To be sure, choice implies an alternative, but it does not imply freedom of choice, in the sense of libertarian free will.

For example, if I am taking a multiple-choice test, I will necessarily choose what I believe to be the right answer; I cannot choose an answer that I believe is wrong, because I have no interest in doing so. Yet, I do make what can properly be called a "choice." Granted, I do have a conditional freedom of choice: I can choose an alternative answer, if I happen to believe that it is the right one.

How so? A choice is made for the sake of a value; when you choose something, you are seeking to gain and/or keep it, which means that you must already value it. Otherwise, you would not have chosen it. Unless one is speaking loosely and metaphorically, to say that values are "chosen" is to say that one can choose to appreciate something - choose to want or desire it. I would like to know how that is possible. Here you are. You have no interest in something; you do not value it in any way, shape or form. For example, you have no interest in supporting green politics; you do not value it at all. Yet you can simply choose to value it? I don't think so! Choice presupposes value; value does not presuppose choice.

But seriously, you didn't choose not to value socialism; you simply stopped valuing it when you learned that capitalism was superior. Nor did you choose to value capitalism; you came to value it only because you discovered that it was a better system.

Merlin,

At the opening of your “Scope of Volition,” you quote Rand’s 1957 statement that free will “is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character.”

You say that this assertion of Rand’s is “too narrow, contradictory, and the choice to think does not control or determine what or how one subsequently thinks.” Why do you say the assertion is contradictory? I have an idea of what you are seeing as contradictory. Please correct me if I have your target wrong.

Rand says that the choice to think is one’s only free choice, then she says that there are other choices one makes that are being controlled by that only free choice, the choice to think or not. This might seem contradictory in the way that the Genesis story seems contradictory in saying Adam and Eve were the first human parents, and yet some of their children went off and married people living elsewhere. But it would seem most straightforward to interpret Rand’s statement as saying that there are choices we make that are not free and that these are controlled by the one kind of choice that is free.

That is my idea of how to read Rand’s statement as not contradictory. Beyond the issue of consistency, you say that Rand’s statement is “too narrow, . . . and the choice to think does not control or determine what or how one subsequently thinks.” On the issue of whether Rand’s scope of the variety of free choices is too narrow, I understand that you and Rand 1957 have a square disagreement. And given the charitable, self-consistent interpretation of Rand’s statement that I have put forth in the preceding paragraph, I think you must be right in contending that by 1969 (when she penned “What Is Romanticism?”) Rand had changed her mind. For she there stresses (i) a freedom of choice one has among alternative values and the composition of one’s character and (ii) a freedom of choice one has among purposeful actions to achieve one’s values. These two sorts of choices, Rand now holds up as free ones. They are intimately connected to that other free choice—the choice to think or not—but by 1969, Rand no longer takes the choice to think as the only free one.

Perhaps Rand did not really change her mind on this after writing Atlas. Perhaps the 1957 statement was defective in expressing all and only what she intended. Be that as it may, Merlin, you make a further criticism of Rand’s 1957 assertion, a criticism that I think starts with a mistaken paraphrase of her statement. Against Rand’s assertion, you say “the choice to think does not control or determine what or how one subsequently thinks.” But Rand’s statement had not contended that. Rand distributed the objects between the two verbs controls and determines.

She asserts that the choice to think “controls all the choices you make.” That seems sensible to me in two ways. For any choices that are not instant ones—what Friedenberg called Rapid Intelligent Reactions—I can choose how much thought, if any, I will devote to the choice. Choosing to add more thought adds more control.

The second way it seems sensible to say that the choice to think controls all the choices one makes is if one attaches to the choice to think the choice to continue to be able to think. That pregnant choice would control all other choices one makes in the mild sense that one’s choice to continue to protect one’s king would control all one’s choices in a game of chess.

On the other branch of Rand’s distribution of objects between controls and determines in her statement, she asserts that the choice to think “determines your life and character.” This seems true in two senses at once, both artfully meant to be apprehended in this single expression. First is the ex ante determination, then the ex post determination. The ex ante determination is a soft determinism: the choice to think shapes you life and character. The ex post determination is simply the hard “determinism” of all things past: the choice to think has shaped one’s life and character in the ways it has. As past occasions, they were the single set of contours of life and character one had; they were as they were. They are now the uniquely determinate occasions that were yours and you.

Stephen

Mr. Boydstun, you wrote:

Mr. Català,

 

Thank you for sharing with us the vista of your post #20.

You’re welcome.

The element I would like to zoom in on at present is what you express in the following statements:

 

The mind must somehow “wing free” from the physical component—the brain, and its electrochemistry. Without this winging free, all would be 100% mechanistic, and choice could not exist.

. . . .

Individual moral decisions, for the fact of being free, can’t have a physical cause.

 

I think you are selling purely physical contingency short.

Well, you may bet I don’t think so. But let’s follow your words. 

Life at all levels of organism is only possible because there is both contingency and necessity in the world. Intelligent life also relies on both the contingency and the necessity in the world.

Unless you are limiting your scope to metaphysical materialism, there is no logical necessity of using the words “in the world.”  Consider that there may be metaphysical necessity, namely, necessity “extra” the world of materiality. (Perhaps we agree on that, but nonetheless I think its proper to point this out.)

In order to not to repeat this ontological point, in the following I will consider that by “in the world” you mean “in reality.”

Indeed, intelligent life depends twice-over on the mind-independent contingency and necessity in the world.

 Agreed.

The body and brain depend on them as all life depends on them. The mind depends on them not only because it requires a brain, but because it must be able to adjust constraints and initial conditions of the lawful unfoldings of parts of the natural world.

Agreed. Your wording involves the reality that no human being can get all what he wishes, but only what adjusts to the physical constraints of the natural world. (There are more constraints:  for instance, you could have added the boundary conditions posed by the consequences of the history of mankind.) 

Before speaking further to the place of free will in nature, I want to leave an interval for you to respond, if you like, to my view in the preceding. I will add an Appendix below to present and elucidate the definitions of contingency and necessity that I mean. I should mention that the view I present here is contrary to the view of Rand and Descartes. For them intelligent will (human or divine) is the source of any contingency in the world; all else is necessity (simply by nature or by ordinance of divine mind).

(To point out that Rand did not suggest any divine will. That is important in relation to central aspests as the Objectivist flawed solution of the Problem of Universals and Objectivist ethics. But I digress.)

In the point of free will, I think that it is limited to the area of morality. For the record, my current view is closely related to the one of Maimonides and the Jewish tradition. (Relatedly, you may be interested in listening this MP3 audio lecture by Dr. Akiva Tatz. [You can download it by right-clicking on the link)

Related to your appended definitions of necessity and contingency, I will point out something which you are probably familiar with: your definition of necessity is different from the “classical” one. (In example, see Aquinas.) The classical one defines necessity as absolute (in your formulation it would be “if A, then B [for all C].) The classical “contingency” includes your conditional necessity.

Before entering the free will conundrum –and, perhaps, related to that same conundrum--, could you please elaborate what novel aspects are you aimed to introduce with your variant formulation?

Regards

Joel Català

(Edited by Joel Català on 6/22, 12:32pm)

Mr. Català,

You say in your post #35 that you restrict free choices to moral choices. Is the domain of moral choice the same in your view as in Rand’s view? She takes moral choices to be those choices of an individual “that determine the purpose and the course of his life”(first page of OE). Humans have other free choices, in Rand’s view, but it is only (and all of) the preceding proper subset of them that she regards as the domain of moral choices.

Other thinkers delimit the domain of moral choice differently. Nozick restricts moral choices to choices in one’s responsiveness to persons as persons. He does not disconnect persons from their lives—he sees persons as situated at the center of lives—but the distinctly moral domain is limited to the treatment of persons, in Nozick’s view.

What is the domain of choices you mean when you speak of moral choices?

In your earlier post #20, you indicated that animal choices, such as choices within their hunting behaviors, are not moral choices. Rather, these are amoral choices. Rand agrees with you on that, as we see in the quotation in post #18 from her 1961 essay “The Objectivist Ethics.”

You go on to say that humans have that same amoral animal mind, “plus an additional moral component of the mind. This explains why humans eventually doubt between courses of action involving different ‘levels’ of moral correctness. . . . The human mind, with its two components—the amoral and the moral—makes ethical conflict and personal growth possible.”

I think William Dwyer is correct in saying, as he does in post #21, that Rand would object to our speaking of animal mind because she would reserve mind for the conceptual level of cognition. I am fine with the contemporary talk of animal minds, but there is another difference you have with Rand concerning what you are calling the animal, amoral part of the human mind. I’ll come to that in a moment.

I first want to ask if you think that the “additional moral component” of the human mind is due to humans having a conceptual faculty. Also, do you think, as Merlin Jetton expressed in post #16, that a major part of the step up from animal to human mind is that humans can represent the past and future and “represent the self—past and future self as well”? If your answers to these two questions are Yes, then, this far, you and Rand are in accord. She remarked informally, around 1970, in an epistemology seminar:

The whole difference between a human type of consciousness and an animal is exactly this. The ability to be self-conscious and to identify the fact of one’s own consciousness, one’s I. (IOE 255–56)

Animals, who do perceive reality or existence, have absolutely no concept of their own consciousness. The enormous distinction between man and animals here is self consciousness. An animal does not have the capacity to isolate critically the fact that there is something and he is conscious of it. (IOE 246)

The fairly definite difference I read between you and Rand concerning what you call the animal, amoral part of the human mind is as follows. Behaviors that are instinctive in one species may not be instinctive in another. Some bird species have to learn (operant conditioning or trial-and-error) what materials are suitable for building a nest; others seem to have an inborn tendency to select the right materials. Rand made the grand contention—as had Schopenhauer—that in humans instinct has been altogether supplanted by intelligence. So in Rand’s view, the “animal mind” in man is not the same as in animals, because they have (not only conditioning-learning, but) instinct to assist them. And we have, as they do not have, conceptual intelligence. (On this last distinction, I can recommend Terrence Deacon’s book The Symbolic Species.)

When you write that “the human being has this same ‘animal mind’,” you are referring to the ability of a lion to select which gnu is better to chase. But when you then go on to speak of the animal, amoral part of the human mind, do you mean to include there our feelings and desires? Do you mean to add feelings and desires to the powers of conditioning-learning (and instincts?) that we share with other animals?

Lastly, for you post #20, what do you mean by levels when you say that “humans eventually doubt between courses of action involving different ‘levels’ of moral correctness”? Are all of these levels within the domain of moral choices?

More on contingency anon.