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Jan. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:05
57 Free Will Part 2

Some more refined views on free will

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 4.14pm on Sunday, January the 15th.
It's Stefan here, after a rather exciting set of email chats with people back and forth about free will.
I think that I'm going to work a little harder to clarify my position, since it seems to be unclear to most people, which is probably due to my inability or lack of effort in clarifying my position.
So I hope to make it a little bit more clear where it is that I'm coming from, and I hope that this is enjoyable to you.
I certainly find that the discussion is very interesting, and I really am curious to find out what people's responses are to a formulation that I've come up with, or a clarification of my sort of ideas around free will.
And this is sort of collated from years of thought on the topic, and you know, it's something that I've mentioned a couple of times before, in passing in various examples in these podcasts, but I'm sort of going to try and bring it all together in one sort of monster truck rally of free will perspectives, if you will.
So my particular approach to free will is that it is both a process and a state.
And what that means is that it's, you know, it's just like health, right?
Health is a process in that there are things that you can do which will enhance your health, the health of your physical body.
And there are things that you can do that are going to deteriorate or undermine the health of your physical body.
But at any particular time, a person can be said to be healthy or unhealthy to various degrees.
So it is both a process, the pursuit of health or healthy activities or healthy lifestyles or healthy choices, is a process.
But it is also a state which can be measured.
And I think that's one of the things that's confusing around free will, in this sort of formulation of mine, that free will is both a process and a state.
And if you look at it just as a state, then it would be sort of incomprehensible.
Like if you just look at health as a state without any process or choices which further to achieve it, then it's going to be sort of incomprehensible.
So in sort of my formulation of free will as a process and a state, I'm sort of going to take some examples and play them out and sort of see how well they fit.
So a couple of years ago, probably more than a couple of years ago now, A singer for the Grateful Dead named Jerry Garcia died, and he wasn't very old when he died, and I was sort of struck when I was reading newspaper accounts of his, you know, illness and subsequent death, because the doctors were pretty unanimous in the course of what happened, right?
So they said, you know, basically if you spend 40 years eating hamburgers and smoking and never exercising, whatever, and doing drugs, then, you know,
All of his system kind of shut down, like all of his organs kind of shut down at once and, you know, there was just no way that we could do anything to save him because he'd been so full of, you know, I guess toxins or, you know, fat or sort of ill health habits that he was absolutely beyond recovery when it came time to try and save him, right?
So he had some sort of, I don't know, it was a heart attack or a stroke or something like that and all the doctors could basically do was make him as comfortable as possible and watch him go.
Now, that to me was pretty instructive in terms of thinking about this question of free will.
And the way that I approached it then, which I'm sort of communicating now, is to say that, you know, Jerry Garcia did not have any free will when it came to survival.
At some point, in his life.
So let's say that two months before he died, if he decided to, you know, cut out the burgers, quit smoking, and start exercising, he probably would have just hastened his demise.
I mean, he probably would have just kicked off even quicker.
So, at some point, it was no longer possible for him to reverse the effects of his previous lifestyle and choose to have a healthy sort of life.
I don't know exactly when that point was.
Maybe it was, you know, 10 years before, 5 years before, or something like that.
This, of course, is the fulcrum that smokers worry about as well, right?
Which is, you know, well, if I quit before I'm 35, I should be okay, because 15 years later, you've reversed the effects of smoking, and your lungs have healed, or whatever, right?
So, all smokers worry You know, to some degree about when is the right time to quit, when can they reverse the damage, and that they don't want to do it too soon because smoking is fun, and they don't want to do it too late because living is fun too.
So that's sort of one aspect of free will that I was sort of curious about, and I remember thinking about with this Jerry Garcia thing.
So, you know, the choices that you make early in life have an effect on the choices that are available to you later in life, right?
So just as the decisions you make regarding your health early in life have effects on the actual health that you have later in life, the same thing is also true for free will.
I know this doesn't prove anything, it's just a metaphor, but I'll sort of work to try and tie it all together as we go on.
A metaphor that I've used before, so I'll just mention again briefly, is that knowledge is a component of free will.
Just as knowledge around health is a component of health.
Right?
I mean, if you simply go by your taste buds, then, you know, muffins and chocolate are the best thing for you to have.
And, you know, sort of raw salad and so on is the worst thing for you to have, because it just doesn't taste nearly as good.
So, if you simply go by the pleasure-pain principle, you are generally led to ill-health habits.
So, you know, going to the gym is really not that much fun.
And sitting on the couch eating toffees is usually pretty wonderful.
So let's just say that the pleasure-praying principle is not enough to guide one to correct decisions in terms of morality and in terms of health and in terms of free will.
So it's fairly important to know the degree to which knowledge is required for free will to actually occur.
And so a metaphor that I've used before is A doctor in the 17th century, before the discovery and proof of the efficacy of antibiotics in fighting infections, would not be considered to be a bad doctor for failing to prescribe antibiotics because they simply didn't exist.
Now, when antibiotics had first been discovered and published but had not been proven, a doctor could be considered to be a bad doctor for prescribing them to everyone who had an infection.
Maybe in the case of an extreme case where it was like cure or death, then it may be worth doing some sort of experimental drug treatment like the brand new penicillin.
But, you know, a doctor's sort of efficacy or his worth as a doctor to some degree has an effect on his balancing information that he has versus the risks and so on.
And so a doctor now who did not prescribe antibiotics for an infection would be considered a bad doctor, but in the past he would be considered a good doctor.
Of course, a doctor does not have the choice to prescribe antibiotics before they exist, or before he or she has knowledge of their efficacy.
And so knowledge is a component of free will as well, just as knowledge is a component of the pursuit of health, right?
You have to know what's good for you in order to pursue a sort of physically healthy lifestyle.
So for instance, if tomorrow it turned out that salads cause cancer, you know, we would all change our habits, those of us who are interested in sort of health, And of course we wouldn't necessarily get angry at those people who'd figured it out.
We'd probably be quite grateful to them.
So that's sort of another aspect that I really wanted to sort of point out.
That knowledge is an important component of free will.
Now free will, in other words, is a A free will is the result of a sort of accurate processing of things like cause and effect, of an acceptance of tangible, objective, external reality.
So, for instance, if I say, wake up one fine morning and say, you know, I really want to be a professor, then I can choose that, to pursue that.
However, I can't just go and walk over to the university and start teaching, right?
I'm not free to do that.
I mean, it's their property and so on, and you know, they have a union.
That won't let me go in and start teaching, and I'd have to go and get a PhD, and then I'd have to go and get a job, and I'd have to whatever, right?
I mean, I guess I could try and start my own university and teach there, but even still, there are some constraints over my desire to become a professor and to teach.
Some of those are real, and some of those are sort of man-made and artificial, like, you know, unions and so on.
So, if I want to become a professor, but I reject the reality of the real steps that are required to become a professor, then my free will, in a sense, is based on fantasy.
I can fantasize that I'm 20 again, but I'm not.
So you have to accept reality and the necessary causes and effects of the steps that are necessary to achieve your goal.
And you can choose to accept that, and of course, if you accept that, then your free will can actually achieve something, right?
Like, it actually has traction in reality.
And if you reject that, then you're just kind of spinning wheels, right?
You're just kind of out there saying, I want to become a professor, and yet you don't actually take the steps that are necessary to achieve it.
I mean, I knew a woman once who wanted to be an actress, and I knew a little bit about this, so I said, you know, well, you know, you need to Uh, you need to, you know, start a community plays, sort of community theater, you know, you can write your own play and put it on, you can, you know, just start auditioning for stuff if you want, but you're not going to have much luck until you've had some basic exposure to the craft.
Uh, even if it's stuff as simple as knowing how to project your vocals, uh, in a theater and, uh, also, uh, you know, application of makeup and, you know, How to work with lighting effectively and upstaging.
You know, the technical terms of the craft, right?
Like if somebody says, you're upstaging me, what does that mean?
So what she chose to do instead was to have dental work.
So, you know, that particular processing, of course, in effect was not particularly effective in my view.
So she said, well, you know, that's all well and good, but what I need to do is get my teeth fixed so that I can be an actress.
And so, you know, my particular perspective was, you know, sure, if you want, but that would be more around you being a movie actress than around a stage actress.
And, you know, generally you start on the stage or at least have some exposure to it.
It's easier to get into a community play than it is to get a role in a movie.
And so her approach to get her teeth fixed, you know, resulted in her teeth being straighter, but, of course, her not getting any particular acting roles.
So, you know, the effects of free will are also somewhat important.
So she was free to choose her priority, and she chose to get her teeth fixed rather than to take acting roles or create acting roles for herself, and therefore she never did become an actress.
And so, you know, that sort of rejection of reality of the natural cause and effect is sort of important when it comes to looking at free will.
And it certainly is a constraint.
You know, this sort of compatibilist argument around free will, that free will is constrained by biological and physical reality.
Of course, I absolutely accept that.
That's perfectly valid.
I mean, it would be crazy to say otherwise.
So, for instance, am I free to go and get a job in Germany?
Well, I'm free to go and look for a job in Germany, but I'm not likely to get a job in Germany unless I speak German.
And I'm certainly not free to speak German unless I study German.
And, you know, studying German is a particular series of events and courses and study and practice and all this kind of stuff.
Of watching, you know, strange black and white movies until I'm comfortable with the lingo and learning how to, you know, shriek.
So there's lots of things around learning a particular language that are, you know, steps.
So if I want to go and work in Germany, I have to learn the language, I have to learn the culture, I have to, you know, whatever, figure out what's important to German business people, what the big industries are.
You know, if I want to go to Germany and be a whale hunter, That may not be the best approach in terms of a rational career move.
So I'm free to sort of imagine and want to do all of these things, but I'm not free to achieve them.
And that is sort of the distinction that I think I'm trying to make here.
You know, as I sort of mentioned in either a podcast or an article, you know, I can choose to jump off a cliff or not jump off a cliff, but I can't choose whether or not I'm going to fall.
And so I can choose to be a professor, I can choose to be a professor at the University of Toronto, but I can't choose the steps that are necessary to achieve that.
Unless, wait a minute, these podcasts turn out to be just so startlingly brilliant that I get an honorary doctorate and they make me the Lord Almighty of U of T. Yeah.
Okay, let's put that one on the back burner.
We'll come back to that later and see if that works out for me or not.
So, you know, that's sort of a pretty important thing, that the effects of free will, or the value of free will, results from an accurate perception of reality.
What is it that I want to achieve?
What are the steps necessary to achieve it?
And I am free to pursue whatever it is that I want, but I'm not free to achieve whatever I want without an accurate analysis of the cause and effect of actually achieving it.
Now, in terms of desire, desire is a pretty important component within free will.
And, of course, we can't just live a life where we pursue pleasure and shun pain.
As I think in the Gorgias, Socrates pointed out, I think it was quite witty, I think he was arguing with Alcibiades, and Alcibiades said, You know, pleasure is the way to go, and pain is the thing to shun, and that's the life we should live.
And Socrates said, okay, so you know when you have an itch, and you can't get to it, and you know, when you finally do get to it and scratch it, isn't that just a delicious bliss that runs through your entire body?
And Alcibiades said, well, yeah.
And so Socrates said, so in your definition, the ideal life would be Having a permanent itch that you could permanently scratch.
That, of course, brought the conversation up short, because everyone around the table recognized that that would probably not be the best life in the world in some sort of abstruse manner, and so they had to look for another definition.
One of the things that human beings have the capacity to do it.
In my view, one of the most essential skills in life is choosing between the complexities of short-term benefits and long-term benefits.
So, for instance, We can say that if I am, like I'm 39, and I go to the dentist and I still have my wisdom teeth in, and the dentist says, ooh, I think there's a problem that you might have within sort of a year or so.
It's going to cause you some pain, and the best thing to do is to take your teeth out now, right?
Your wisdom teeth.
And so I might say, well, okay, so I've got another 40 or 50 years to live, so I better have those out, because I don't want to spend 40 or 50 years in pain, so I'll go through the pain And the fear of having my wisdom teeth out now, because it's worth it, right?
The short-term pain versus the long-term gain, we balance it out.
And I mean, there's some subjectivity around this, but in general, we have a fairly good understanding of those benefits.
Like, if you have appendicitis, you go and have the operation, because both the short-term pain is pretty intense, and the long-term pain of being dead is pretty intense too, so we go and have the operation.
But in other areas, such as dental work, where we are having a lot more preventative operations, then, you know, that's something that we sort of have to balance.
And it would be fairly logical for me to do that at the moment.
However, let's say that I am, you know, terminally ill, and the doctor says I'm within a couple of days of death, and my good friend, the dentist, comes over and notices that I have a very small cavity developing on one of my teeth, right?
He just, you know, I don't know, leans in to kiss me on the forehead and notices that because of his expert vision.
Well, you know, for him to say, you know what, you should really, you know, unhook yourself from all of these IVs, wheel yourself over to my, you know, dental office, and I'll fix up that, you know, little cavity lickety split, you know, and I'd sort of say to him, well, the doctor says I have two days to live.
I'm I don't really think that the cost-benefit is worth it, right?
I mean, because this is something that in a couple of months, six to twelve months, might develop into a cavity.
But there's simply no possibility that I'm going to be alive in that time.
So let's not take your approach, right?
So the cost-benefit analysis changes throughout your life, right?
Depending on a wide variety of circumstances.
We've been talking about this.
I was talking about this with my boss in regards to my brother, right?
has not developed really practical skills in the workplace, but has a lifestyle that, you know, consumes a good chunk of money.
And so, you know, as my boss was sort of saying, it's like, well, you know, he could just go become a lawyer, right?
And that's certainly true, but the value of becoming a lawyer when you're in your 40s versus the value of becoming a lawyer in your 20s is quite a bit different, right?
I mean, the pain is higher because you have to support a family.
He's got two kids.
He has to support a family.
And so taking a couple of years off to go to school and then, you know, articling and working 80-hour weeks and competing with people, you know, more than about 20 years his junior is, you know, the cost benefits are quite different in that kind of situation.
Choosing between the complexities of long- and short-term benefits is very, very central to the question of motivation and what it is to have free will and what it is to choose.
And that's why knowledge is so important.
So if you really don't have any idea what is the long-term benefits, right?
So if I don't have any idea that going to the dentist is going to benefit me in the long run because it's going to reduce toothache or losing teeth or whatever, then going to the dentist would just be masochistic, right?
If I had absolutely no idea that there was a benefit to it, then going to the dentist would just be sort of masochistic.
Similarly, for me, getting up and going to listen to somebody drone along in ancient Greek would be somewhat non-beneficial on a Sunday morning, unless I happen to be a member of the Greek Orthodox religion.
and believe that that is going to save my soul after death, or, you know, at least give me social acceptance, or, you know, make my kids respect me, or, you know, not be gossiped about in the community or something, then, you know, for me, I'm just not going to go and do something like that.
It would be purely masochistic.
That's why, you know, in religious and other sort of areas, they have to portray this long-term benefit as spectacularly good and, of course, perfectly unverifiable.
Like, you go to heaven or you go to hell.
So that's another aspect of free will.
Why is it that people make choices?
It's because they are convinced as to the long-term and short-term benefits of various things.
So I will put money away for my retirement Because the need to work when you're 80 is probably not something that we want to be faced with.
But I'm not going to put all of my money away for retirement and just live on bread and water at the moment.
Because I might not make it to 90.
I might not make it to 80.
I might not even make it to retirement.
So you kind of have to balance all of these pluses and minuses.
And so one of the things that is so important in this examination of something like free will, and why I think it's so important to use things like the argument for morality, which I've been talking about for quite some time, is because we do want to help people to understand the long-term consequences of the short-term political decisions that they're making at the moment.
So, for instance, you know, we say to people, sure, you think the welfare state helps people, and it probably does help people in the short run, a small subsection of people, and it certainly helps the bureaucrats who get paid for managing it, but it really doesn't help society in the long run, and, you know, here's why.
And that's sort of the argument from effect.
And so that's something else that's very important to sort of understand when we're communicating about truth, that what we're trying to do by convincing people of the value of a sort of particular rational approach to truth or to philosophy or even to economics or morality or politics or whatever you want, is we're trying to give them knowledge which they did not have before.
And what that knowledge does is it increases their capacity to make choices.
So if we invent penicillin and we hand it out to doctors, we are increasing their capacity to make choices in the treatment.
You know, they don't have to amputate an infected leg.
They can treat it with penicillin, right?
So we are increasing the choices available to them, so we have to come up with a benefit, and we also have to communicate it in terms that they understand in the balance of self-interest between short-term and long-term benefits.
And that's something that is very important, and I think is compatible with the compatibilist approach to free will.
So, for instance, I mean, I put out these things like, you know, advertisers advertise and therefore they must be attempting to get us to alter our decisions, and that is an example of free will.
And, you know, somebody wrote back and said, you know, quite the opposite, right?
That it's not an example It's an example of determinism, right?
That people respond to particular incentives and people will always try and play off those.
And that advertisements are always kind of the same, right?
They're always trying to say, well, this is going to benefit you more than it's going to cost you.
And therefore, since people are attracted to benefits rather than to costs, that it's sort of deterministic.
And I mean, obviously, I agree with that.
I mean, and the person who wrote back also said that there are sales training courses, which all have pretty much the similar things in common, right?
That you want to present whatever it is that you're selling as a net benefit to the person and not, you know, you don't go out and say, look, I really need to make my quota this month, so please buy my software or my service.
And you actually try and appeal to their self-interest and so on.
And I mean, of course, I fully agree with that.
That's exactly what you have to do when you're selling, right?
You have to put yourself in the other person's shoes, figure out what makes them tick, what they're going to respond to, what makes them excited or happy, and you convince them that you will provide that.
And of course, if you're an honorable business person and want repeat business, you actually then sort of deliver it.
So when you look at advertisements, they are, of course, Talking about exactly that, like there's that Buckley's commercial, and if you've ever had it, it really is like a sneeze from Satan to actually take that stuff.
It really is vile.
You know, and of course they say it tastes terrible and it works, but it works.
And so they're saying, yes, there's a short-term pain in that this cough mixture or sore throat mixture tastes absolutely horrible, but it works.
So they're saying that the implication is that if it tastes good, it's not going to work.
you should really go with our stuff because we haven't put all this weird stuff in to just make it taste better.
We're just going to the core.
Maybe it's cheaper or it's some faster acting, but, you know, it works better than the stuff that tastes good.
So, of course, you are absolutely appealing to people's self-interest.
And this works, you know, at two levels, right?
I mean, you can appeal to their genuine self-interest and you can appeal to their vanity.
And, of course, if you have received, as most people do in your mailbox, advertisements from gyms sort of saying, your New Year's resolution should be to get fit, right?
Then they always say two things, right?
They say, get fit, look great.
I mean, those are the two sort of aspects to the benefits that they're providing to you.
And, you know, it's sort of...
artificial and probably shallow of me to divide this into sort of true and not true or deep and shallow because it's important to look good.
I mean, you want to look good for your spouse.
You want to look good at work.
You want to sort of be healthy.
You don't want to be overweight if you can avoid it, not just because of the health issues, but also because practical issues like climbing stairs and also attractive issues like people are going to make judgments about you and your wife might not find you as attractive.
You know, all those things.
So looking good is important.
I'd rather be healthy than look good, but it's sort of better to have the both.
So in that sense they're appealing to your long-term interest.
You will be healthy, you'll live longer, you'll have more energy, and so on.
But they're also appealing to your short-term interest.
You know, like if you take yoga, you'll have a great butt, and that will make you a really great person.
And, you know, I can tell you that that's true.
No, I'm kidding.
I can tell you that that's true in terms of when I took yoga and noticed it.
So, to leave the exciting world of yoga butts and return back to the philosophical argument, or the philosophical position that I'm sort of putting forward, in my sort of view, and again, I know that I sort of have a bend towards science, and I'm not going to say that all of this stuff is provable, and I'm going to start at a metaphorical level and then try and hone it in a little bit more so logistically, but if you look at something like free will, I don't view this as a constant state throughout life.
And that is, to me, just empirical, right?
So when you're young, you can choose to, you know, do a sort of large number of things, and the cost-benefit is great.
Like, you can choose to be a lawyer, a painter, a doctor, whatever it is you want.
When you're 80, your options have somewhat diminished, right?
And this is also true if you think of athletics, right?
With your athletic ability or your physical strength.
Let's just talk about athletic ability.
So, when you're a baby, your athletic ability is somewhat diminished by the fact that you kind of work your arms and legs like big cranes and can't figure out exactly how to make them work.
And, you know, you can barely walk, and so, you know, your capacity to be, say, a hockey player is probably not that great.
Plus, they don't really make those tiny skates, although they should, because they'd be very cute.
Now, as you get older, you gain some sort of more control over your body, and you have the capacity to do finer, more coordinated actions, and you can learn, and you can become a much better hockey player, let's say.
And then, in your teens and in your twenties, you're sort of at your peak, And then you sort of become a little less strong in your 30s, and then usually by your late 30s or early 40s, you're certainly down at a professional level, and you can continue to play for quite some time.
And then probably in your 70s or 80s, you know, your capacity to be a good hockey player is pretty much diminished.
And, you know, this is also true in terms... it's dependent, right?
I mean, if you never learn, you're never a good hockey player.
But if you put the effort in to learn, you have a sort of... it's like a bell curve, right?
And then you diminish in terms of your capacity to be effective at a particular sport.
And if you look at your health, you know, that's also, to some degree, follows the same pattern.
To a lesser degree, but to some degree.
So when you're a kid, right, your immune system is pretty raw, and you haven't been exposed to all the bugs on the planet.
So, you know, you sort of start off fairly unhealthy, right?
You go through all these childhood ailments and so on.
And then when you get into your teens, you're, you know, pretty healthy.
And, you know, I just remember when I was a teenager, you could eat whatever you wanted.
You didn't have to work out.
You could just, you know, you just He had this sort of great life where you just sort of had this conveyor belt and could burn off anything, and you had all the energy in the world.
And then when you get into your 20s and your 30s, that sort of diminishes to some degree, and as you get older, so you have this sort of peak of health, right?
And then it diminishes.
And we're just talking in general, right?
There's lots you can do to change it, but you can't change the overall pattern.
Right, so as you get into your 70s and 80s your health is going to diminish, sort of regardless of what you do, right?
There's just no way you're going to be able to bench press at 80 what you could do at 20.
at 80 what you could do at 20.
And so that's sort of waxing and waning of vitality, of health, of abilities, is something that's quite important in the physical body.
And similarly, of course, health, as a sort of abstract principle, tends to increase and then diminish over life.
And it's my particular view that free will follows this same pattern.
And, you know, feel free to start typing me the emails debunking this now, because it's not a position that I've ever heard of before.
So, you know, let's say that there's a vague possibility that there's something wrong with it, but this is still sort of what I've experienced in my life and what I see in the people around me.
And this is maybe a perspective that you get when you're So, let's take two Greek girls, say, as a possibility of a template.
people have made and the decisions that they've made and the results of those.
So let's take two Greek girls, say, as a possibility of a template.
We'll call one of them Beth and one of them Jane, because the Greek parents had English fetishes, let's say.
Now let's just say that they both have similar degrees of ability, that are both smart girls, and Beth doesn't really do much to exercise for potential.
So, let's say she goes through school, she gets a job, maybe she even gets a university degree, she gets a job, but she's just not particularly ambitious.
She doesn't want to do that much, and, you know, she changes jobs a lot, and then she'll take six months off to go and pick grapes in Queensland, or, you know, then she'll take another year off to go and tour around the world, and, you know, she has lots of fun, I mean, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, everybody can, you know, fry their fish in whichever way they want, because life is about personal choice.
But uh... you know later on in life what happens?
Well she's got a real spotty job record and uh... she has uh... no particularly developed skills like she's she's tamped and she's waitressed and she's done house painting and she's tried to you know create her own jewelry business as all these people sort of inevitably seem to want to do and you know she sews her own dresses and you know people think that they're cool so she's always entertaining ambitions of starting her own label or making her own Handbags and this sort of stuff.
So, that's sort of Beth.
Now Jane, on the other hand, takes a bit more of a methodological approach.
Methodical!
There you go.
And the other word too.
methodical approach to her life.
And she, you know, goes to school to become a doctor.
And she goes through, you know, pre-med and med.
And then she goes through all of the apprenticeship that's involved in the medical field.
And, you know, she eventually becomes a doctor.
And, you know, so basically her 20s are learning how to be a doctor.
And then after that, she has, you know, specific skills and a good income and this and that and the other.
And, you know, so both of these women have made choices, and And when Beth was young and, you know, freewheeling around Europe with a bunch of drunken Australians in a Humvee, she was having fun, right?
She had a lot of freedom, right?
She didn't have to get up and go to school.
She did whatever, right?
So she took her freedom in her twenties, let's just say.
She took her freedom in her twenties and she went off and did all of these things.
So she took the short-term gain And there's nothing wrong with that, it's perfectly valid, you know, absolutely logical choice for certain personality types.
And at the same time, Jane was, you know, beavering away at school and, you know, didn't get to go, you know, rolling around Europe with drunken Australians, but instead, you know, had to stay up late studying and so on.
So, Jane didn't take her freedom, in a sense, in her twenties, but instead worked very hard and, you know, her choice was to sacrifice the short-term gain for the sake of long-term gain.
Now, of course, if they both get wiped out by a meteor when they're 30, then we could probably say that Beth made the better choice, right?
You know, live fast, die young kind of thing.
However, if they both live to 80, then you could say, to some degree, objectively, that Jane made the better choice.
Because, you know, she spent 10 years getting herself into a great career, and then after that she was able to You know, have a great job, and she had lots of money, and then of course she had more freedom later in life, right?
So she made lots of money, and then if she wanted to, she could take six months off and go and find those drunken Australians when she was a little bit older and come back and still know that she was going to be in demand.
You know, and if we look at, say, the last 20 years of their life, right, from 65 to 85, it's quite likely that Jane, the doctor, is going to have a lot more freedom, a lot more choices, because she's got, you know, she's got money and she can do whatever she wants, and whereas Beth is going to be, you know, kind of broke and not have any money.
So, you know, in that sense, right, the bell curve that you can take in terms of freedom In terms of the free choices that are available to you, it has different shapes in different lives, to different degrees.
So, you know, in this sort of example, Beth's sort of bell curve bulges pretty early, right, of choices, of the free choices that are available to her.
So she exercises a lot of preferential choices, of sort of pain-pleasure choices on the pleasure side early in life, which robs her, in a sense, it's not exactly robbing, but they often feel that way later on in life, it sort of robs her of the free choices or the capacity to exercise free will later on in life.
You can't sort of go back and rewrite the past and end up with a great degree and great job skills and experience in your forties when you just didn't do it, right?
And whereas Jane, her bell curve of freedom or the capacity to exercise free choice bulges later in life, right?
So she's got a much flatter plateau earlier in her life in her twenties and then in her early thirties to mid thirties it sort of starts to peak and then after that she has much more freedom later on in life.
So, I mean, I'm not sort of equating choice with free will, but there is a relationship between them.
So, you know, one's choices as an adult are very much related.
One's capacity to exercise freedom, to exercise one's free will, is very much related to the choices that you have made earlier in life.
So, to take a sort of another example, Let's say that Christina lives and dies to run marathons.
Okay, it's a stretch, but let's go there, right?
So Christina loves getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning and going out and pounding the pavement in her bathrobe to train herself to become an expert long-distance runner.
Okay, my mind's still blown, but let's just say that this is the case.
I still have bite marks on my arm from when I first tried to get Christina to come to the gym.
She certainly does seem to exercise, not wanting to exercise.
And let's say that I'm not at all interested in becoming a marathon runner, and when she's out there pounding through the slush at five o'clock in the morning, You know, I'm lying cozy in bed, toasty warm and dreaming of muffins.
And then, of course, she is free to run marathons, right?
She has the freedom, she has the free capacity to go and run marathons, whereas me, not so much, right?
I mean, if I try to run a marathon, I sort of go, you know, probably six miles and then Need quite a bit of CPR and possibly some sort of defibrillator right there on the sidewalk.
So one's freedom to exercise, one's free choice to run a marathon is dependent upon, of course, years of training.
Years of training to run a marathon.
I mean, a friend of mine, his wife ran the Boston Marathon after 10 years of training for it, and she spent six months preparing for it.
And even then, she said, I finished, and I finished in a fairly decent time, in the top quarter.
And even though I trained for so long, I basically had to crawl up the stairs.
We were sort of staying at this bed and breakfast and we had a room upstairs.
I actually had to go up the stairs on my hands and knees because my legs were so tired.
So, you know, even if you train for it, it's not always that easy.
And this, of course, ties back into what I was saying earlier about health.
That health is both a state and a process, and the state results in one's conscious understanding of the effects of choices throughout time.
So if I consciously dig in to try and find out the truth about healthy versus unhealthy behaviors, then I can choose the healthy behaviors over the unhealthy behaviors, which is a process that results in continued maintenance or Actually, achievement of good health.
And so similarly, if I accurately try to understand the ways in which I can maximize my capacity to choose to exercise my free will throughout my life, then I can start to take those steps which are necessary to be able to achieve that.
In other words, I can choose to sacrifice my freedom in the present, to sacrifice my My choice is the exercise of choices in the present for the sake of greater freedom later, which is something I'm not going to do when I'm 90.
I'm not going to go and start trying to train for a marathon when I'm 90 because it's really sort of pointless.
But you know when I'm 18 or 19 or 20 or 30 or I can do those things and you know that could be something that I would choose to do.
So in this formulation free will is a process and a state, right?
So at any particular time you can say is someone capable of exercising their free will.
And it is something that results from a whole series of choices all the way back through one's life.
And it involves a strong recognition or processing, an accurate processing of one's short-term benefits versus one's long-term benefits and the accurate weighing of one's capacity to choose between those and to accurately gauge the effects of each one upon yourself.
And that really translates into the fact that we are free to choose our own actions to some degree.
I mean, this again waxes and wanes over life, but we're not really free to choose the effects of those actions.
So, for instance, I'm free to choose and sit down and do this podcast But I'm not free to choose how this podcast is received in the libertarian community, and I'm certainly not free to choose how you're going to respond to it.
I'm free to choose to be a libertarian philosopher, but I'm not free to choose to be a very popular media figure who everybody looks to for advice.
You know, given the state of the culture at the moment, that would sort of make sense.
But what I think is valuable about this kind of communication, and why I think that the conversation that we're all engaged in is so powerful and so important, is in my particular view, and I've talked about this in terms of religious people, in my particular view, until somebody points out what is possible to people, they really don't have a choice in the matter.
So if all you've ever heard is that, you know, capitalists are evil and the government saves everybody, and all you've ever been presented with is examples of that and so on, then it is really asking a lot of people to conceive the exact opposite.
Right?
So it's sort of like saying to doctors that, you know, Openicillin actually kills people and what you want to do is apply leeches again.
I mean, they're just not going to really be able to make much sense out of that.
So I think what we need to do is to communicate as much as possible to people, because what we do is we open up a possibility to them.
So we're like the people who are sort of figuring out that smoking is bad for you, and, you know, we've sort of figured that out through our analysis of politics and economics and philosophy.
And therefore we're trying to communicate to people that smoking is bad for them, so they have a real choice to quit, right?
Because what we're doing is we're putting a weight on the long-term pain of smoking, i.e.
of state power, of compulsion, and this kind of stuff.
And we're saying that you can't make your decisions just based on short-term gain, right?
Like, it's real nice to smoke, or, you know, if you like to smoke, it's real nice to smoke.
But you have to take into account the long-term pain, and it's one particular way of adjusting social opinion.
Because if everybody just focuses on the short-term gain and has no concept of the long-term pain, Then, for sure, people are going to be very, very likely to pursue short-term gain.
And, of course, a number of people who wrote to me said things like, you know, economics and, you know, the sort of study of memes, of sort of the spread of ideas.
All have particular characteristics, as does advertising.
One of the principle rules of economics is that people respond to incentives.
If you cut the price, people will buy more.
If you give them a coupon, people will buy more.
If you give them two-for-one, people will buy more.
And, of course, that's very true.
Now, what does that have to do with free will?
Well, of course, you can't predict the degree to which people will respond to incentives.
You could say that if you sell a Maserati for a dollar, that just about everyone will pick one up.
But of course, you can't predict exactly how many people, and it certainly won't be everyone, right?
Because there'll be some people who are monks, or who've taken a vow of poverty, or, you know, were locked in the trunk of a Maserati for two weeks and never want to see another one again, no matter how cheap it is, who just won't come and do it.
And so, because there's this level of complexity in people's processing, of costs and benefits.
It's impossible to predict in advance to what degree and in what manner and how many people would respond to particular incentives.
It's certainly true in general that people respond to incentives, but that's not always the case.
It certainly is true in general that exercise will help people become more healthy, but it's certainly not true that exercise will help someone with a congenital heart defect become more healthy, you know, without that defect first being repaired.
It's true that weightlifting in general is very good for you, but if you have very brittle bones or osteoporosis or you're under the age of 16, it's not very good for you.
In fact, it's bad for you.
These sort of general principles are very important, but all it says is that people prefer pleasure to pain.
And the fact that we are biological organisms with pleasure and pain centers is obviously very important.
The goal of life is happiness.
Right?
Not economic efficiency or any of the other stuff which is occasionally argued for in libertarian circles.
The goal of life is not even to be good, right?
The goal of life is to be happy.
It's just that in my particular formulation, and certainly not just mine, virtuous is the way to achieve happiness and there's no other way to do it.
So that's sort of what you want to take your focus on.
So it certainly is true human beings respond to incentives and that they generally prefer maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain And that's why it's so important to communicate the long-term consequences of things like state programs and coercion, so that people can recognize that the long-term pain needs to be balanced with the short-term gain.
And so that's sort of one approach of helping people to open up possibilities within their lives and give them choices or make those choices valuable that weren't before.
So for instance, as I mentioned before, I don't take heroin because I think heroin is probably really good and really fun and I don't want to get addicted and you know this and that.
So, for me, the short-term gain of taking heroin, which I imagine is wonderful, is balanced by the long-term pain of, you know, a life lived in the gutter.
So, you know, that's why I don't take it.
Now, if heroin was, you know, legal and non-addictive, and you could sort of just take it once, and you'd never want it again, but you'd have this great experience, it would be somewhat tough to say, yeah, well, I'm just not going to do it, because I don't like pleasure.
So, you know, at the moment everybody thinks that the heroine of state violence is sort of cost-free, that there's no addiction, no hangover, no crash, no destruction.
And so for us to sort of point out that is going to open up to them a way of balancing that pleasure-pain principle to give them new capacities for choice.
to alter what free will means to them, because to balance pleasure and pain is one of the aspects of free will, and it's a somewhat subjective aspect.
But if there is no sense of pain at all in the long run, then people are always going to choose short-run pleasure.
Well, not always.
Almost always.
Now, of course, what I'm talking about here is somewhat specific to the argument from effect, which is not what I say is the primary purpose to getting people to change their minds about what is meant by the good, right?
Because I'm saying that the consequences of state violence are problematic.
But, of course, I've argued very strongly against the argument from effect as an effective way of changing people's minds.
And the reason for that is just that, you know, people aren't going to sacrifice their short-term material gain for potential and abstract possible losses, you know, tens or decades of years down in the future.
So that's why I focus so much on the argument for morality.
Because the argument for morality really, really brings short-term pain to bear on people.
Now just as, you know, you think that I'm spiraling into some sort of sadistic fantasy camp of inflicting pain, I really am sort of serious about this in that it is a very powerful way of bringing the immediate pain of hypocrisy to bear on people who are claiming to be moral.
And, you know, because the real problem And so when you point out to someone that what they consider to be moral is in fact immoral, you cause great pain in them, which is sort of why they become irritated and angry at you and treat you as an aggressor.
And so what it does is instead of saying to a Christian, well, if you teach your children religious principles, they might be unhappy decades down the road, And they might not have as fulfilling a life as they could have if you taught them more rational principles.
They're going to be like, yeah, well, that's fine.
But who cares, right?
Right now I sort of have to get my kid to church, otherwise my neighbors are going to talk all about me, and I'm going to get disowned by my parents, and the priest is going to come down on me, and I'm going to feel like crap.
So you simply can't get people to change their minds about moral things from the argument from effect.
The effect is so far down the road and so diffused, and the pain of non-compliance with social conformity in the present is so high, right?
So I certainly, in the whole approach from the argument for morality, I completely accept that human beings have specific motivators that are more powerful than others, and that obviously is An argument against a sort of pure and unfettered free will.
So I think in that sense, where, you know, the people who've written to disagree with me and I, we're probably a lot closer than we think.
But what I want to do is to bring the pain of hypocrisy to bear on people immediately.
Right?
And that is a very powerful pain to bring to bear on people.
And it's not because I'm sadistic.
Right?
It's just because I enjoy people's suffering.
No, wait.
Hang on.
Let me pause and come up with the right way to justify my desire to help people.
Well, it's because, you know, I think as a moralist or as a philosopher, I want people to be happy, and if I see them pursuing things for the sake of social acceptance, it isn't going to make them happy.
Then I do want to sort of point out to them that their hypocrisy is real, and it should not remain untreated, right?
So if you see somebody who has a terrible infection, and the way that they're treating it is to take a lot of morphine, right, you'd probably say to them, and they say, no, no, my leg is perfectly healthy, or whatever, you'd probably want to say to them, no, look, your leg is not healthy, And you'd need to sort of frighten them in terms of the consequences to get them to get to a hospital, right?
But if you sort of say, well, that's fine, but you know, it's possible that a couple of years down the road your leg might be less effective than it is now, you're not really going to have... you sort of need to bring the contradictions that they are maybe not aware of to the surface so they can sort of panic and change.
I mean, I know it sounds a little bit like radical shock therapy, But I'm allowed to do that because I'm a philosopher and I'm not a psychologist like my wife, so I don't have to be that nice to people.
So, you know, that is sort of one of the things that the argument for morality brings to bear on people, right?
So that they say, I'm a good person and I'm good because of X, Y, and Z, and you point out that by their own definition they're not good, then you bring the sort of pain of hypocrisy to bear and you get to find out if they're really interested in being good or they're only interested in social conformity.
And that's a very important thing to bring to bear on people, because it gives them the capacity to make choices.
So what I'm saying is that if you bring short-term pain to people through the argument from morality, then you really are doing them an enormous service, because you are bringing short-term pain to bear on them, which gives them the capacity to make choices based on accurate information, rather than to continue in this sort of dream world of self-justification that's completely irrational.
So that's sort of one of the reasons that I suggest taking a more immediate approach to people's ethical choices, and a critique of their ethical choices, rather than letting them sort of continue in a fog or a haze.
So to take an example from my own life, as I've mentioned before, I used to see my mother every week for lunch, or we'd go out for brunch on the weekends or whatever, and I hated it.
I hated it every time.
It was sort of like being clubbed with a bag full of past horror for a couple of hours.
And, you know, it was pretty awful, but what I did was I convinced myself that it was the right or good or moral thing to do, so I kind of steeled myself to do it.
And, you know, once I sort of recognized and really felt the pain that was going on for me in those sort of meetings with Crazy Mom, I sort of stopped drugging myself with sort of moral justifications and began to actually sort of feel the experience of what was going on.
And once I felt that, then That pain allowed me to make different decisions.
So I accepted the pain that was going on for me both in the past and in having my lunch with my mom.
That opened up for me the possibility of acting differently.
Because if I'm not feeling the pain, right, this is why pain is so essential in life, if I'm not feeling the pain, I'm not going to be provoked into making different decisions.
So if I have a belief called, you know, irrationality is a virtue, then, you know, like religion or whatever, if I say that God exists and belief in God is what is moral, and that is true and good and I'm very interested in virtue, then if somebody points out that it's not virtuous to believe in God, And it's not healthy to believe in God, then it's going to hurt, but at least then I have a choice that I didn't have before.
And so I think that you can provoke free will through pain.
I guess that's the only blunt way of putting it, right?
And certainly as libertarians who argue with people, we know that they never sort of burst out in song and throw their arms around us and thank us for opening their eyes.
No, they get irritated generally.
and frustrated and usually quite angry.
But that's sort of natural, right?
I mean, that's the process, right?
A doctor generally makes you feel worse before he makes you feel better, right?
A surgeon is going to cut into you, which normally would be a criminal act of violence, in order to make you better.
A dentist is going to make you feel worse before you feel better.
And, of course, a psychologist is going to do the same thing.
So, you know, that's all perfectly natural, right?
If we don't accept pain, then we don't actually really have choices, because we can't accurately balance short-term and long-term gains and losses, pleasures and pains.
So, I think that it's certainly true that human beings respond to incentives, but we need to give them accurate incentives.
You know, the fact of the matter is, if you do take heroin, you are very likely to get addicted and to ruin your whole life.
And if you don't have that knowledge, then heroin looks a whole lot more attractive, and you can't make an informed and accurate decision if you don't know the consequences.
So, you know, when I talk about the argument for morality and the need to approach people in that way, I'm absolutely talking about inflicting pain on them in the short run.
But it's a very real pain, and it's a pain that they're feeling anyway.
They're just kind of drugging themselves with some abstract morality that doesn't make any sense.
And so you need to sort of expose the pain that they're going through.
You know, I mean, I've known psychologists who do exactly this with their patients, right?
Their patients come in thinking, yeah, things are pretty good with my family.
I'm just I'm just kind of depressed and I don't know why.
And, you know, then the psychologists will start pulling apart the threads and find, you know, that their home life is a complete nightmare and they just justify everything.
And they feel like hell.
I mean, they just feel like hell.
You know, they're sobbing, they're agonized.
They just it's a nightmare for them.
And, you know, the therapists just sort of rub their hands and go, ka-ching!
No wait, it's not quite exactly that.
They, you know, they sort of say, yes, you know, you need to experience this pain because otherwise you won't be able to change.
We also know this about people who are alcoholics or drug addicts that generally, you know, the way that they change is they hit bottom, right?
So they sort of try and juggle everything and then once they've lost their job and they've lost their I know this has been quite a long and discursive ramble to some degree, and I'm sorry that it's not more precise.
kidneys on eBay for their next drink, you know, at some point they're going to hit bottom and then the pleasure brain principle is going to kick in and then are going to recognize that the short term, even the short term benefits are diminishing, so they're going to start to change.
So I know this has been quite a long and discursive ramble to some degree, and I'm sorry that it's not more precise than, it's not as precise as I'd like to be, but I'm dealing with sort of quite a lot of synthesizing of a number of aspects of free will.
But so, sort of basically, free will, I certainly agree with some of the materialists or the determinists who say that we are constrained by nature, and, you know, human beings have a pleasure-pain principle, which we, you know, completely respond to, and that, you know, we're not free to invent our pleasure-pain principle to, you know, to completely reverse it.
And so we're not, we don't have complete free will, and absolutely, I fully accept that.
There is an aspect of determinism, and the way that we gain the maximum amount of choice, of actually exercisable free will, is to have an accurate perception of reality so that we can truthfully and honestly and accurately assess the costs and benefits of various decisions.
And the whole purpose of propaganda is to pretend that There is only a benefit and no cost to particular courses of action, right?
So, you know, people who like the welfare state or public schools, they say, yeah, there are a couple of problems, but there's no other way to do it.
And this is the best way, and this is the only way that is moral.
The only way to help the poor is through government programs.
The only way to protect the population from invasion is to tax them and force them to support the military and perhaps be drafted.
And, you know, the only way for the poor to be, for the sick to be taken care of is through socialized medicine.
And there's no real costs.
Yeah, okay, you get taxed or whatever, but the costs are pretty minor.
Because they portray it as sort of an absolute both moral and pragmatic argument, which is completely false.
And we are opposing that completely by saying not only is there the long-term pain of sort of social collapse and, you know, economic civil war and, you know, corrupted politicians and the whole corrupted political process, but you, sir, who are advocating this particular position, I'm actually going to expose in you and make you feel the short-term pain of your own hypocrisy because you have not examined these beliefs that you're portraying as absolutes.
And that really is what the Socratic method is all about.
It inflicts a lot of pain on people because it reveals That they don't know, in fact, what they claim to know for a certainty.
It's very painful for people, but it does allow them to look down a different path that they didn't know before.
And that's sort of what I think the purpose of philosophy is.
To point out the shortcomings in people's thinking, and of course I appreciate when people do that for me as well, So that it opens up choices for them before which they didn't exist.
So we're working to chisel and widen the concept of free will by giving people choices and appealing to their short and long term processing of gains and losses so that they can live a new kind of life and have new kind of ideas and hopefully, and I certainly believe this to be true, be far happier in the long run.
So I hope this has cleared up some of my thoughts about free will.
And again, I'm not sure.
I might write an article about this, but I'm not sure where I'd get it published.
But that's sort of my approach to it.
And of course, feel free to rain your corrections upon me, because this is a complex topic.
And, you know, I certainly retract my earlier statement of not really understanding why people found it so complex.
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