Personal Morality and Free Will

I'm not one to neglect my responsibilities as a secular humanist, but it's only tonight that I broke the spine of this month's edition of Free Inquiry magazine. The editor, Paul Kurtz opens the issue with the question of Personal Morality. Your titular expectations may lead you down the path of, say, vicarious redemption, free will, or personal responsibility, but rather, Kurtz approaches the issue by first accepting a commonly wavered conceit; to be "a secularist or an atheist", he suggests, "is no guarantee of ethical high-mindedness or moral integrity". I agree, although I would argue that you're facing the right direction if you adopt these labels correctly. His piece hinges not on the autonomy of the individual or the assumption of a metaphysical extension of human understanding, but instead he emphasises the importance of personal integrity among secularists.

Secular humanists need to support individual autonomy, freedom of choice, and the right of privacy. Those who are committed to the open, pluralistic, democratic society prize tolerance and respect diversity.

All of which is true. However, he ploughs the fields of the metaphysical when asserting our "freedom of choice". Personal morality, he rightly notes, stems from our evolutionary development, wherein compassion, emotional solidarity, empathy, and the desire to survive were hard-wired into our consciousness. Do we, in fact, have "freedom" at all? Perhaps freedom is illusory, resulting from a conflict of desires. When conflicting impulses collide, in increasingly complex scenarios, we, as humans, are forced to, shall we say, make a choice. Though, we must accept, that this choice is based solely on the singular merits of each, and the repercussions of others. Kurtz addresses this notion in another essay for the magazine, entitled, A Short Primer on Secular Ethics, in which he states:

Some individuals may never fully develop morally — they may be morally handicapped, even sociopathic. That is one reason society needs to enact laws to protect itself.

Indeed, laws, and the inherent punishment, constitute a repercussion. Clearly, one is morally compelled to argue that laws, and the implementation of punishment, are an imperative deterrent to the would-be criminal. And so, when we discuss personal morality, we must accept that the governing of impulses and actions have been affected over our evolutionary history by self-imposed and outwardly imposed laws. This adds to the illusion of free will, as we appear, in our own psyche, to weigh up the positive effects of a deed against the negative. This topic is tackled, albeit not exhaustively, by my friend and relapsed bloggerist, Thom. In his essay, Is determinism inherent due to our linear perception of time?, he had the following to add to the debate:

Specifically, what of moral responsibility? If what I am arguing is true then would it not be acceptable for anyone in court being convicted of a crime to use the excuse of, ‘But it was already determined for me to commit the crime, from the beginning of time.’ My argument in response to this is that whilst we may not be responsible in a cosmically determined sense, we each still possess individual agency and to a certain extent, even if it is illusory, free will. We have the capacity to analyse the potential consequences of any action that we ‘choose’ to commit and in choosing to commit a crime you have to accept the fact that you may be caught and punished for it. If the criminal were to use the determinist argument in defence of his actions then it would equally be perfectly rational for the jury and judge to claim that it is determined that they go to prison for their actions, as if it is only through determinism that they are arguing their criminal actions arose then surely they would have no defence against being punished. To a certain degree, a justice system based on moral responsibility relies on free will having some bearing in reality, and so the concept of free will can perhaps be said to be more of a practical product of necessity in society whilst simultaneously being inherently illusory.

Thom's expansion upon the argument against free will acutely recognizes that it is, at once, a facile debate. Even the illusion of free will is enough for it to penetrate our legal system, and whether we have, as Kurtz argued, a "freedom of choice", is irrelevant. However, the question of personal morality is not, and I fear the debate needs to rage for some time to come.