Homo economicus

Economists use theories and mathematical models to describe certain economic phenomena observed in real-life. Such theories can be parsimonious and make specific assumptions about how individuals should and do actually behave. One very popular such theory is the standard economic theory assuming that individuals are rational and selfish, caring only about maximizing their own material self-interest. In economics, rational individuals are those who have a consistent objective that they want to achieve.1 When individuals’ objective is to maximize their own material gains from undertaking a certain action, such decision-makers are often described as Homo economicus who are assumed to have strong computational abilities, allowing them to weight accurately the costs and benefits of a decision that monetarily benefits them the most. Standard economic theory has been the central framework of analysis for many decades. But why this theoretical model has attracted so much interest in economics?

The main reason is that standard economic theory is a very simple model of economic behaviour, abstracting from the complications of natural environments where different factors are operative at the same time. Building economic models is like drawing a map. In both cases, it is important to consider which details are relevant to be specified and which are less relevant: maps are drawn including those details that enable travellers to arrive at their destination and economic models are built including those details which are relevant in that they can make predictions that describe well observed behaviour.

To the extent that the selfishness assumption can describe observed behaviour accurately, standard economic theory does a good job. It is therefore natural to gain a better understanding about whether and if so, under which conditions selfishness is a good or bad assumption? The general answer is that it depends on what our research question is. Sometimes selfishness is a relevant assumption for people's behaviour; however, in many decision-making situations, it is not a good assumption and standard economic theory fails to explain economic behaviour. Take for example the case where we would like to understand why individuals engage in philanthropic activities or why they leave a tip in a restaurant or why they decide to volunteer in their free time?

My concern has been with the very possibility of human freedom, not its extent; with the metaphysics of freedom rather than, for example, the local realities of political freedom or specific freedoms from certain constraints. For this reason, it may be necessary to head off a misunderstanding: I am not claiming that our freedom is boundless. On the contrary, it is subject to many restrictions.

The most basic and universal limitation arises from the fact that we do not create the most fundamental condition of our freedom: our very existence. We are the products of a universe evolving before our birth and, most crucially, of our parents’ choices – most obviously to have a child; to permit a missed period to mark the beginning of a life.

Aldous Huxley highlights a mind-stretching accident built into this choice:

And we have, in most cases, as little choice over our death as over our birth. Exercising that choice in gratuitous suicide – freely cancelling the accident of our freedom – has been claimed as the freest of all acts. But the one-off freedom to bring our freedom to an end does little to offset the limitations of our freedom.

The extent to which we can exercise our freedom, or have any freedom to exercise, between the usually unchosen limits of our lifespan is contingent on the tickets we draw in the lottery of life – our natural, chance-given gifts, our health, and on the health of our relations with others and of the political system in which we live. While we may elect to make the best of our talents, or allow them to go to waste, their direction and scale do not lie within our gift. And my capacity to do many things is dependent on circumstances I have not chosen: as certain philosophers would put it, “cans are constitutionally iffy”.

Failure to achieve our chosen goals is as much a feature of life as success. This may be less evident than it might otherwise be because we often pre-empt failure by accepting our limitations in advance of any endeavour to push against them.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST FREE WILL: LAWS AND CAUSES

Before we look at the case against free will, it is a good idea to settle on a definition of what is being attacked and, indeed, what is being defended in this book. The definition by Robert Kane in his excellent The Significance of Free Will captures what matters: “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators (or originators) and sustainers of their own ends and purposes”.

Perhaps “ultimate creators (or originators)” is to make a claim that is difficult to sustain. So let us drop “ultimate” and unpack what is important in a less ambitious idea of free will. It implies:

• 1. That we can truly say of at least some of our behaviour that “I am responsible for this”.

• 2. That our actions have deflected the course of events: we make a difference and that difference is not merely an inflection by our bodies of the predetermined course of events passing through us.

• 3. That our actions express something within us that we can truly own and justifiably own up to.

• 4. That as agents we have explicit ends and purposes that truly belong to us.

• 5. And that what we have done is one of several possibilities genuinely open to us such that we could have done or chosen otherwise.

Since I do not claim that we exercise our freedom by breaking or entirely bypassing the so-called laws of nature, my position is compatibilist: I will argue that determinism in the natural world is compatible with human freedom.

My position is a modest one, in that I do not believe that everything that human agents do is driven by something called the will. Nor does the claim that we are the originators of our actions imply that, unassisted, we magic ourselves and our actions into being.

For many determinists their vision of the world and of their place in it is what we might call Laplacian, after the great physicist Pierre Laplace. In his Essai philosophique sur les probabilities, Laplace argued as follows:

The future state of the universe, including of those entities in it who fancy themselves as free agents, is entirely predictable because it is fixed once initial conditions are established. Everything unfolds in accordance with the laws of nature. An omniscient being – Laplace's oddly named (but not by Laplace) Demon – could predict what would happen to me and how I would behave long before I had any idea of either of these things. As Peter van Inwagen has put it, “there is, at any instant exactly one physical possible future”. The idea of my exercising choice – and hence choosing between one future and another – is fantasy.

As we shall see, the “intelligence” to which Laplace referred, the demon, has no place in the Laplacian universe. Nor would Laplace himself, the discoverer of his eponymous law, be accommodated in the law-bound world picture he offers in the passage we have quoted. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

And then there is causal necessity. Is it not true that my actions – material events arising in a material body – are the effects of prior causes whose ancestry precedes my being born, stretching back, perhaps, to the Big Bang?

Thus, a double whammy for any claim to true agency, to my being a genuine source of my actions, shaping my own future and that of at least a small part of the universe.

WHAT REAL ACTIONS LOOK LIKE

Our critical examination in Section 1.2 of neurodeterminism and of experiments that supposedly demonstrated that we are the helpless puppets of unconscious processes in our brains was not entirely a waste of time. At the very least, it was an opportunity to remind ourselves of something not captured in the neuroscience lab: the nature of real actions in real life. Agency is not tacked together out of discrete movements, except insofar as those movements are part of something much bigger – as when, for example, I may raise my hand to vote at the end of a discussion. The exercise of the free will is typically to be found in large-scale actions that are interconnected with, or at least make sense in the light of, other actions.

Connected with this, and contrary to what some neurodeterminists seem to believe, free will is not a matter of trains of atomic urges resulting in twitches. While actions in the physiology laboratory may be teased apart into separate physical movements, they are irreducibly compound, being part of, indeed constituting, the ongoingness of our lives. A combined electromyographic and kinetic account of what is happening in and to my limbs would give no hint as to what I am doing, why, and how it fits into my present situation or long stretches of my life.

One way of putting this would be to say the free will is to be found in a field of volition. It is here that we will find the sense of ordinary voluntary activity, such as picking up the kids from school, making time to telephone a friend to offer condolences, or planning a holiday. Such actions weave together countless movements, requisitioned to serve a network of connected purposes. The field, or world, from which these actions draw their meaning is deep, wide, without a clear-cut boundary, and is often shared with others. In short, no action is an island. Nor is any agent. Voluntary actions are integrated with one another in our individual and communal hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, lives. They are woven into the complex embroidery of journeys that is a life.

I have described freedom as an “impossible reality”. Its origin is not to be found in the material world and the habits of nature portrayed in the laws and causes of natural science. There are two possible conclusions to be drawn from this: either that our belief in freedom is an illusion; or that natural science, and the simplified metaphysics we take from it, are incomplete accounts of the world and, importantly, of human life. This volume has been devoted to arguing for the second conclusion, not the least because I do not think we should deny the reality of something just because we cannot understand how it is possible when we look at the world through the lens of objective, quantitative science.

That the scientific gaze cannot accommodate free will is to be expected. Science seeks fundamental, underlying, unchanging patterns beneath all change and must therefore look straight past or through the realm where freedom is exercised. It cannot accommodate the perspective on nature that a subject has, even less account for the transformation of what-is into a situation which requires action, or into initial conditions that are the platform for such action. There is equally little place for the sense that the present moment, far from being an involuntary inheritance we are stuck with, is a starting point, a point of departure to a chosen future, not predetermined by the habits of nature.

As many philosophers have pointed out, natural science has progressed by removing from its interpretation of the world precisely the subjective consciousness and its intentionality that makes agency possible. The consciousness of human subjects is also that which makes science, its search for laws and causes, possible. If we were not able individually and collectively to approach the habits of nature from without, those habits could not have been discovered and exploited to create the technology by which we are able to predict and manipulate the natural world with ever-increasing power. If the world were the physical world, and the physical world that which is revealed through physics, there would be no physics to reveal it. Physics cannot explain physics.

ALTERNATIVE CANDIDATES FOR A CAUSAL PARTNERSHIP UNDERPINNING AGENCY

Final dismantling of event-causation of action

It will be obvious from the previous chapter that any “causes” I mobilize to bring about “effects” that count as the goal of my action will not be discrete spatio-temporal stretches of happening such as those who have a realist view of causes imagine are served up by the physical world innocent of the intentions of agents. Crucially, the goals of successful actions will not be defined in terms of their physical properties – which is the other side of the fact that intentions can be realized in a multitude of ways. There is no satisfactory physical description of the fulfilment of an intention to go to London to make the case for improving stroke services, let alone a unique or definitive one.

This is signalled from the beginning. In the initial conditions that we set off from to our goal, we exploit events and states of affairs that we single out in relation to a situation which demands something of us in order that we shall achieve what our interests require of us or (more tellingly) we require of ourselves. This situation transcends discrete, demarcated events that tradition and common sense classify as causes and even their surrounding conditions; indeed, what brings about our actions is not something that weaves itself out of material events. Where there is a so-called cause of our action, it figures as an opportunity which, notwithstanding its physical reality, is gathered up or unified by an idea, a unification that is delivered in part by a future possibility equally defined by an idea.

In short, nothing essential to voluntary activity is captured in the idea of material responses to material stimuli, in which the former are discrete physical effects of the latter understood as discrete physical causes. Replacing “material causes” by “mental causes” does not help in the slightest for reasons set out in our previous discussion of propositional attitudes.

Of course, there are some elements of human behaviour that seem to be mere responses to stimuli understood as biologically mediated causes – as when I withdraw my foot having stood on a sharp object, duck as a missile comes towards me, jump at a loud bang, or absent-mindedly scratch an itch.

REALISM AND ANTI-REALISM

In an attempt to free the idea of the laws of nature from something that has legislative or regulative power – a hangover, perhaps, from pre-scientific intuitions of God-ordained fate – we have spoken of “the habits” of nature, with reference to the uniformity of its manner of unfolding. The habits are not distinct from nature and hence are not imposed on it. Things don't “obey” their own habits. If those habits are universal and unalterable, however, they are no more open to negotiation than would be the most rigid and “pushy” laws.

But an important point remains: if we close the distance between nature and its patterns of behaviour by replacing “laws” with “habits” we correspondingly widen the distance between nature and the laws of science. At the very least, the laws of science are laws about nature and so cannot be identical with the latter. The question therefore arises as to whether, or to what extent, the laws of science are, or could ever be, undistorted articulations of the habits of nature. Are they faithful portraits of how nature fundamentally “goes” and of the stuff in which those habits are expressed; or are they merely useful instruments – cognitive tools to assist us to predict and manipulate the natural world? There are reasons for favouring the latter – the so-called instrumentalist or anti-realist interpretation of the laws of science.

The most obvious come from reflection on the history of science which suggests that all laws hitherto discovered have proved to be provisional, approximate, incomplete, or sometimes plain wrong. They are up for endless revision or replacement. To this process, there seems to be no end in sight. The incompatibility between the two most powerful and fundamental scientific theories – quantum mechanics and general relativity – is a striking challenge to faith in a gradual progression towards an entirely realistic portrait of the habits of nature. The increasingly desperate but unsuccessful attempts to unite and reconcile those two grand theories – of which 10-dimensional string theory is only the most absurd and inconceivable – gives ammunition to the instrumentalist position.

THE ENACTIVIST CORRECTIVE: ABSORBED COPING

Much of this book has been a corrective to those who see us as natural objects wired into nature. An unintended consequence may have been to suggest that we are somehow entirely cut off from nature and live at a spectatorial distance from the material world. For many contemporary philosophers, this kind of thinking is the last trace of a departing Cartesian ghost. The idea that actions are in some sense driven by, informed by, or even prompted by, propositional attitudes – such as desires, less full-blooded ones such as beliefs, even more anaemic ones such as intentions, and entirely bloodless ones such as reasons – is untrue, they argue, to the reality of voluntary behaviour. We are not mere spectators who, every now and then, choose to dirty ourselves by engaging with the material world.

This is not the view that is advanced in this book; nor is it one with which I am in agreement. Yes, and crucially, we are able to operate on a material world with and in the service of our material bodies from an outside opened up by intentionality and greatly expanded by the joining of intentionality within ourselves (notably through memory) and with that of others to create the vast realm of knowledge and expertise supplemented by technology. But we are not metaphysical flâneurs, engaging with that world as and when and how we like. What we do is part of an ongoing life. We are swimming in a sea into which we are often thrown by events. Our daily existence, that is to say, is not as reflective and elective as the emphasis on the central role of propositional attitudes in our behaviour may suggest to some.

Some determinists argue that all physical events are not only law-governed but also the inescapable effects of prior events – their causes. Since behaviour must take place in, and make a difference to, the physical world, the idea of actions as a metaphysically privileged category of happenings expressing an agency free from the bondage of causation is therefore fantasy. Even when actions are motivated by “internal events” such as explicit intentions, beliefs, hopes, or the idea of an immediate or distant goal, so the argument continues, they are no less determined from without. Internal events are the effects (and subsequently causes) of external events.

Intentions, reasons, wishes and such-like are simply intermediate (presumably physical) causes located between physical inputs understood as stimuli and physical outputs understood as responses. These intermediaries have either been implanted as biological instincts or “drives”; or they are the consequences of cultural conditioning, the latter being rooted in biology and hence ultimately in the physical world. Even when we do exactly as we want we are not acting freely because we have not chosen the wants that cause our actions. Those wants have a causal ancestry that ultimately lies outside of us.

In short, actions are part of the natural order and are themselves natural phenomena. This is necessary if they are to interact on level terms with the rest of the natural world. The movement of the arm of a person who picks up a stone to throw it is, and must be, as subject to Newton's laws as is the flight of the stone and what happens when the stone falls to the ground.

There can be few more dispiriting ideas than that our freedom is an illusion. I can testify to this when, as a teenager, I was assailed from time to time by the terrible thought that my behaviour, and indeed my whole life, might be predetermined by forces and circumstances which were not of my choosing.

The claim that we have no control over the contents of our lives requires little by way of detailed or sophisticated argument. The man in the pub or the woman on the Clapham omnibus will remind you that actions are physical events. As such, they must be the result of prior causes and subject to the laws of nature that, by definition, admit of no exception. The difference between mere happenings and human doings is therefore apparent rather than real. It must also follow that choice is an illusion since, at any given time, there is only one future. Jenann Ismael (who does not share this view) expressed it thus: “As you toss and turn in the throes of a difficult decision, there is really only one possible outcome. You are no freer to choose otherwise, than water is to flow uphill”.

Like many, perhaps most, determinists my teenage self did not consistently embrace the consequences of his belief. After all, he took pride in some of his achievements – sufficient to let them occasionally slip out in the conversation – and he did not hesitate to pass judgement on himself and, more often, on others. In practice, he regarded humans, for the most part, as moral agents responsible for their actions.

The theoretical impossibility of free will is, it seems, difficult to accept in practice. Arguments leading to conclusions that no-one seems to take seriously may appear to the busy world to condemn philosophy as lacking true seriousness – a fault that may seem more reprehensible in a world engulfed, as it is at the time of writing, in a pandemic. Not as irritating as, say, Zeno's paradoxes demonstrating that motion, and indeed any sort of change, is not possible, but nevertheless bad enough.

At the heart of the arguments I shall present for the reality of human freedom and, indeed, of our distinctive agency, is what is called “intentionality”. Intentionality is a notion that has had a venerable history. It was there in ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy, and was important to Stoic and medieval philosophers. Since it was revived by the German philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century, intentionality has had a central presence in so-called continental philosophy and, in recent decades, in the analytical philosophy of mind. For philosophers “intentionality” may seem all-too-familiar and for non-philosophers technical and obscure. Notwithstanding the technicality of the term, it is something whose essential nature can be grasped by a moment's thought. Its apparent simplicity, however, is deceptive. Intentionality, like the concept of “the atom” in physics, has proved to be a gift that keeps on giving.

Intentionality is “the mark of the mental”. It is what distinguishes mental states or events such as perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires from other items in the world. It is “the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties, and states of affairs”.2 Importantly, these items are other than, and distinct from, those mental states. While intentionality is a fundamental and universal feature of mental states or entities, no physical entity has this feature. Physical events may be (or, as we shall see, may not be) causally related to other events but they are not about them.

How mental states relate to what they are about will vary according to the state in question. It will be different in perceptions, beliefs, knowledge, thoughts and desires. There is, however, something that they have in common and it is this, as we shall see, that accounts for the possibility of truly voluntary action. The relationships of “aboutness” between our mental states and the external world hold open a space between ourselves as conscious subjects and the world (or perhaps worlds) to which we relate as the theatre of our lives.

Some readers may feel that there is a serious omission in this volume: a discussion of whether or not animals are true agents and the extent of any freedom they may have. There are several reasons for not engaging with this controversial topic. The first is that my central purpose has been to defend the possibility of human freedom. The second is that many of the arguments around animal freedom are empirical and draw on contested interpretations of their behaviour. The third is that the topic of animal versus human consciousness and behaviour is one I have discussed elsewhere at some length. In a range of books, I have highlighted what I believe to be a huge gap between ourselves and other living creatures, even our nearest primate kin.1 While I believe it is clear that other animals do not seem to be free to the extent, or in the manner, that we are, a few words on the question of whether they have any freedom of the kind that we have discussed seem justified.

In this book have argued that human freedom is rooted in the following characteristics of our human being:

• 1. A consciousness marked by full-blown and shared intentionality;

• 2. The intentions, beliefs, desires, hopes, reasons, and envisaged goals that lie at the heart of actions;

• 3. The ability to entertain and share explicit possibilities;

• 4. Tensed time, with a developed sense of the future informed by an explicit past;

• 5. And, growing out of this, an ability – whose most sophisticated expression is the discovery and exploitation of the laws of nature – to approach the material world from an ever-expanding outside offset from what-is.

It might seem to follow from this that genuine agency is unique to human beings. While it seems likely that the consciousness of higher animals has some intentionality, it is not developed in the way it is in humans, not the least because of the absence of the kind of communication that fills our human days. We do not have direct evidence on this issue, but it seems reasonable to suppose that, for example, beliefs, knowledge, and thoughts, the holistic spaces created out of them, that are central to agency, are not present in animals, or not to anything like the degree they are present in humans.