Human Beings // Human Freedom
Abstract
The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how
to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe
itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible
of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in
no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological
drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, these obstacles came under the heading
of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the
realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity,
together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape
of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope
of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest
image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly),
particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The
phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher
Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with
the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the
drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world,
as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better
with atheism?
A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought
to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a
sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity
who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in
ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism—
which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course,
has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter
exist.
It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum
regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe
are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally
posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of
the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic
ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the
idea of human freedom?
In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and
whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more
resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does.