Is Free Will Real?
The protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a World War II veteran named Billy Pilgrim who is kidnapped and taken to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo. The Tralfamadorians--“two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends” (26)--can see in four dimensions (the fourth dimension being time). To them, “outer space looks like rarefied, luminous spaghetti” because they “can see where each star has been and where it is going.” People look like “great millepedes--with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other” (87).
Because they can see the future, the Tralfamadorians don’t believe in free will. They say they know how the world will end: “We blow it up, experimenting with test fuels for our flying saucers,” the guide at the zoo tells Billy. “A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” But they don’t think they can do anything with this knowledge: “He has always pressed the button, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.” The Tralfamadorian guide tells Billy there’s no point in trying to prevent wars on Earth. Better, he says, to just “ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones” (117).
Readers who miss Vonnegut’s satire think that he’s actually saying free will is an illusion. In fact, the Tralfamadorians are probably not even real; Vonnegut emphasizes over and over that Billy is the lone source of the information about them. And they trap themselves in a logical contradiction: Their decision to ignore wars and devastation and “spend eternity looking at pleasant moments” is a clear act of free will.
Vonnegut encapsulates his true worldview by alluding to the “serenity prayer,” which is best known for its use Alcoholics Anonymous programs: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to know the difference” (60,209). Contrary to Billy’s comical misinterpretation--”Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future”--the quote highlights the human capacity to use free will, even in an imperfect world. Vonnegut acknowledges that human nature brings about human suffering, but he also claims that suffering is not inevitable.
In making this argument, Vonnegut offers his own answer to a question that has consumed humans for millenia: How much control do they have over the events of their lives?
Plato argued that humans possessed a “rational” part of the soul, which distinguished them from animals and enabled them to exercise free will. But he also believed the human soul had “spiritual” and “appetitive” aspects, each of which exerted an influence (O’Connor). In other words, people have some amount of control over their lives, but it’s limited.
Plato’s fellow Athenian, the playwright Sophocles, also tackled the concept of free will. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist is unable to outrun the fate ordained by the gods: He kills his father and marries his mother. On the surface, it seems pretty clear that Sophocles is arguing against the existence of free will. But a close reading reveals that it’s more complicated than that. Oedipus kills his father Laius (who he doesn’t realize is his father) at a crossroads, the symbolism of which is almost universal (62). (I say almost because it’s never a good idea to say something is always true in literature.) This suggests that Oedipus has a choice: He could go down the road of good, but he instead chooses the road of evil. He makes this choice, following the structure of Greek tragedies, because of his tragic flaw (one of several tragic flaws, actually): his temper. Like Vonnegut, Sophocles argues that humans have free will, but that human nature leads people to use free will for bad things.
The gods don’t make Oedipus’ fate come true; rather, they are able to predict how he will use the character traits they have given him. This leaves the question of fate versus free will unanswered, because it seems to promote determinism and free will at the same time.
Sophocles died two thousand years before the Scientific Revolution, but the contradictions in Oedipus are prescient given what scientists now know about how the human body works.
Molecular biology reduces humans’ thoughts, feelings, desires, and decisions to a series of chemical reactions. Chemicals react with each other according to laws of nature which cannot be broken. Therefore, if it were possible to look inside a person’s brain and observe the chemical reactions taking place, it would be possible to predict the person’s decision with certainty. Recent neuroscience research has found that, in many cases, intentional actions happen before people are conscious of them (Coyne).
Jerry A. Coyne, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, argues that this proves the nonexistence of free will: “To assert that we can freely choose among alternatives is to claim that we can somehow step outside the physical structure of our brain and change its workings. That is impossible. Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made. ...No, we couldn’t have had that V8, and Robert Frost couldn’t have taken the other road.”
But others argue that this is missing the point. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and Florida State philosophy professor Alfred R. Mele, among others, say that the science-based case against free will is a straw-man argument: Philosophers (and most people) can accept the idea of free will without what Coyne calls “a spooky, nonphysical ‘will’ that can redirect our own molecules” calling the shots.
Baumeister invokes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson, who wrote in 1973: “One may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y. But this hierarchy does not imply that science X is ‘just applied Y.’ At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary” (363). Applying Anderson’s idea to the free will debate, decisions are indeed a product of chemical reactions, but they exist on a higher level of complexity than chemical reactions, so the laws of chemistry alone aren’t enough to explain how decisions work. It is therefore possible for free will to exist alongside the laws of nature.
“There is no need to insist that free will is some kind of magical violation of causality,” Baumeister writes. “Free will is just another kind of cause.” It has to compete with other causes, like impulses and environmental stimuli--the “appetitive” parts of human nature, in Plato’s words. Human will doesn’t always win out, as any person who has ever eaten chocolate cake while on a diet knows. And of course, cultural expectations and social relationships--with peers, parents, and siblings--can impact decision-making, sometimes without people realizing it. People are wrong to believe they can always, as philosopher and cognitive scientist Shaun Nichols puts it, “access the factors affecting their choices.” But they do have the ability to make those choices, and the only way for them to lose that power is if they choose not to use it, like Billy Pilgrim.
In Freakonomics, authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner present the stories of two boys. One grows up in the Chicago suburbs with all the sociological advantages: he’s white, with doting parents who read to him and take him on nature hikes. He’s a math genius who skips a grade in school. The other boy grows up in Daytona Beach, Florida with every possible disadvantage: he’s black, his mother abandons him when he’s two years old, his father is a violent alcoholic who eventually goes to jail for sexual assault. It’s not that surprising that the first child ends up at Harvard; it’s also not that surprising that the second child is on the streets by his teenage years, selling drugs and carrying a gun (156-57). What is surprising is that in their adult lives, the first child, Ted Kaczynski, turns into the Unabomber, while the second child, Roland G. Fryer, becomes a Harvard economics professor (211).
People of all philosophical persuasions can find something in these stories to support their point of view. Fryer’s ascent perhaps demonstrates the power of free will to help people overcome difficult circumstances. Or it illustrates the power of environmental factors, because surely there were professors or adults who guided him along the way. Likewise, Kaczynski’s actions could be the result of a free decision to do wrong or the result of a declining mental state, which he couldn’t control. But most people would agree that the truth lies somewhere in between.
The things that people cannot change constrain the choices that people can make. But that doesn’t mean there are no choices to make.
Works Cited
Anderson, Philip. “More Is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science.” Science 177 (1972): 393-96. World Scientific. Web. 20 May 2015.
Baumeister, Roy F. “Do You Really Have Free Will? Of Course. Here’s How It Evolved.” Slate. Slate Group, 25 Sept. 2013. Web. 18 May 2015.
Coyne, Jerry. "You Don't Have Free Will." Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 Mar. 2012. Web. 20 May 2015.
Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.
Mele, Alfred R. "The Case against the Case against Free Will." Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 Mar. 2012. Web. 20 May 2015.
Nichols, Shaun. “Perspectives: Is Free Will an Illusion?” Scientific American Nov.-Dec. 2011: n. pag. Scientific American. Web. 19 May 2015.
O’Connor, Timothy. “Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 29 Oct. 2010. Web. 18 May 2015.
Sophocles. “Oedipus the King.” Three Theban Plays. Trans. Theodore Howard Banks. New York: Oxford, 1956. 39-83. Print.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Random House, 1969. Print.
