Foreknowledge and Freedom of the Will
I have always grown pouty and grumpy like an old man, even when I was young, hearing the idea that more information and more detailed information, about the future, or about anything, somehow detracts or diminishes from the freedom of the will.
Bosh and rubbish, say I.
More foreknowledge means more freedom of the will, because the will operates more perfectly, the more one knows.
An amnesiac, or, more to the point, a man who does not know his own character, stepping into a situation of threat or temptation, as when facing a brutal enemy or an alluring seductress, does not have more freedom of the will than a man who knows himself, knows his own character, and knows he will neither be frightened into cowardice nor lured into wickedness.
If his knowledge is foreknowledge, as in some supernatural or science fictional setting, told to him by an oracle or a time traveler, that he will overcome temptation tomorrow, when tomorrow comes, if anything, this should strengthen his spirit and strength the power of his will to rule the unruly elements in his soul.
To mere mortals, who face our tomorrow blindly, temptations often can be ambushes, and the will be made weaker by surprise.
Even the many Christian writers, men wiser than I, who say that God hides Himself from man in order not to impose on man’s free choice to obey or disobey, with them I take respectful, polite, but absolute issue.
God did not hide from Adam in the garden, and Adam’s choice before the Fall of Man was utterly free.
The hateful devils writhing in Hell know well that God is real, with no confusion and no doubt about the issue, and their decision to rebel before the Fall of Angels was utterly free.
Let me speak for none but myself: it is clear enough from my own history that the sole source of any unfreedom in my will, any weakness of the will, any inability to do the right despite knowing the right, springs in no way from not knowing the right.
My unfreedom of the will springs from my own clash of passions, ambition, pride against my conscience, as when sin darkens intellect, blunts prudence, blinds forethought, and blinkers or baffles my desires with strange exaggerations.
In sum, weakness of the will comes from the world, the flesh and the devil, into whose usurped and unruly tyrant power sin places the soul.
Is my willpower more free, when I sit in a restaurant before a menu with two dozen options, rather than two?
Because there are always at least two options, even if there is only one item on the menu: to eat or not. I submit that freedom of the will is not dependent on the number of options.
Suppose, however, there is but one option: either to do the one thing conscience demands, regardless of personal consequences, or not to do. Is the freedom of the will obliterated when faced with such a choice?
For it seems to me that in the desperate situation where there are no more tactics to try, only a raw choice between suffering and cowardice, between death and dishonor, that is precisely when the willpower is called upon to reach its greatest extent.
Now, suppose someone who knew you well, let us say, your wife or your mother, having strong faith that you will make the right choice, tells you beforehand what you will eventually decide to do.
You know and she knows. But the choice is still a terrible one. Still you pray this cup pass by you, or that some unforeseen event open an unseen escape hatch.
Does her knowledge of your character make your choice less an act of the will?
Contrariwise, let us suppose the opposite. If your mother or wife could not predict how you would act in the narrow strait because you lack character, and temptation often weakens and confuses you, surely this shows less freedom of the will, namely, that your willpower at such times lacks the power to act.
One almost feels like a helpless observer, merely watching the wrong choice being made, because the wrong choice is easier.
To see oneself do such things is a difficult sight: psychology keeps a long list of tricks and frauds a mind is likely to play on itself to avoid confronting the sight of one’s own weakness. (And the common sense Old Wives know keeps a longer list, but in simpler language.)
Again, surely this is the opposite of freedom of the will. This is the very definition of weakness of the will.
Again, suppose a time traveler, or a prophetic oracle, or a divine being, saw and foreknew which choice you would make in the narrow strait before you made it, before you were born, and knew you would prevail or fail at the inner struggle.
It is a play on words to say you have no chance hence no choice to take the hard path; it is the fact that you, by your own action, closed and locked the door leading to the correct corridor to prevents any choice after the fact.
In one sense of the word “choice”, the path not taken, since it will not be taken, is no path at all. It is not a path so you have no choice to take it, since you chose not to.
It is not a path you can select because your selection was not to make it your path. The act of choosing, by this logic, makes it not a choice.
Admittedly, this is an elliptical way of speaking.
Perhaps a hypothetical all-seeing prophet foreknew how your free action would freely be decided; his foreknowledge put no thumb on the scales of fate. His foreseeing it in no way makes your choice unfree, for the choice would have been the same, unforeseen.
In the other sense of the word, the path not taken would have been a path had it been taken. It would have been your choice had you chosen it. It would have been the path you made by making it; and now it is not.
The presence or absence of a hypothetical all-seeing prophet changes nothing, in this sense of the word. Had you taken the other path, he would have foreseen that. You did not, so he did not.
This is the normal sense of the word, and, outside wrongheaded philosophical discussions about fate and free will, this is the way the word is always used: the word choice refers to what, at one time, might have been, had the choice been different, but now cannot be.
The use of the word inside wrongheaded philosophical discussions of “choice” define the word to mean that which does not exist, for every choice is one or the other, an either-or, and the option not taken is defined (in the language of wrongheadedness) as having somehow never having had been available, never real.
The door at the fork in the corridor you could have unlocked, by this thinking, retroactively is turned into a prop door painted on the scenery backdrop of the illusion of the universe, never opened and never had any ability to be opened.
By this definition, choice never exists.
In normal speech, we speak of choice as the decision between two options, both existing in potential, neither one, at the time before the decision, being actual.
But if choice never exists, there is no way and no point in talking someone into changing an opinion, neither on this topic nor any other, because changing an opinion is choice. In which case, the option that choice never exists cannot be uttered, nor believed, because the choice to believe that option never exists.
Those who insist that everything that is as it is now could never have had been any other way, either because the wisdom of the Supreme Being or the tyranny of cause and effect requires no decision points leading to other possible branches exist at any point in the chain of history.
Those who are subtler in making such arguments will say that, indeed, divine foreknowledge or iron cause and effect does determine the outcome, but that the existence of those options, and the freewilled human reactions to them, are part of the great chain of events: hence, all points in time are determined, but some of those points are decision points, where the event that leads to a given outcome is the free choice of a being with free will.
One cannot argue that free will does not exist on the grounds that one certain outcome results from its operation, while a second certain outcome does not.
Those who are subtlest of all will argue that freedom of the will, like competence to stand trial, is a moral and legal category, and has nothing to do one way or the other with reasoning about cause and effect, which is an empirical category.
Much of this wrongheadedness about what is freedom of the will is based on a deeper wrongheadedness about what freedom itself is. Thomas Hobbes, perhaps, is the most famous early perpetrator of this confusion.
Hobbes merely played a word-game with the word “choice”, in order to reach his desired conclusion that coerced choices, where a man is blackmailed or threatened by another man attempting to break or overawe his victim’s will, were one and the same with any form of choice. As if deciding whether whether to walk north on the road or south were the same as being forced to walk the plank, blades at your back, into the shark-infested sea.
The fact that the options are limited by the deliberate action of a man Hobbes blithely ignores, equating this with options limited by the nature of reality. But no matter how free my will, nor how many my choices, I cannot walk north and south on the same road at the same time.
But Hobbes wanted to come to the conclusion that contracts made under duress are valid, and so he merely defined duress out of existence. Once a man forces you to sign a contract by threatening your life or limb or property, so Hobbesian logic ran, you are not allowed to break the contract with him, the moment the threat is removed, not even to save life, limb, property.
The error in logic here is that a contract made under duress lacks moral quality, because the victim does not wish for nor benefit from terms of the contract, or, rather, he will is overawed by the threat. Such a contract can exist only in a universe where human actions have no moral dimension. But in such a universe, the moral rule that one must honor contracts do not exist.
Conveniently, if coercion does not exist, all coercion, whether lawful or criminal, whether in defense of law or abridging law, becomes one and the same. As if with a wave of a fairy wand, all questions of law, of morality, of ethics, of politics, are banished. Justice becomes merely the power of the strong to compel the weak.
By an odd twist in his argument, Hobbes then makes it unjust to complain about injustice when the strong compel the weak, nor may the weak combine against the strong to elude or overthrow his tyranny. I trust that self-contradiction needs no further remark from me: you may read LEVIATHAN for yourself, and see how and why being a tyrant is lawful, but becoming a tyrant is not.
So, those following Hobbes — and all postmodern posthumans, either treading his heels or his path, follow Hobbes — define freedom as the unhindered ability of a man to do whatever he wills, and the will is defined as whatever the last impulse passing through his mind might happen to be.
In the same way the concept coercion is simply defined out of existence by this deceptive word-game, calling the last impulse, whether moral or immoral, sprung from the reason or sprung from the appetites, by the same word used for the willpower, simply defines all internal moral and mental struggle over hard decisions out of existence.
Selecting death with honor over ignoble slavery is a choice no different, by this logic, than preferring pie to cake.
Entire millennia of universal human experience, tragedy, victory, and wisdom, not to mention the histories and songs and stories, writings of sages and preachers and poets, are all banished with a puff of rhetoric.
The lack of external hindrance to the exercise of the last impulse to action is not what freedom is. The absence of human laws punishing the contemplated act is not what freedom is. Such things can hinder and limit options, and limit freedom in the silly rhetorical sense described above.
True freedom is the sovereignty of the reason over the passions, and the victory by the conscience over temptation. Such victory, in humans, comes when and only when our human nature is perfected and complete.
Fallen man is in a sick and unhealthy condition, and so we have been all our lives. It is a type of blindness combined with a disorder of the appetites, so that we are tempted to imprudence, deaf to reason, lured by shallow appearances, and too stupid to learn better, despite repeated warning and repeated lessons.
Fallen man loves his seven deadly sins with a distempered infatuation, and will bend his whole life into a warped and distorted shape of horror to protect and promote them: and sin, by definition, is inhuman, unhealthy for men, insane, and corruptive to the soul. We are infatuated what destroys us.
Long experience teaches that only true love drives out infatuation. Attempting to dislodge one infatuation of sin, such as selfishness, with another infatuation of sin, such as utopianism, merely leads to more and deeper infatuation of darker sin. The sickness is aggravated by the snake oil of a false panacea.
Those who seek to abolish the sins of cruelty and injustice from human nature, or to abolish human nature from men and women, by adjusting human social institutions somehow to hatch the bird of utopia from the egg of tyranny, become a little Satan, and they make Earth into a little Hell.
Selfishness, as is seen when men ignore the suffering of the deserving poor, is bad; the pride required for, let us say, a bartender, to think to organize all human economic activity and all its ecological side effects, immediate and remote, is pride beyond all human reckoning.
Such pride hinders and corrupts human nature. It kills natural sympathy, it corrupts the natural emotions toward kin and neighbors and strangers, it inverts morality. It corrodes the roles of woman and men, and makes them ghastly mannikins. Wrong becomes right and truth becomes hatespeech. Thought becomes thoughtcrime.
Robbed of sex, of morality, of reason, of speech, the posthuman of utopia has no freedom of the will at all, because his human nature is lost. The one thing that holds his salvation becomes unutterable hateful and repellant: Gollum cannot eat the waybread of the elves.
But grace perfects nature. The Fall of Man is cured in the Saints of Heaven, and their will is entirely subordinated and obedient — lovingly and voluntarily obedience, for the word ‘obedience’ has no other true meaning — to the source and summit of the love that moves the stars.
I hope a saint would always know beforehand what he is likely to do, for he should know perfectly what his conscience will direct.
I have seen many, many word games played by those who know better, or would know better, had they not been criminally negligent in their thinking, claiming saintliness, being perfect, admits of no further growth, nor choice, nor freedom of action.
As if a sick man, once his progress toward health were complete, and all his fevers gone, suddenly were somehow deprived of growth, or choice, or freedom. Health is achieved! So all motion from sick to healthy is done. Hence health is stasis, hence undesirable.
It is all humbug. The restoration of man to his prelapsarian state ends a bout of sickness, nothing more.
The idea that once an organism is mature, it is dead, is also a commonplace often uttered by these same negligent rhetoricians. The motion from childhood to adulthood fulfills the potential latent from the start, and, if the child is healthy, he becomes a healthy adult. No more growing is needed: we need not be giants, adding height to height, nor need we be like the images of Near Eastern deities, with three eyes and four heads and nine arms.
A close examination of a philosopher or pundit claiming human pain is the only source of human desire, and that growth and change are directed, not toward a fixed end, but up an endless asymptote, will usually reveal the further items on the agenda: usually sexual license, and a call toward “freedom” from morality.
When the words are used in their proper sense, freedom from morality, which alone grants freedom, is an insolent contradiction in terms.
So, then, if God is not hidden for the sake of making our choice to keep faith or disobey more free, then why?
My own speculation, which I hope is not blasphemous to state, is that man’s sinful nature makes God not obvious to our hearts. Man’s sin makes the jubilation of His handiwork, mountain and forest and sun and stars and fish and fowl and beasts and man, not obvious to our ears as they cry out his glory every moment.
My own speculation is that if God revealed His face to us, we would die.
He is keeping His face hidden as an act of mercy, for now, to give us one last clear chance to change our minds, lay down our rebel arms, repent, and seek Him. But that is not a question of knowing or not knowing.
He told us what we need to know about Him through His prophets, His messiah, and His Church.
Those who wish to know Him will know Him. When the world is cured of sin and pain, the knowledge of the wonders of God will cover the world, as the waters cover the sea.
Will freedom of the will be abolished by this, or perfected?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
