Philosophy 262 Short Paper:
Ayer’s Discussion of Free Will Versus Determinism
Takagi, Taylr
Gideon Yaffe
Maryam Qudrat
As quoted from a wise professor, “Philosophy moves painfully slow, but at blinding speed.” The renowned philosopher A.J. Ayer proves this remark true within his brief passage “Freedom and Necessity” when he evaluates the complex idea of free will versus determinism and constraint. Within his passage, he delves into his ideas of what it means to be free and of the circumstances that refute the concept of freedom, which are different types of constraints. In his second to last paragraph of the passage, he confronts an objection that one may pose challenging his beliefs implying that free will and determinism are not compatible with all beings hopelessly entrapped into a preordained life and future. Yet, Ayer concisely invalidates this objection by using his well-defined concepts of free will and determinism and reminds his “thinkers” to be aware of the objection’s false postulates.
In the second to last paragraph, Ayer’s imagined objector challenges Ayer’s idea that free will and determinism can coexist. This objection implies that due to the concept of determinism every event is causally determined therefore we can distinguish everything that will happen in the future just by evaluating the past. Everything in life is engraved in stone and there is nothing we can do to change the future. We are all living hopeless lives because anything we do does not affect the future because the future is preordained; everything is set and nothing can change. Thus, we are “hopeless prisoners of fate” (Ayer, 118).
Before delving into Ayer’s response to this paragraph, it is necessary to define some terms. Determinism means that every event is causally determined (given prior events and the laws of nature such as physics, biology, and sociology, the event had to come about) due to prior events. In other words, every event causes an effect that in turn causes another event and so forth, implying that every occurrence in this world is caused by prior events, and given the laws of nature the event had to take place. One could think of dominoes in that once one domino falls then all the other dominoes fall in respect to the previous domino. Also, it seems that the objector has not distinguished the difference between fatalism versus determinism meaning that with fatalism an event is fated which means the future is preordained in spite of all prior actions, but with determinism, the future relies on the actions that take place prior. With fatalism, it is possible to feel that there is no escape from the future and that we are all hopeless prisoners, yet the objector is challenging Ayer’s belief that determinism and free will can coexist.
Ayer challenges the objection in the last paragraph. According to Ayer, the objector’s point is a tautology, which means that the objector’s logic was repetitive and “going in circles.” His objection is not well-constructed, vague, and shallow in thinking leaving open many holes for discrepancies; such tautologies prove nothing about the freedom of will as he states. Refuting this poorly posed – but as I can imagine – common objection, Ayer recognizes the possible challenges of this objection and comments on them. First of all, the statement that “the future course of events is already decided,” (118) is vague. Ayer indicates that if the objector means that if some person has deliberately planned the course of the future, which cannot be changed, then the objector’s point is false. As previously stated, it is impossible to circumvent or change events that will happen in the future due to the awareness that they will occur because if a person chooses to try to circumvent these supposed future events, they were not really going to take place in the first place. But, as Ayer goes on, if the objector is saying that it is possible to predict the future due to past events, then this is very true. As elaborated on previously in his passage, there seems to be logic to the outcomes of many events in life, which makes it possible for people to predict the future, such as how we can predict human behavior. As a previous example in Ayer’s passage, we can predict that in certain circumstances a man will be angry, but we cannot predict what his exact actions will be due to his anger nor can we predict how others will react to his anger. Yet even though this point is true, other points that the objector has made are not.
The statement that we are “hopeless prisoners of fate” (118) is a misconception because our actions do affect the future because actions are “causes as well as effects” (118). It seems that the objector is confusing the concepts of fatalism and determinism, in that determinism suggests that what we do in the present will affect the future, and if we make the choice to choose to do otherwise, then the future will be changed, whereas fatalism does not imply these ideas. Indeed we can predict behavior or our actions due to these prior events, but this does not mean that we are acting under constraint since acting under constraint is when one does not have the ability to do otherwise and does not have free will. As Ayer discusses, we can predict certain events to take place in the future as the result of prior events, which encompasses the concept of “causality,” yet causality is different than the concept of constraint. Ayer believes that it is not causality that freedom should be contrasted with, but rather constraint. Ayer describes three possible conditions of constraint, which do not entail free will – physical constraints such as being pushed off a bridge or locked in a room, coercion such as forcing a person to act to circumvent another situation that he or she “regards as even more undesirable than the consequences of the action” (115), and psychological compulsions such as those that kleptomaniacs may have. When these constraints are not applicable to an agent’s circumstance, then he or she is considered to have free will.
Progressing onward into the final words of Ayer’s response, he confirms that it is true that people cannot escape their destiny if “it is taken to mean no more than that I shall do what I shall do” (118), or that people cannot escape the future if it is meant no more that whatever one chooses to do and acts, the past cannot be changed. Yet, tautologies such as these become weak and repetitive when discussing such a deep topic of free will, and when challenging such important issues one would hope for a thoroughly thought out and constructed argument. The objector implies that determinism means that one event has power over another, “whereas the truth is that they are factually correlated” (117) in Ayer’s eyes. The entrapment or tautology that the objector tries to impose is that determinism is described as an “unhappy effect trying vainly to escape from the clutches of an overmastering cause” (118), but indeed Ayer clarifies that when one event occurs, it merely causes another event to occur in consequence meaning that our free will is retained as long as we are acquitted from the constraints that cause us not to have the freedom to choose. The overwhelming sense of loss of meaning and control in one’s life is a tragic misinterpretation on the objector’s behalf for he or she is not hopelessly bound to chains of fate as the objector may believe.
For the concept that determinism and free will are compatible, such depth and meditation is necessary to discuss an issue that encompasses our everyday lives – the very essence of being. These concepts awake the mind and open the eyes to a world that forever existed, but had not yet been seen to the extent of its vibrant complexity. We can appreciate the great thinkers of our world who expand on the most perplexing ideas of life to help us understand the beauty of our own sense of being, or rather to be mystified in that sense of being.
Bibliography
Pereboom, Derek. Free Will. A.J. Ayer “Freedom and Necessity.” Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.