By Daniel Hughes.

Since the dawn of mankind, humanity has been plagued by a singular evil, freedom. For centuries this false belief has been necessary to accept as part of our identity, indeed freedom was something so overwhelmingly obvious and immediate that few sought to question it. Freedom became the rock upon which society was built, the assumption that our actions were determined not by external forces or rules but rather by some intangible power of will that each of us possessed became the foundations of morality. The very idea of good and bad, right and wrong requires freedom; in the words of Immanuel Kant, “ought implies can”, there can only be moral imperatives about things that are possible to do.

Let’s consider the implications of removing free will from this moral equation;

1. The moral judgment that X should not have been done implies that something else should have been done instead.

2. That something else should have been done necessitates that there was something else to do.

3. That there was something else to do, necessitates that something else could have been done.

4. That something else could have been done necessitates that there is free will for one to choose to act otherwise.

5. If there is no free will to have done other than X we cannot make the moral judgment that X should not have been done.

In short, what this means is that we can only make moral judgements about acts where the act in question was done as a result of free choice, i.e. it would have been possible to do something else.

Convinced of the importance of freedom in moral discussion, let us now discuss why freedom is in fact nothing more than an illusion. Interest in determinism is often associated with Newtonian mechanics which depicts a Universe operating to fixed physical laws. The “billiard ball” hypothesis proposes that once the initial conditions of a system, as well as the laws governing the system, are known then all the following states of the system follow logically. The same applies to the Universe, if we know the starting conditions of the Universe and the laws governing the Universe then it would be theoretically possible to compute the state of every point in time and space. The implication of this is obvious; the course of the Universe is immutable and the chain of cause and effect is set. The human mind, although undoubtedly highly complex, is no exception to this; our actions are equally as determined by laws as the motion of a tennis ball acting under the effect of gravity. For many, this is undoubtedly a hard pill to swallow; no one wants to question their core beliefs, so deeply held that they might not even have consciously considered them.

But what are the implications of our newfound servitude to laws beyond our control, you ask? Should we cast away old concepts like morality, justice and responsibility that seem to be based in nothing but unscientific conjecture? Should we take to the streets and start robbing and killing where we please since we could not be held responsible for these such acts in a deterministic Universe? The answer is, perhaps, no. Sometimes it is better for our acts and motives to not be in accordance with fact, sometimes it is better to hide behind the veil of ignorance content in a naïve belief in freedom. Perhaps that belief might be naïve, but it is also necessary not only for the maintained function of society but also to keep us from falling into the endless rabbit hole that is our part as but a small cog in the deterministic cosmic machine that is our Universe.