Will With Causes

Every decision has a backstory.

Choice is shaped by upbringing, temperament, hormones, fatigue, experience, available information, social pressure and how long it has been since the person ate. Consciousness does not make decisions in a sterile room outside causality.

From this people sometimes conclude that there is no free will at all: the brain produced the action and consciousness composed an explanation afterwards.

Possibly. But practical life does not entirely disappear because of it.

A person is able to:

• consider several options;
• imagine consequences;
• notice his own impulse;
• set rules in advance;
• change the environment;
• learn from the result;
• ask another person to hold him back from a habitual decision.

All these actions have causes too. That does not make them useless.

The argument about free will often mixes two different questions:

Could the person have acted otherwise under absolutely identical conditions?

Is the person able to change the conditions of future decisions?

The first question is hard to answer in a testable way. The answer to the second is clearer: learning, laws, conversations, therapy, habits and punishments exist precisely because behaviour can change under the influence of causes.

Responsibility does not necessarily presuppose a mystical ability to make decisions outside the workings of the world. It can mean that the person is the node of the system through which the choice and the consequences pass.

This makes it possible to take the causes of an act into account and to demand a change of behaviour at the same time.

Someone who grew up in a violent environment did not choose the starting conditions. But that does not grant him the right to harm others. An explanation reduces the mystery. It does not always cancel responsibility.

Inner dialogue does often rationalize a desire that has already appeared. But sometimes it stops it. It is better not to fire consciousness merely because it is not the chief executive. A good quality-control department is useful too.

The practical difference shows up in boring examples. Someone who has decided to spend less may fight the urge to order delivery every evening — and lose about half the time. The same person can set up an automatic transfer of part of his salary to a separate account on the day it arrives. The second decision is made once and with a clear head; the first is made thirty times a month and mostly towards the night. Willpower has not grown by a gram: it has simply been given one task instead of thirty.

Free will, if it lives anywhere, lives not at the moment of choice but before it. By the time the hand reaches for the phone, everything has mostly been decided already — by an earlier decision about what that moment would be like.