Stoicism vs. Objectivism: Is Free Will Magic? – New Ideal

Both Stoicism and Ayn Rands philosophy, Objectivism, purport to offer guidance on the pursuit of values and the conduct and improvement of our lives. But, unlike Objectivism which upholds free will Stoicism embraces a deterministic worldview thats incompatible with moral guidance, or so I argue in my article The False Promise of Stoicism. For a philosophy to be useful as a guide, I wrote, it must at least acknowledge that we have some genuine, volitional control over our actions and choices actions and choices that make a difference to where we end up in life.

Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at The City College of New York and a prominent voice in the contemporary Stoicism movement, disagrees. In his essay Epic Battles in Practical Ethics: Stoicism vs Objectivism, Pigliucci insists on a perspective held by many philosophers and scientists today namely, that to reject determinism, as Objectivism does, amounts to believing in magic.

Consider Pigliuccis argument for this position.

Determinism, writes Pigliucci, in its simplest and broadest definition means that things happen as a result of cause-effect, or because there are laws of nature.

If you accept that the cosmos works by cause-effect, then your attitude about human volition (free will) can fall into one of two categories: (a) You believe there is no such thing as volition, its an illusion (deterministic incompatibilism); or (b) You believe that volition is just another aspect of the lawful behavior of things in the universe, including human beings (compatibilism).

If you dont like either of the above two stances on volition, then your only remaining choice, (c) is to reject the premise of determinism and claim special status for human free will (contra-causal incompatibilism). The Stoics like most contemporary philosophers chose option(b). Smith, apparently, wants something like (c). Which, based on what we know of how the world works, amounts to believing in magic, just like many religious people do: its called contra-causal free will because the notion is that, somehow (but how??), human volition can transcend the laws of physics and biology.1

Observe that Pigliuccis argument relies on equating determinism with cause and effect and scientific lawfulness. This equation is of course not unique to Pigliucci. Daniel Dennett, one of the most influential philosophers in the contemporary free will debate, characterizes determinism similarly as the idea that every event has a cause, which has a cause, which has a cause, in a causal chain that goes back to the Big Bang, if you like, and that there are no events without causes undetermined events.2 (My emphasis)

The reason Pigliucci gets Rand wrong is that the Objectivist view offree will (and causality) doesnt fit the alternativesthat he and others consider viable contenders.

This equation which, as we will see, Objectivism rejects leads Pigliucci to narrowly frame our theoretical options as either: (i) accept the universality of cause and effect and scientific lawfulness (and therefore determinism) dismissing free will as either an illusion or a deterministic action or (ii) accept free will and therefore reject the universality of cause and effect and the laws of nature (i.e., determinism). Since Objectivism openly rejects determinism, Pigliucci assumes that Objectivism must endorse a non-causal (or contra-causal) theory of free will.

But it doesnt. Volition, according to Objectivism, is both causal (no need for magic) and free (non-deterministic). Perhaps the reason Pigliucci gets Rand wrong is that the Objectivist view offree will (and causality) doesnt fit the alternativesthat he and others consider viable contenders.

READ ALSO: Why Champions of Science and Reason Need Free Will

Consider just a few aspects of Rands account.

According to Objectivism, causality (or cause and effect) is not a principle relating antecedentevents to their necessary consequences (determinism), but one that relates an entitys identity (what it is) to its actions (what it does). Objectivism holds that since every entity has a specific identity, constituted by its specific set of characteristics, it can perform only those actions it has the capacity to perform; it cannot act apart from or in contradiction to its nature. As such, there can be no uncaused actions and no miracles. (There goes anything contra-causal.)

Objectivism accepts the universality of cause and effect. But it stresses that the principle of cause and effect by itself does not legislate that all cause-effect relations are deterministic (such that one and only one outcome is possible from and indeed necessitated by a given set of antecedent circumstances). Nor does the principle of causality tell us which specific actions an entity can take in a given context; it tells us only that an entity must act in accordance with its nature; it cannot act in contradiction to it.

Contrary to Pigliuccis assumptions, the Objectivist view of free will is not that volition magically transcends identity and causality as Gods volition is traditionally supposed to. Rather, Objectivism holds that volition is a form of causation.

Questions about what specific actions entities are capable of must be settled by reference to observed facts about the behavior of the relevant entities. And when it comes to human volition, the proper place to begin is with the data of introspection i.e., with what we can directly observe of the operations of our own consciousness. What we observe thereby is that we possess a certain kind of control over our consciousness. This observed control, this causal power to initiate and direct action, is what Rand calls free will.

As Rand puts it, what is fundamentally and directly under our control is the process of thinking:

To think is an act of choice. . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort.4

To say that we have free will, in Objectivism, is to say that reason operates by choice. You can choose to think to exercise your cognitive faculties, to seek to know, to classify, to reach a wider and deeper understanding. Or, you can allow your mind to drift letting it glide on autopilot, guided only by undirected stimuli, emotions, and associations. Or, you can choose to deliberately throw your mind out of focus to refuse to know, to pretend facts are other than they are, turning your mind away from the goal of awareness, thereby subverting its functioning. You can also realize (clearly or dimly) that you are out of focus and choose to exert the effort that a state of goal-directed awareness requires an effort nature does not compel you to exert or sustain.

READ ALSO: Free Will vs. Science?

To say that a process of thought is caused by the actor, does not mean only that it is caused by factors that are internal to the actor rather than external, as many determinists would say. It means that the actor possesses the capacity to initiate action and chose to exercise that capacity.

It is only because we have free will that we need, and can make use of, a philosophic perspective to guide our choices toward a vision of what our lives and character could and ought to be.

If the deterministic framework that so many philosophers and scientifically minded people today accept doesnt allow for this directly observable form of causation, then that framework should be revised. The alternatives dismissing the observed fact of choice as an illusion (deterministic incompatibilism) or rewriting it to fit the prevailing theory as compatibilist accounts of volition like Pigliuccis attempt to do are unscientific.5

Pigliucci as someone offering advice on how to live and what to value seems to want to maintain some genuine notion of free will, presumably because he realizes that moral agency is impossible without it.

Our decisions are the result of external causes (other peoples opinions, events, etc.), combined with internal causes (our character, considered judgments, etc.) Human beings arent passive receivers of external influences . . . we are part and parcel of how the universe works. And the intriguing thing . . . is that volition, as an internal cause, can act on itself in a recursive fashion. A fancy way to say that we can reflect on our own judgments and change them. And the more we engage in cognitive and behavioral steps, the more we change our internal causality. If our changes are in the right direction we become better persons, the goal of Stoic practice.

This is as close as one gets to free will in a universe governed by laws and by relations of cause-effect.

Summarizing this perspective later in the essay, he writes:

Nothing is really ours, except the considered judgments we arrive at. Those are the ones on the basis of which we should be thought of as worthy or unworthy human beings. And lucky for us, those are under our control. Which means that the objective of living a life worth living is also under our control.6

But when Pigliucci says that our considered judgments are under our control and that we can reflect on our own judgments and change them, the essential question is: are both alternatives to consider or not consider, to reflect or not reflect, to think or not to think within our power to choose under the circumstances? Or is our act of reflecting or not reflecting itself necessitated by antecedent events? If we take determinism seriously, then whether we become a better or worse person today or tomorrow is not within our power to choose. It was determined for us long before we were born.

In his book Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, fellow modern Stoic Donald Robertson presents the Stoic position on determinism more accurately as the idea that absolutely everything in life necessarily happens as it does.

Your own thoughts and actions are necessitated as part of the whole string of causes that forms the universe . . . so that even if there are things in life that seem to require great effort on our part to achieve, whether or not we make the effort is fated along with the outcome . . .

What happens next will depend, in part, on what you choose to do next because you are a tiny but essential cog in the vast machinery of the universe. However, your choices themselves are the consequences of a massive string of causation set in motion countless billions of years before you were even born, at the beginning of the universe.7

The essential point here is that, for a cog whose every thought and action is necessitated by factors outside his control a philosophy of life is useless. It is only because we have free will that we need, and can make use of, a philosophic perspective to guide our choices toward a vision of what our lives and character could and ought to be.

If youre seeking a philosophic perspective on life according to which there genuinely are things that are up to you that you face genuine alternatives, such that if you make the right choices, you can become a better person and live a better life you need a philosophy that embraces free will, not one that gives you the illusion of freedom while insisting on a worldview that denies it.

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Stoicism vs. Objectivism: Is Free Will Magic? - New Ideal