1 There remains one other, and very vital, problem that breeds dissatisfaction with the human condition. It is freedom of will.
2 We are here in another Bet Situation; that is, we are faced with a problem that we cannot and never shall solve, but about which we ought to come to some conclusion. I must bet either that I have no freedom of will and my actions are never my own, however free and willed they appear to be, or I must bet that I have, or can achieve, some sort of freedom. I can, thirdly, make no bet and remain agnostic.
3 This is in many ways an easier race to bet on than those that oppose an intervening and a non-intervening god, or an afterlife and a total extinction. Most religions and codes of justice have supposed complete freedom of will in order to make their ethical and punitive systems effective; and this is more forgive-able, if no less undemonstrable than the determinist reduction of all human behaviour to mechanics. ‘A mailman was drowned in the floods’ and ‘A mailman was murdered by a gunman’ may belong to the same category of events in evolution; but not in their significance to human society. We may say that this particular murderer had no freedom of choice when he pressed the trigger; but not that all men would have had no choice in a similar situation. We may argue about the degree of free will possessed by this or that individual; but to deny it to all mankind is to beg the great question of why we are not all gunmen – and why we are capable of disinterested choices.
4 It may turn out finally that indeed we do not, in some evolutionary or biological sense, possess any free will. All our ‘free’ choices may be finally attributable to some conditioning over which we have no control. Even if we could establish the contrary – total free w ill – W e are still limited, since to be completely free we should need an absolutely free field of choice as well as the freedom to choose in it. We are in fact confined to the courses of action available, perceivable and feasible to us. I cannot choose whether to be a woman or not because I was born male; and so on. Yet there remains the fact that we all have experience of situations when we feel (and more importantly, an outside observer can feel) we choose freely. We are perhaps, are almost certainly, machines; but we are machines so complex that they have developed a relative freedom to choose. We are in a prison cell, but it is, or can be made to become, a comparatively spacious one; and inside it we can become relatively free.
5 There may be situations and senses in which Euclidean geometry is not true; but it is enough for ordinary purposes that it seems true, and ‘works’, in ordinary situations.
6 Chess permits freedom of permutations within a framework of set rules and prescribed movements. Because a chess player cannot move absolutely as he likes, either in terms of the rules or in terms of the exigencies of the particular game, has he no freedom of move? The separate game of chess I play with existence has different rules from your and every other game; the only similarity is that each of our separate games always has rules. The gifts, inherited and acquired, that are special to me are the rules of the game; and the situation I am in at any given moment is the situation of the game. My freedom is the choice of action and the power of enactment I have within the rules and situation of the game.
7 There is finally a paradoxical sense in which we gain free will by living in society. At the most obvious level, the final decision of a committee, though it may not be the decision that some individual members would have arrived at ‘of their own free will’, does represent a freedom of general human will in the face of an apparently determining biological system. This is perhaps the deepest psychological attraction society holds for the individual; though the more easily comprehensible individual in each of us tends to think of other people’s opinions and beliefs as in some way hostile and confining, a deeper intelligence in each is aware that what springs out of this conflict is a greater general freedom – and one in which each eventually shares.
‘GRATUITOUS ACTS’
8 A famous category of actions – ‘gratuitous acts’ or sudden decisions without rational motivation – are supposed to prove absolute freedom of will. But all they prove is contempt for convention. They spring from the heresy that all restriction is analogous to imprisonment; as if everything we know, from the observable cosmos to the meson, is not restricted.
9 If I were to throw a rotten egg at the Archbishop of Canterbury I might prove that I have no respect for convention; but I prove nothing about freedom of will. A world of irrational actions would not constitute an absolutely free world because for human beings anarchy is only freedom when everyone wants anarchy.
10 In a world where the individual is, or feels that he is, being stamped out of existence it is only natural that the gratuitous act should gain a certain glamour. But this is an indictment of the world as it is, not a justification of the gratuitous act, or a proof of free will.
THE PURPOSE OF RELATIVE FREEDOM
11 If we are only relatively free, then it must be so that we shall evolve a greater relative freedom. This freedom is something that has to be gained: both by the individual in his own lifetime, and by the species during its long history.
12 It is obvious what it is gained by: greater intelligence and greater knowledge, both of self and of life. In practical social terms it requires a higher general standard of education and a different kind of education. Above all it requires social equality. Freedom of will is strictly related to freedom of living condition.
INABILITY TO ENACT GOOD
13 Since it is essential that we should fail to do evil, it is necessary that we should sometimes fail to do good. Will is an amoral force, like electricity: it can kill or it can serve. Failure to enact represents an indispensable safety system, like the fuses in an electrical system.
14 Even if we could enact more of what we willed, the world would be no better since the increased power to will and enact would apply to both good and evil actions. Therefore, to say that we wish we could enact what we will is to say that we need more training in determining what is good and what is evil; not in willing and enacting.
15 Animals have strong wills; they try to enact whatever they will. They are incapable of not acting as they will. That is how we trap them. Weak-willedness both oils and safeguards the machine of human society.
16 But our dissatisfaction is that we are unable to enact the good we freely will. I have a shilling in my pocket for this charity box; yet I pass it by. There are six principle causes of such failure.
17 The first stems from the fatalist belief that we have no freedom of choice in willing an action; and therefore we enact, if we enact, what is chosen for us. Our choosing is an illusion; our action, a waste of energy. To do or not to do… who cares?
18 The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.
19 All forks dream of crossroads; in atoms as in men, complexification causes loss of energy. Throughout history the intelligentsia have been despised for their weakness as enactors. But it would be only in a world where high intelligence were synonymous with high morality that one could wish the most intelligent to have the most power.
20 The third cause of failure to enact good stems from our ability to imagine fulfilment. We know from experience that things rarely turn out as pleasantly as we imagined they might have done; and an imagined ideal consequence may take such a hold on our minds that it becomes impossible to risk the disappointments of reality.
21 Before I act it is as if I had acted before. To say you believe in doing something may be, except in front of witnesses likely to hold you to your word, merely to give yourself an excuse not to do it. For goodness is action; not intention to act.
