Just Thomism

In the Aristotelian tradition, free will or choice is an act terminating deliberation (Nic. Eth. III.3).

Libet-style experiments demand performing an act without deliberating; indeed they involve tasks where deliberation is impossible.

Libet-style experiments do not study free will or choice as defined in the Aristotelian tradition.

Take free will as the power of not letting circumstances control whether you are happy. Orthogonal to this, not letting moods that are wholly determined by circumstances control your words or actions. Eventually, not letting circumstances control your mood.

This is a bona fide freedom or free will on anyone’s account, as it is defined by the absence of exterior control over your actions.

This is not far from what Aristotle would define simply as virtue in general, habitual rational control of that part of which is not rational but can obey reason – which is above all one’s mood.

This is not the Vulcan life or the emotionally obtuse life. One is dominated by circumstances when he stays saturnine and aloof when engagement or controntation is called for.

Let free will mean a choice made with indifference to alternatives. I don’t think this defines free will, but it seems to be the working hypothesis for many. The Jesuit/ Franciscan Scholastic-era opinion, for example, arguably stressed the component of indifference in discussions of will, and these schools seemed to be more influential in forming modern thought.

But there are two very different ways of being indifferent to alternatives:

1.) On the part of the real equality of objects. There are all sorts of times when the objects we must choose between are equal and so provide us with no reason to choose one option over another. At the beginning of the buffet you reach out to a tray of forks and grab one. You could have just as easily grabbed that one as this one, but the objects themselves give no reason for preference.

2.) On the part of a defect of the subject. There are times when we are aware of being unable to choose between alternatives because we don’t have enough information, experience, wisdom, moral character, etc.

The first sort of indifference is best dealt with by never thinking about it. All such decisions must be recognized for what they are and simply not thought about. One seeks to remove them from reason. The second sorts of indifference, however, is completely contrary: one seeks to subsume it as far as possible into reason. One uses the indifference of (2) as the matter for the development of the virtue of prudence, and large parts of law and social arrangement need to be set up so as to subsume (2) indifference into the rational order.

So the indifference of the will forks into two contrary paths, one that drives objects further and further from rational consideration, and which recognizes the pointlessness of rational consideration; and another which seeks to become more and more under rational sovereignty and control. Discerning the difference between these two is not always easy, and this discernment is itself a matter of prudence.

So defining free will by indifference makes the relationship of free choice to reason inherently ambiguous. So long as we are considering (1) level indifference, free will has nothing to do with reason, and even irrational animals will need something like “free will” with respect to such objects. Consider Buridan’s ass, or the sorts of objects one is asked to “choose” in Libet experiments. But to cut the connection between (2) level objects and reason is a self-evident absurdity.

Free will is of those things that owe their existence to us

Some things owe their existence to us.

Some things are objects of our free will

Sam Harris denies the minor, since the sciency thing to say is that whatever happens in the universe arises from the grand totality of all the laws and antecedent conditions of the universe, and no one is such a totality.

The argument requires that existence is a whole to which we are parts. Note that the argument therefore doesn’t follow since the actions of wholes are attributed to parts when the part is the proper tool of the action, which is why it’s true that “the hammer pounded the nail in” even if the action is properly said of the whole complex of construction worker + hammer, though it is not true that the worker’s boot pounded the nail in, even if the boot were a part of the whole complex. The question then becomes whether we are a proper cause of existence or a sheerly accidental part, and if it’s the first then we could say both that all the antecedent conditions of the universe lead to the action and that our choice does if our choice a proper tool of the whole universe targeting existence. But this seems to be just how we are a part since in virtue of intellection we are the part of the physical cosmos that targets existence per se. What has no intellect doesn’t take existence as a per se object. Because whatever has an intellect also has a self per se, it follows both that the totality of conditions of the universe cause the action and I caused the action by myself.

That said, our targeting the existence of things is not per se and first, as though we made the difference between being and nothing at all. This is properly the act of creation, and we clearly can’t do that. So divine creation is free will per se and first, human choice is free will per se but not first. Likewise the divine self causes the whole of the universe simply and as such, the human self causes as a proper part of the universe causes only parts of the universe as a proper part of the universe, sc. the part with intellection.

The upshot of Aristotle’s discussion of choice or free will in Ethics III c. 2 and 3 is that it is very difficult to define and very easy to confuse with things that it is more than. On the one hand, choice or free will is not merely voluntary action, since anything one wants to do is voluntary but babies, animals, insane persons, the senile, etc all do things they want to do but nevertheless don’t make choices. It’s in fact very important to know when one deals with children and the senile that their voluntary acts aren’t choices. For the same reason, we can’t explain our choices by pointing out we felt like doing them – babies do what they feel like doing too. We also can’t explain a choice as something we wished to do since we can successfully wish for impossible things but not successfully choose to do them. At the end of his discussion, Aristotle is left to define choice as the point where deliberation terminates, which simply shifts the goalposts to defining deliberation, which he proceeds to do in c. 3.

Chapter three also starts off with a series of negations. If deliberation terminates in choice then the insane – who don’t choose – aren’t deliberating even if they appear to do so. So choice is now grounded in the acts of one who is compos mentis. Again, while we ponder eternal things we can’t choose them, since the things we exist have to exist by our choices. This last note seems to be the one at the heart of the matter: free will/ choice is of objects that can owe their existence to the existence to us. Even this is tweaked by the last note he strikes in c. 2, since the truths in our thoughts owe their existence to us but are not formally the goods that arise by choice, and we have to talk about “owing existence to us” other than how fruit owes its existence to the tree.

Before one denies free will or fights for it it we might take a long look at just how hard it is to get clear on what exactly the term means.

If a tree wondered about predestination, it would be troubled by the conflict between predestination and growing apples. If the circulatory system thought about grace, it would be bothered by the mystery of divine causality and pumping blood. Since we are human we wonder about the mystery of grace and free will.

The problem, in other words, is how the divine causality can create and conserve natures as opposed to obliterating them. On the one hand the answer is simply to point: there’s the nature ontologically contingent and working by itself. On the other hand the esse one points to is not so entirely autonomous or of itself as give rise to an operatio that is entirely autonomous or of itself.

1.) The will of persons follows intellect, which is the capacity of knowing being and its transcendental attributes: good, truth, unity, etc.

2.) Being and its transcendentals have indefinite concrete expressions and realizations, and so any intellect deliberating over the concrete deliberates over indefinite goods. This is the first and only proper meaning of the freedom of the will.

3.) The intellect and will are powers and therefore distinct from the subject or person.

4.) Some per accidens exercises of powers destroy their subject. The mouse’s power to run might lead it over a glue trap; the oven’s the power to start fires might burn the house down. Again, cancer grows till it destroys its host; unsustainable farming grows until the power to grow is destroyed. The exercise of a power that destroys its proper subject is the best short definition of evil. 

5.) Call any such evil, per accidens exercise of a power abuse. Because things exist in certain ways, certain evils are possible while others are not. Mice and ant are household pests, but the mouse can get caught in a mousetrap while the ant cannot.

6.) When free will chooses between good and evil, it is not the proper sense specified in (2), but an entirely distinct sense of the indifference between use and abuse. True, moral evil is an abuse proper to intellectual volition, but it is not a proper function of intellection as such for the same reason that burning the house down isn’t a feature of stove design, even if a stove burns the house down.  Baking/ frying is not the same alternative set as baking/ burning the house down, and the stove is responsible for these in different ways.

The Scholastic-Patristic idea of simplicity is the type (3) predication of positive predicates not said relative to creatures. Because predicates count as “properties” and type (3) predicates express identity, it is possible to understand divine simplicity as Analytic Philosophers do. viz that God is identical to his properties. But because predicates that involve relation to creatures are set aside, it is impossible to set up a conflict between divine simplicity and the free choice to create, to redeem, etc.

But chances are that the Analytic philosophers that insist on a contradiction between simplicity and free choice will not be content in what appears to be my mere defining it out of existence. For all that, I want to show that their arguments are not formally against divine simplicity but logically require a prior denial of the existence of God.

Bill Vallicella, commenting on a response to an argument by Robert Mullins, puts the conflict like this:

There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

1) If God is simple, then he is pure act (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentials. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be.  Given that God is simple, there can be no real distinction in him between potency and act. This is necessarily true  because God exists of metaphysical necessity and is essentially pure act.

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a  different universe, or no universe at all. Had he created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  In that case he would not be pure act: he would harbor an unactualized potential.

My response requires a paragraph of set-up. Consider the following premise:

G = What changes another need not change itself.

You might become convinced of G because your mind wandered off to considering knowledge, which involves objects actualizing a cognitive power without themselves changing or coming to be. Or maybe you wandered off to considering things loved, which can cause love in others without having to become something else. Or maybe you thought about relations, which allow for Socrates to be shorter than Plato not because Socrates changed by shrinking but because Plato changed by growing. Or maybe you were considering what Aristotle takes to be the paradigm case of efficient causality – giving advice – the whole idea of which is that the one who gets it should change while the one who gives it doesn’t need to.

Now consider the second sentence in Vallicella’s (2)

Had [God] created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.

Presumably, Vallicella thought this was just axiomatic or obvious, though this is logically equivalent to taking G as self-evidently false, and that’s just a mistake. More to the point, the proof by which one establishes the existence of purus actus (not its simplicity, but its existence) requires that there be something that causes change in another without changing itself. This is precisely what “purus actus” means. “Pure” is the opposite of “mixed” and a mixed act is an actualizer that is itself actualized or a changer that is itself changed.

Put another way, the supposed dilemma between simplicity and freedom is not on objection to divine simplicity, but an assertion that God’s existence is self-evidently false, at least as this existence is understood by the defenders of divine simplicity. I don’t mean this in the obvious sense that if you affirm “God is not simple” you also affirm “no simple God exists”, but rather in the sense that the objection against divine simplicity is downstream from an unexamined assumption that a purus actus or unmoved mover or uncreated creator is impossible.  That unexamined assumption is devastating to theism, and though we might be willing to throw Scholasticism under the bus, patristic thought would go with it, along with any idea of a biblical theology or Christology of the one through whom all things which were made, were made. I suppose a Mormon god or the Olympians might remain, which is exactly where the logic of denying divine simplicity tends.

Arguendo, you have free will, and it’s exercised when you confront a row of buttons and push one marked “3”.

Question: Are you free to push the button while pushing it?

Yes: The action is one actualization of a power, and powers must exist while being actualized. It’s nonsense to deny my power to do X while I am doing X, so it is nonsense to say I have no power of free choice while I am freely choosing.

No: Freedom is the ability to do otherwise, but while you are doing X it is impossible to be doing otherwise. One cannot simultaneously push a button and not push it.

True, one is able to refrain from doing X while doing so, but this means either

a.) While doing the action, one might cease before it is finished, or

b.) There is a counterfactual truth of non-action when one acts, viz. Although I’m doing this, I might have not. 

But (a) considers the future of the action and so not while it is happening. If (b) is taken as referring to a different past it does the same, but can it be taken as referring to the same moment as the action?

This raises the question of the possibilia simul contradictionis (PSC),or the simultaneous possibility of contradictories. Specifically, what relation does the PSC have to something actual?

The PSC cannot be actualized since no action can make contradictions exist simultaneously. So we have to distinguish the PSC from possibilities that can be brought into existence. The old name for PSC was “logical” possibility, though what’s key to it is that it cannot be actualized whereas there is another sort of possibility that can be actualized. Nevertheless, we’re clearly aware of PSC and so it exists in mind.

This seems to give some light on the initial question. Free will is an action of a being with mind, and so of a being that is aware of PSC even though the PSC as such cannot be realized. In beings that act with minds, the PSC can therefore be a terminus a quo of an action while it cannot be a terminus ad quem.

Free will will thus be understood as an action with a unique principle, namely mind so far as it contains the PSC. So taken we can see the truth of the yes argument – since actions that arise from mind arise from a principle that has the PSC, though the no argument is also true since the PSC as such can never be actualized.

Difficulties Concerning God’s Free Action 

Although the truth of God’s free choice is firmly established by both faith and natural reason, it is contradicted strenuously by difficulties which human discourse can scarcely extricate itself from.

The difficulties reduce to three heads:

1.) From indifference. This aspect of freedom seems incompatible with divinity, though liberty cannot exist without it. Power or will is signified as a principle that in the very being of the act can either perform or not perform an action and so would have to lack a positive perfection that would be a divine perfection, e.g. he might not will to save a Jew whom he could have willed to save. Willing is signified as an act cannot have an indifference with respect to being elicited or non-elicited by a power since it is not an act exercised by a power, as it is in us – God being pure act in second act. But to apply oneself to act or not there is not an indifference in an act exercised by a power.

2.) From Immutability. This characterizes God and his acts in every way, so the liberty that can turn itself to either of two options does not seem like it can belong to him. If, however, immutability belonged to his act, along with a mutability in our thought of his action relative to an object, it is not clear why God could not will something that he did not will previously in time, sinc e this would not require a real change, but only one in our ideas of his action.

3.) From the Motive. That is, from the thing that is needed to determine the will to the very thing that is willed. It is not clear by what God’s will can be determined or why it would more incline to one thing as opposed to another. The will, after all, is not determined as a potency, since, Goven that God comprehends all things, his intellect does not propose some motive for willing or not willing the world that is actually established. Still, it is certain that if God had not willed to produce the world, there would be no motive influential enough to make him do so. So how can he be moved to one thing rather than another when all motives for acting or not acting are equal, such that, whatever happened, would be fitting?

Various Opinions

I would submit that all that thought with the mind of the Church and in a sane manner about divine liberty understood that divine liberty could not be placed in God as it is in us, sc. by the multiplication of acts exercised by the will or by its non-exercise. Our will, to be sure, consists in initiating or witholding an act, but this is not so with the divine liberty, since it is pure act, the last act of willing, unified, multiform while ruling out division, and nothing less than the absolute essence of God. We do not explain divine freedom as the exercise or retention of an act from a power of will but as one and the same act as relating to and connoting a created object, as a power actively indifferent and either actively joining an object to itself or not, not as passively receiving or having the perfection of act from the object, though, when it is given in act, it is not in its power to either relate or not relate to the object. Because some heretics cannot elevate their mind to understand another mode of liberty not exercised as it is by us, they deny a real liberty in God…