Ideas Matter: Free Will, Bias, and Social Justice

The problem of free will has—you’ll pardon the expression—bedeviled philosophers and theologians for centuries. If God foreknows our actions and choices, then in what sense can they be free? But if our actions are predetermined, then why should we be condemned for what we can’t avoid doing? Since the Reformation and Enlightenment, many have concluded that we don’t have free will. However, free will and its denial have implications for human justice as well, which means they crop up as hidden assumptions in political theories and debates. Why is this a problem?

No Free Will = No Choice

“You don’t have free will, but don’t worry.” The title of the YouTube video, hosted by Sabine Hossenfelder, ought to illustrate the central problem of arguments against free will: If I have no free will, I have no choice whether I worry about it or not. Likewise, Hossenfelder has no choice but to blither on for just over 11 minutes trying to get us not only to accept that we have no free will but to feel okay with that conclusion. She is, as much as I am, a puppet of genetic, environmental, and social forces beyond our control.

Commented The Apologist Who Must Not Be Named, on whose Facebook feed I found the video, “Closely reasoned arguments against free will always crack me up.” As well they should. By denying free will, you deny that reason as such had anything to do with your conclusion. You can’t choose your grounds for belief or disbelief any more than you can choose the atomic weight of yttrium or the value of pi. You can’t change your socks of your own volition, let alone change your mind. You’re a puppet trying to persuade other puppets that they’re puppets. Now that’s absurd.

People can make very persuasive cases against free will, just as Zeno of Elea made a very persuasive argument that Achilles couldn’t beat a tortoise in a footrace. It’s only when you consider the enormity of the claim—that nothing you think, say, do, or desire is your choice—that you begin to see the zipper in the back of the monster suit. They’ve unwittingly given up any claim to have based their position on reason because they’ve sacrificed reason itself. They’ve forgotten that what must be true of everybody must be true of themselves as well.

There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis—incommensurable with the others—and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 91)

Free Will and Moral Agency

Here’s the problem: All human justice, with perhaps the exception of distributive justice, hinges on the question of agency. Not just Did the person do this? but also Was the person capable of not doing it, or doing something else? Insanity, diminished capacity, informed consent, the age of majority, rape, coercion, and extortion are representative issues of the role one’s freedom to choose among alternatives plays. The law presumes free will; it remains for the accused to show that their actions were forced by either circumstance or psychology.

If there’s no free will, however, there’s no agency. The individual, having no choice or control over their behavior, can’t be responsible for that behavior when it causes insult or injury. The accused is just one more link in a causal chain theoretically stretching back to the Big Bang, no more accountable for the damage they do than is a tornado or an earthquake. Justice, under these circumstances, isn’t merely impossible—it’s irrelevant. Denying free will lets us off the hook for everything, whether it’s genocide or jaywalking.

If free will is an illusion, then so is moral superiority. If we have no control over our thoughts, then evaluative terms such as right and wrong, true and false, moral and immoral are so many irrelevant abstractions. The saint is no more responsible for his saintliness than the serial killer is for his murderousness. The social reformers’ idea of justice is a product of their genetics and social environment, not of superior intelligence or insight. They literally can’t help thinking their beliefs are superior. Denying free will not only denies us blame for our mistakes but credit for being right.

Who’s Biased?

The cognitive blind spot I mentioned earlier—forgetting that what thinker believes affects everybody must affect the thinker as well—I call the “egotistical exception.” The skeptic questions all beliefs but his own; the cynic questions all motives but his own. The subjectivists unconsciously reserve for themselves the objectivity they deny to others. To the moral relativists, all moral principles are equal, but theirs are more equal than others’. The scientist who deems consciousness an illusion doesn’t wonder how that illusion can allow him to make observations and deductions. They really can’t see how their arguments become self-defeating progressions.

Such is the case with social biases. Bias is a real psychological phenomenon, another aspect of our human fallibility. However, it’s most often brought up in political philosophy and policy debates as a mechanism to deprive an opponent or enemy tribe of any capacity for seeing The World As It Really Is. “Of course you think like that. You belong to Social Group S (which we all know to be not only wrong but morally defective). You can’t not think like that. It’s in Group S’s self-interest to think like that.” Group identity as a mental straitjacket.

The first problem with invoking bias is the problem of subjective parallax: To the biased, fairness can appear biased against them. Bias is meaningful only with reference to a fixed, objective standard of fairness knowable to us all. If the standard is subjective, then the appearance of bias is subjective as well. If the standard is in question, then charges of bias beg the question. If no objective standard exists, or if none of us can know it, then bias is meaningless, a mere synonym for “disagreement.” Who’s biased? Let the tu quoque arguments begin!

Which brings up the second problem: If one person in a particular social group can think or perceive things objectively, without bias distorting their perspective, it’s possible for other people in other social groups as well. The egotistical exemption simply means that “group biases are a problem for everybody but me/us.” But universal truths can’t have exceptions. The problem is one of logical consistency: Nobody can claim objectivity for themselves without implicitly contradicting the notion that biases pose impenetrable barriers to objectivity.

Further Objections

So far, we’ve only touched on subjectivity, which is an issue deserving of its own consideration. However, the subjectivity argument depends on biases being not only omnipresent but overpowering and insuperable. You’re doomed to see things only from the perspective of your social group. Choice and change are not merely restricted; they’re hogtied. The concept of bias, pushed this far, thus becomes a Trojan horse for the denial of free will.

If social-group bias were the insurmountable obstacle some social theories require, there shouldn’t be exceptions. There shouldn’t be white anti-racists or black critics of anti-racism. There should be no feminist critics of intersectionality or Catholic supporters of same-sex marriage. The theorists are then in the embarrassing position of having to account not only for their own singular objectivity but also for the various other rebellions against social bias’s tyrannous rule. It can’t be done with any internal consistency.

Interpose a second group’s bias—the rebels are mental captives of the bad guys—and you weaken the explanatory power of social bias. If one social bias can defeat another, social bias itself can be defeated. And in fact, we’re not members of one and only one demographic bloc, but rather many, each with its own central tendencies and averages. Moreover, we bring into our social groups qualities unique to ourselves, such as genetic makeup, family environment, and experience set, all with their own influences. We’re individuals because we’re more than the sum of our memberships.

If bias explains our opponents’ errors, it also explains our belief that we’re exempt from error. Naturally, you think your group sees everything clearly; so do they. Sure, you think your opponents are blind fools; they think your group is stupid, too. Trying to paint over the logical inconsistency with special pleading and abusive labels merely makes the inconsistency more obvious. Until you show the counterargument is an error, appealing to bias is a genetic fallacy. Once you show that it’s an error, asserting bias is unnecessary. Free will explains error just as well as does bias.

Conclusion

As I said, depriving us of free will deprives us of agency. Depriving us of agency for our thoughts, ideas, and arguments is at the very least smug, patronizing elitism: “Poor dear, you’re not really responsible for your mistakes. It’s that bad old Other Tribe that makes you think like that.” At its worst, it smuggles social-group bigotry into the debate disguised as social psychology. They all think like that because they’re mentally / morally defective. They can’t know the Way the World Really Is. They can’t handle the truth.

Honesty compels us to acknowledge that biases, predispositions, social influences, and other factors can distort our thinking. But we can just as easily make too much of them as too little. If we want agency for our best ideas, we must be agents for our worst ideas as well. Free will implies the freedom to make mistakes—to choose the wrong actions, reactions, assumptions, and principles. To decry injustice is to assert that we can choose to act with justice. If choice is beyond our reach, then so is justice.