one to post the letter and drop it in the box, however, one’s action would be compelled and hence not free. Freedom thus does not consist in an absence of all causes; rather, it consists in being caused by the right kind of causes: beliefs, desires, and character traits.
Compatibilist Definitions of “Free”
Fully aware that their attempt to reconcile freedom with causal determinism seems to amount to nothing more than inventing a new meaning for the term “free,” the compatibilists are quick to point out that it is their definition of “free,” not that of the voluntarists, that makes sense of moral responsibility.
According to the compatibilist, voluntarism makes free choice a random affair, since it implies that no sufficient explanation can be given for an individual’s choices. This is problematic, according to the compatibilist, because people do not hold others morally accountable for actions that happen randomly or by chance. People do not think that the lottery official who randomly pulls the ticket of a destitute mother is more charitable than is the official who randomly draws the name of a tycoon. These events happen by chance and are thus to neither official’s moral credit or discredit. For this reason, the compatibilist charges the voluntarist with having reduced human freedom to a kind of internal lottery, a lottery that undermines the very moral responsibility that freedom is supposed to explain.
In defense of their own definition of “free,” compatibilists point out that people do think it appropriate to punish those whose actions flowed from wicked wants or a wicked character and to praise those whose actions flowed from virtuous wants or a virtuous character. This fact shows, they argue, that people do not hesitate to hold people responsible for actions that are caused, provided they are caused by the appropriate internal states.
The debate is not thus decided in favor of the compatibilist, however, for the voluntarist will note that the compatibilists’ attempt to uphold freedom only succeeds while one focuses upon the immediate causes of free action, the agent’s beliefs, desires, and character traits. When one considers the causes of these internal states, one quickly sees that compatibilism implies that they are ultimately caused by factors that are wholly external to the individual in question, factors that obtained even before the individual was born. The voluntarist therefore notes that the causal determinism that is part of compatibilism undermines its attempt to redefine freedom. Since determinism implies that all of an agent’s actions are ultimately the results of wholly external causes, it turns out that no actions are free even according to the compatibilists’ definition of “free.”
Convinced of the inability of both voluntarism and compatibilism to offer a satisfactory account of moral responsibility, some philosophers have resisted the call to offer a theory of freedom. Such hard determinists as the late-eighteenth century English philosopher Joseph Priestley resist the call by simply denying that there is any such thing as free agency.
Freedom, they insist, is merely an illusion created by one’s ignorance of those causal factors that have determined the way that one will act on a given occasion.
Other philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, see freedom as a necessary condition of moral responsibility and thus are not willing to dismiss it; nevertheless, they resist the call to supply a theory of freedom by maintaining that the nature of free agency is a mystery that cannot be penetrated by human reason.
Although philosophical discussion of the will’s freedom and autonomy normally focuses on the degree to which the will must be immune from determining factors, an interesting sidelight to this debate concerns the possibility that an individual can, freely and knowingly, choose evil.
Weakness of Will
Acting in a waythat is contrary to one’s moral obligation while one is fully aware of that obligation constitutes weakness of will. Sometimes called moral weakness or incontinence, weakness of will seems to be a part of most individuals’ experience.
What is philosophically interesting about incontinence is that some philosophers have been unconvinced by the abundance of experiential evidence for its occurrence and have insisted that it never actually happens.
Probably the best-known advocate of the impossibility of incontinence is Socrates. He rejected incontinence on the grounds that no person wants to be miserable and that the surest way to make oneself miserable is by disregarding the demands of morality.
Having accepted these points, Socrates was led to explain those who do choose lives of vice by supposing that they must be ignorant of the true nature of a virtuous life.
Other philosophers (such as R. M. Hare) have rejected incontinence on the grounds that it is impossible to act contrary to the moral principles that one holds insofar as the only true indicators of one’s moral principles are the actions that one performs.
According to this view, it is what a person does and not what he or she says that reveals his or her actual moral principles. It is only because people delude themselves into thinking that they hold certain moral principles that the illusion of incontinence is so prevalent.
Further Reading
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. New York: Macmillan, 1959. This work contains an influential defense of voluntarism.
Bourke, Vernon. Will in Western Thought. NewYork: Sheed & Ward, 1964. Arguably the best introduction to philosophical thought on the will, Bourke’s book identifies and analyzes eight distinct conceptions of the will that have been prevalent in the history of Western philosophy.
Kane, Robert, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Includes essays on all aspects of free will and determinism written by many contemporary experts in the field.
Kenny, Anthony. Will, Freedom, and Power. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. Provides a clearly argued defense of an Aristotelian/ Thomistic conception of freedom.
Mortimore, Geoffrey. Weakness of Will. London: Macmillan, 1971. This anthology includes selections from a broad historical spectrum and is a helpful introduction to the issue of moral weakness.
New York University Institute of Philosophy. Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science. Edited by Sidney Hook. New York: Collier, 1961. This work offers an understanding of the dialectical interplay among the theories of hard determinism, soft determinism, and voluntarism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Contains Nietzsche’s famous and enigmatic declaration that the world is composed of will to power “and nothing else besides.”
O’Shaughnessy, Brian. The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory. 2 vols. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Perhaps the most sustained treatment of the will offered in the twentieth century, O’Shaughnessy’s book is a development and defense of a dual-aspect theory. Although very difficult, this work will repay a careful reading.
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes&Noble, 1949. Considered by many to be the definitive critique of Cartesian dualism and its theory of volitions, it is also an excellent example of ordinary-language philosophy, one of the dominant philosophical schools of the twentieth century.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. 1958. Reprint. NewYork: Dover, 1969. This seminal work of pessimistic idealism views the will as determining both experience and reality.
Thorp, John. Free Will: A Defence Against Neurophysiological Determinism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. A clearly written attack on neurophysiological determinism that includes an interesting attempt to delineate between incompatibilist freedom and randomness.