St. Thomas Day Lecture: “Free Choice: What It Is Not, and What It Is”

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By Rev. Stephen Brock
University of Chicago
St. Thomas Day Lecture
January 27, 2023

 

As probably some of you know, this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of an important document by Saint John Paul II, the encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor — “The Splendor of Truth.” It is a profound reflection on the moral law, on the place of the moral law in the Christian life, and on certain tendencies in our culture that make the moral law difficult to accept or that distort its significance. One of the encyclical’s main themes is freedom. The very idea of morality presupposes a certain kind of freedom, namely the freedom inherent in the power of choice. If you do not have free choice, then you cannot be held morally responsible for what you do. But nowadays, in fact, even though our culture places a very high value on many kinds of freedom, it has become rather common to hear people denying the very existence of free choice. Indeed, they seem to regard the denial of free choice as a kind of liberation — a liberation precisely from moral responsibility, which is felt to be an imposition, and even a source of strife.

A prominent spokesman for this view today is a very popular speaker named Sam Harris. His lectures on this topic alone have millions of views on YouTube. Mr. Harris argues against many things. I do not know whether he ever argues for anything. But one thing that he argues against is what he calls free will. (As I shall explain later, I prefer to speak of free choice. But we are talking about the same thing, and in this lecture, I use the two expressions interchangeably.)

Now, Harris offers several arguments against free will. I will refer to one of them later in the lecture. But he also argues that we really ought to prefer to believe that free will does not exist. His reason is that, if there is no free will, then no one is to blame for what they do. They cannot help it. And this is comforting, not only because then I cannot be blamed for what I do, but also, less egoistically, because I cannot blame others either. They cannot help what they do. They have no choice. And if I cannot blame them, then I cannot be angry at them or disappointed with them or offended by them. I can be more at peace with people. Belief in free will leads to conflict.

Well, there may be some truth in that. But I would say two things about it. First, if it is true that, without free will, there is no blame, it is also true that there is no praise. To deny free will is to deny responsibility not only for bad things but also for good things. If I cannot be angry with people, neither can I be grateful to them. Those who treat me well do so, not because they choose to do so, but because they cannot help it. In fact, if Aristotle is right, to deny free will is to deny the very possibility of true friendship between people. Being a friend is a matter of choice.

The other thing I would like to say is that it is rather curious of Mr. Harris to be trying to persuade us that it is better to believe that free will does not exist than to believe that it does. He is speaking as though we had some choice about what we believe. I think that we do. But this is not really consistent with what he wants us to believe. In the very course of arguing against free will, he seems to be taking it for granted. Well, perhaps he could respond that if he does go around saying these things, it is because he cannot help it — he is not free to do otherwise.

In any case, I am not at all suggesting that Mr. Harris is in bad faith. I am sure he is sincere. My point is simply that, as Etienne Gilson famously said, what philosophers know as men, they are liable to forget as philosophers. Or, if they do not forget it, they at least get rather confused about it. Free will, in ordinary human life and practice, is perfectly obvious. I believe that this is so true that, in itself, the existence of free will does not need to be argued for. It is too evident, too inescapable, to doubt in any real or practical way. Every time we stop and deliberate about what we are going to do, we are exercising our free will, and we know that we are.

However, this is not to say that there are no philosophical problems about free will. There are many. I cannot possibly address all of them here. But I think a good number of them are results of some confusion. They cast doubt on free will only because they assume one or more mistaken conceptions of it. This is why, in the rest of my talk, I want to do just one thing: to sketch a fairly precise concept of the freedom of the will. I think that if people had the right concept of it, they would be far less likely to deny it. My presentation has two main parts. First, I will go over some things — five of them — that the freedom of the will is not. Second, I will try to convey what I think is the positive core of the concept of free will. I believe that this is, after all, the best way to defend its existence. I will of course be drawing heavily on the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.

 

I. Some things that do not belong to Saint Thomas’s concept of free will or free choice

So here are some things that do not belong to Thomas’s concept of the freedom of the will.

1) First, he does not think the will is free about absolutely everything. By “the will,” I simply mean our capacity to want things that we think are good and to shun things that we think are bad. There is at least one thing, for Thomas, that we simply must want; we cannot help wanting it. We are naturally determined to want it. It is what he calls happiness. To be happy is to have the total good, to have what literally leaves nothing to be desired. There is also something that we simply cannot want, something we necessarily shun. It is the contrary of happiness. He calls it misery.

Now this might seem to constitute a limit or a constraint on the freedom of the will. Would we not be even freer if we were not determined to want or to shun anything? Not in Thomas’s view. He sees the desire for happiness as the very motor that drives free will. It is the master desire. It is what gives us mastery over all our other desires. The desire for total good is what enables us to actively determine ourselves, to decide for ourselves, about any merely partial good. We are free about the partial goods. Without that determination to total good, we would not be free, because we would be merely passive. We would be slaves, driven by the urge of the moment, like beasts. Later in the talk I will go into how the process of self-determination works.

2) A second thing that free will is not, is a power to act at random or for no reason. No doubt we do a lot of things for no reason, on the spur of the moment, on a whim. And in a sense, we do them freely: we are not determined to do them. But we do not really determine ourselves to do them either. We could do so; but instead, we only, as it were, let ourselves do them, passively. Free will is something active. To have free will is to be one’s own master, to be in command.

What does the activity of free will consist in? It consists first and foremost in the act that Thomas calls electio, choice. What is a choice? He gives a very simple formula: to choose is “to take one thing, refusing another.”¹ Later I will look at that formula more closely. My point now is that choices have reasons. We take one thing and refuse another for a definite reason; namely, because the one seems somehow better than the other. To make the choice is to use that reason, to accept it and to apply it to the matter that the choice is about.

I stress this because sometimes the question of free will is in fact treated as if it were about a power of doing things for no reason. The result of treating it this way is that, if it turns out that the things we do for no reason can be explained without appeal to a special power, then there seem to be no grounds for believing in free will. One of the arguments against free will that Sam Harris sometimes invokes is along these lines. He cites an experiment conducted in the 1980’s by a scientist named Benjamin Libet. The experiment became famous, because it seemed to offer proof that the things we think we do freely are really determined by unconscious processes in our brains. I will not go into the details of the experiment, because, as a matter of fact, in recent years other scientists have come to realize that, as evidence about free will, that experiment was poorly conceived.² It took for granted part of the very thing it claimed to show; namely, that the actions whose free performance was in question were caused by those brain processes.

What interests me about that experiment, however, is not that it has been debunked. It is that the experiment had little or no bearing on free will in the first place. The actions that it focused on were things that people did at random, for no reason: things like flexing a finger at irregular intervals, or pressing one button or another, or other quite simple and quite meaningless bodily movements. We can make choices about such things, but usually we do not, because they are too trivial. A scientist should know better than to look for free will, or the lack of it, in such things.

It is because the will is not free about everything, and because people sometimes look for the freedom of will outside the domain of choice, that I generally prefer to speak of free choice or free decision rather than free will. It is what freedom of choice amounts to that interests me.

3) Now, a third negative point, closely connected with the second one, is that acts of free choice are not uncaused acts. Just as they always have reasons, they always have causes — usually a number of them. What is a cause of a thing? It is some other thing on which that thing somehow depends. A human choice depends on many things. One, of course, is the chooser. Also, as I said earlier, it depends on the chooser’s desire for happiness; all our choices are in some way ordered toward happiness. Our choices depend as well on the reasons for them. And the reasons themselves depend on many factors; those factors too are causes of the choices. For instance, perhaps you choose to stop studying and get a pizza, because you are hungry. Your hunger makes eating a pizza seem better, in a way, than studying. You may choose this pizzeria over that because of advice given to you. The hunger and the advice are causes of your choices.

That choices have causes is not incompatible with their being free. What is incompatible with their being free is their being determined by their causes. A thing is determined by its causes if its causes make its being as it is necessary; or in other words, if they make its not being as it is impossible. You choose to eat because you are hungry. Does this mean that your being hungry makes your not choosing to eat impossible? Obviously not. In fact, you might choose not to eat, precisely because you are hungry. You might do so as a penance, or just to prove that you can. The power of free choice, if it exists, is a power to determine one’s own desires and actions. A choice just is such a determination, one made by the person who chooses. If it were determined by its causes, it would not really be a choice at all. You cannot decide what is already decided.

4) Fourthly: If the freedom of our choices is not incompatible with their having causes, neither is it incompatible with a good deal of general predictability in them. By this I mean predictability in the distribution of choices among large groups, such as groups of consumers. Marketing forecasting does seem able to be fairly successful. This sort of predictability is the result of two things. One is that many of the influences on our choices are themselves fairly predictable. The physical and human worlds, and our own bodily and psychic makeups, have a good deal of stability. Thomas even thought that astrology could be successful in predicting the natural temperaments of people born at different times of the year. This is because he thought that the movements of the heavenly bodies exercise considerable influence on our bodies, and because our bodily constitution has a lot to do with our temperament. (Today we might say that temperament is a matter of genetic endowment, or climate, or perhaps early upbringing.) And Thomas also thought that people tend to make choices in accordance with their temperaments. For instance, irascible people, people who get angry easily, tend to choose things that satisfy their anger. But Thomas insists that our temperaments do not determine our choices. We can reflect on them and decide that it is better to resist them, even to modify them. As for astrology, Thomas quotes the great ancient astronomer Ptolemy: “The wise man dominates the stars.”³ By the wise man he means the man who follows his reason rather than his merely bodily urges.

Another reason why our choices have some predictability is that the choices which we first make in response to a given influence have their own power to influence our subsequent choices. That is, they tend to create habits of choice. Good habits are called virtues; bad habits are called vices. These make up what is called a person’s character. It is hard to choose against one’s character. But it is possible. People have done it. Character does not determine choice either.

5) Mentioning virtues and vices brings us back to the topic of responsibility, specifically moral responsibility. Our power of free choice brings with it the drama of moral good and evil. But here is one last thing that free choice is not: it is not only, nor even primarily, a power to choose between moral good and evil or between right and wrong. The power to choose evil is not absolutely essential to free choice. In fact, it is an imperfection of the freedom of choice. It is basically the possibility of not using the light of our reason as fully as we could use it, in making our choices. Explaining this possibility is complicated. For this reason, when we undertake to study free choice, I think it is better not to start with the question of moral good and evil. Take that question up later. Start with the power to choose among morally acceptable things. This is not at all always trivial. I mean, for instance, the power to choose a career, or a home, or a friend.

So, to sum up: there are these five things that free will or freedom of choice is not. It is not a power to choose absolutely anything; we cannot choose misery. It is not a power to act at random or for no reason. It is not a power for uncaused acts. It is not incompatible with predictability. And it is not primarily or essentially a power to choose between moral good and evil.

 

II. What freedom of choice is: the power to determine one’s own desires

Now let me try to sketch a positive account of the nature of free choice. Earlier I mentioned that very simple description which Thomas offers of what it is to choose: “to take one thing, refusing another.” A choice is, so to speak, a two-pronged act. It bears both on the thing taken and on the thing, or perhaps the things, refused. It is a decision, which etymologically means a cutting off. You cut off one alternative and keep the other. The will, Thomas says, being free, determines itself, insofar as it adheres to either this or that.⁴ A choice is a self-determined act of will, a self-determined desire or inclination toward something.

What makes us capable of such an act? On Saint Thomas’s view, there are two fundamental factors. One factor is our power to make comparisons. Before we make a choice, we typically engage in what he calls counsel or deliberation. We survey the field, we identify the alternatives, we gather up their pros and cons, and we compare them with each other. When we finally choose one, it is because of something about that one that makes it seem better than the other or the others. That is our reason for the choice that we make. Again, we always choose for a reason.

So, one thing that is essential to free choice is the power to make comparisons. But clearly, that is not the only thing. For in the case of some comparisons, the result is predetermined. If we compare the numbers 3 and 6 as to size, asking which one is bigger, there is only one possibility. But when we deliberate about things, we are not comparing them merely as to size, although that might be one factor. When we are making choices, we are comparing things, not (or not only) as to their size, but as to their goodness, their desirability. We are asking which is better. We are looking at them from the point of view of that master desire, the desire for happiness, the desire for total goodness. And goodness, Thomas insists, is something really huge. It is much bigger than size. Size is only one feature of things. Goodness belongs to many different features.

Bonum est multiplex. The good is manifold. It comes in numerous forms. The goodness of a good deed; the goodness of good food; the goodness of good music; the goodness of a good guess. These goodnesses are very different from each other. Even negative features can be good. Salt is good, but if your French fries are already salty, not putting more salt on them is also good. (Too much of a good thing is not good.) There are many forms of goodness. And moreover, the things we normally make choices about are particular, concrete things that can be judged under many criteria; that is, with respect to many forms of goodness. Shortly I will give an example.

How does all this bear on the freedom of choice? It means that an alternative that is better with respect to one form or feature may be worse with respect to another. In fact, it always will be. The only thing that is better in every respect is the total or perfect good, whose possession is happiness. And we want that necessarily, not by choice. But about other things we have a choice.

Take a simple example. I could use a car. Here is one; it is glamorous — fast, sleek, powerful — but it is also expensive. Here is another; it is economical, but also a bit clunky. I could afford the glamorous one, but not so easily; and I could put up with my friends’ poking fun at me about the clunky one, but also not so easily (I’m rather touchy). It is not an easy choice. Now, I might find it so hard that I decide to keep on deliberating, considering other features or even other cars. But this could very well leave me in the same position as before: with no absolute winner. And really, I do not even have to go on deliberating. Deciding to do that is a matter of free choice too. I could choose to make my choice now. I do not need an absolute winner. The alternatives do not absolutely decide the question. The comparisons that I make between them enable us to choose, but they are open-ended. They do not determine the choice. Nothing does. The choice itself is a new determination.

Now, you might reply: If what I have before me is this, a glamorous but expensive car versus an economical but clunky one, then it boils down to a choice between glamour and economy. So, do I not need to decide which of these values is more important to me? Yes, I do. And I might undertake a separate deliberation about that. But even if I do, there need be no absolute winner. It is I myself who settle my priorities. I decide what is more or less important to me. Moreover, in order to choose between the cars, I do not have to undertake a separate deliberation about those values. I can decide between them simply by deciding between the particular things that embody them. Just by choosing between the cars, I will give priority either to glamour or to economy.

You may rejoin: in any case, do I not after all need another criterion, another value, standing above glamour and economy, under which to compare them or the things that embody them? No, I do not. I already have all the criteria I need. Each of those two values is a criterion under which to compare it, or what embodies it, with the other one. Glamour is better than economy … with respect to glamour. It is more glamorous! And economy is better than glamour … with respect to economy. It is more economical! I can use either criterion, either value, to make my choice.

The point, again, is that there does not have to be an absolute winner, something making it simply necessary to choose one and impossible to choose the other, as it is impossible for 3 to be greater than 6. When I choose, I always have a reason. If I choose the glamorous and expensive car, it is because it is glamorous, not because it is expensive. But my reason does not necessitate my choice or make it impossible for me to choose the other car. For I also have a reason, a quite sufficient one, for choosing the other. The reason for my choice is not compelling. When I take one thing and refuse the other, I am taking a thing that I could be refusing, and I am refusing a thing that I could be taking. Nothing and no one makes the choice for me. It is I who make it.

You might, however, have one other rejoinder. You might say: was it not granted that we desire happiness necessarily? We cannot help that. But there are some things that a person takes to be necessary for happiness. For instance, Christians take the avoidance of sin to be necessary for happiness. As Christians, they cannot think that it is better to sin than not to sin. And yet it is possible for a Christian to choose to sin. Or so I am told. But if so, then there seem to be just two possibilities: either we do choose for no reason, at random, arbitrarily; or, it is not we who make our choices, in light of our own reasons, but something else makes them and foists them upon us.

With this we come back to the question of the choice between moral good and evil, right and wrong. As I said, this adds a bit of complication to the basic explanation of free choice. I will try to lay out Saint Thomas’s account of it briefly. Thomas does not think that the choice to sin is an exception to the rule that we always choose for a reason or that what we choose always has a feature that makes it seem somehow better to us than the alternative. What is distinctive of the choice to sin is that the reason is not a good one, and that what one chooses seems better only from a limited or partial viewpoint. When Christians consider life as a whole and what is most worth pursuing, they see that sinful things are out of the question, that they derail. They are not true alternatives, not really choiceworthy. But we are not always considering things from that viewpoint. When we are in a situation that calls for a choice, it is up to us to take that viewpoint or not. It is up to us to apply our beliefs about what is and what is not truly choiceworthy. That can call for effort. But before we make that effort, something that in fact is sinful can present an attractive face to us. From a certain limited point of view, taking that thing can seem better than refusing it. And that is enough for us to be able to choose it. I do not mean that then we cannot help choosing it. We could very well stop to consider whether, on the whole, that is truly a viable option. After all, considering the truth of the matter is a good too, one to which we are naturally inclined. And sometimes people do just that. They resist temptation. But sometimes they do not.

This is why I say that being able to choose sin is an imperfection, a weakness. If we always had clearly in mind what we naturally value most, we would never choose against it. But we do not. Yet we do have the power to bring it to mind. When we sin, we choose without doing so. And it is only then that the law of our mind, the moral law, begins to feel like an imposition.

Now however another question may arise. Can there be free choice without the possibility of sinning? Is there free choice in heaven? I would say that, on Thomas’s view, heaven is where free choice really comes into its own. What we have in this life is only a foretaste of it. Here is an analogy. Think of that heavenly musician, Mozart. And think of an amateur hack, like me. We both sit down at the piano. Now, whatever Mozart plays, he cannot make a blunder. He cannot commit a musical sin. And I? I certainly can. I do it all the time. But now, which of us sees more possibilities at the keyboard? Which of us can be more creative? Which of us plays with more freedom of choice? It is obvious. The variety in Mozart’s output is astounding. There is something new, and wonderful, every time. With me it is always the same three riffs, executed badly. For the most part, you know, sin is boring. It is almost always the same old stuff. But the point is, one cannot sin in heaven, because one sees God in His infinite goodness, and He is utterly irresistible. But one also sees an endless variety of ways of imitating His goodness. One stands before a myriad of amazing choices. We here below cannot even imagine most of them.

To sum up this second part: a choice is an act of taking one thing and refusing another. Its freedom depends on two things: the multiformity of goodness, and power to make comparisons. But freedom to make bad choices also involves a third factor, not a power but a weakness: not always having actually in mind what we most deeply want. Without this factor, we would never do anything blameworthy. Yet we would still have free choice. And even Sam Harris might not mind it. For it would not be a source of conflict. Blame would not exist. We would all be friends.

 

III. One other cause of free choice

By way of conclusion, I would like to mention one other thing without which the account of the freedom of choice would be incomplete. There is one other cause. In a sense it is the primary cause. I have already alluded to it, in mentioning heaven. There would be no freedom of choice if there were no God.

Of course, the truth is that if there were no God, there would be nothing at all, since all being is from him. But our freedom of choice is from him in a special way. God causes some things by means of the action of secondary, created agents. But no creature can give our soul its will with its natural freedom of choice. God alone can. This is not so difficult to see, if we simply consider again one of the fundamental things in us enabling us to choose freely. I mean that master desire, our will’s drive toward happiness. This drive has a kind of infinity about it. Of course, it does not have infinite power; if it did, we would never fail to reach the happiness that we desire. Nor is it of infinite duration; it has not always existed, any more than we have. It began to exist, and so it must have some cause, just as we ourselves must. But it is a drive toward total good, unlimited good; what Thomas calls universal good. No finite good, no created good, can fully satisfy it. Nor can any created agent suffice to produce it. It must well up in our soul as kind of overflow of that absolutely infinite act of will which is God’s own love for his goodness. That love is the cause of all his creatures, and in a special way of the rational ones, his images. “God moves man’s will,” Thomas says, “as the universal mover, to the universal object of the will, which is the good. And without this universal motion, man cannot will anything.”⁵

And then Thomas immediately adds, “but man determines himself by his reason to will this or that, which is either truly good or a seeming good.”⁶ This is where the moral law comes in. Thomas calls it a kind of light, the splendid light of truth, showing us what is truly good; that is, showing us what our happiness truly consists in, and what any valid path toward it must look like. It is up to us to open our eyes to that light. To be sure, in our fallen condition, we need the help of God’s grace to do that consistently. But using the graces that he gives is also up to us.⁷

So, we do indeed bear some responsibility for our own conduct and our own destiny. Is this an imposition? Is it not rather a great adventure? I finish with words from Veritatis Splendor.

“Human freedom belongs to us as creatures; it is a freedom which is given as a gift, one to be received like a seed and to be cultivated responsibly. It is an essential part of that creaturely image which is the basis of the dignity of the person. Within that freedom there is an echo of the primordial vocation whereby the Creator calls man to the true Good, and even more, through Christ's Revelation, to become his friend and to share his own divine life.”⁸

 

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Notes

1. Summa theologiae, I-II.83.3.

2. Two 2019 pieces: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/; https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/.

3. Summa theologiae, I-II.9.5ad3.

4. In II Sent., 34.1.3ad4.

5. Summa theologiae, I-II.9.6ad3.

6. Ibid.

7. Summa theologiae, I.62.3ad2.

8. Veritatis Splendor, §86.

 

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