Why is Freedom So Important To Us?

John Shand explains why free will is basic to humanity.

- John Shand

Much has been written about whether or not we have free will. That is not my topic here, but it has a connection to it, in that I want to ask why so much has been written on the matter. Whether we are free or not seems very important to us. Let’s first suppose that we are not free – that there is no such thing as free will.

Let’s further take that to imply that there is no sense in which we may be held responsible for what we do, any more than a tree or a rock may be held responsible when it falls on our head. It either falls, owing to some previous cause, or it does not. It’s a purely factual matter, devoid of any normative judgement as to whether it should or should not have happened. Let’s also suppose that the causes are all that is to be said about the matter. In that case, the entire universe can be summed up by an account of what does exist and what does and does not happen. Events either take place or they don’t. And that’s it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, the world is the totality of facts (Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, 1.1, 1921).

To stave off an objection that might come into someone’s head here, we have to be careful in our language and pay attention to the way in which we use normative words such as ‘should’ or ‘ought’. We sometimes use these words in a non-normative sense; but the meaning in those cases is quite different. It may signal an ignorance of causes, for example. So suppose the jewellers have just returned your watch, after cleaning and servicing it. After a few days it stops: we might say that the watch should not or