Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a blog post suggesting that some forms of atheism make free will and moral reasoning absurd. Will Wilkinson responded by essentially saying that this is a psuedo-problem (link via Unqualified Offerings).

I think Wilkinson doesn’t really acknowledge the source of the worry here. He writes:

Here are two things you know: free will exists (it is obvious: go ahead, touch your nose) and the universe is made of whatever it is made of (obvious, if anything is). Therefore, you know the conjunction of those two things. Therefore, you know that the crazy proposition that says that one of them must be false isn’t true! There’s no need to get hung up on an arbitrary conjecture about the trascendental conditions for the very possibility of the existence of something when things you already know rule it out.

He seems to want to say that this is a psuedo-problem because we already know that we have free will, so whatever the universe turns out to be like must be compatible with that fact.

But the whole point of the worry about determinism or physicalism that Ponnuru originally raised was that, if the universe turned out to be a certain way, we might not have free will after all as we originally supposed. In other words, there are possible ways the universe might be that are, on closer inspection, incompatible with free will.

Wilkinson is certainly right that we can distinguish voluntary from involuntary actions, and that this distinction isn’t threatened by whatever metaphysical account of reality we come up with. But this isn’t the meaning of “free will” that people who worry about determinism and/or physicalism (incompatibilists in the philosophical jargon) usually have in mind.

There worry is something more like this: if the universe consists entirely of the sorts of things and events described by physics, then it seems that what we take to be actions based on reasoning and choice would turn out to be really explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, these laws make no reference to things like intention or value, so it would appear to be false that the cause of my choosing x was that I believed it to be the best course of action all things considered. Rather the real explanation would make reference to various physical events in my brain, body, and environment.

Essentially, it boils down to this: free will (in a deeper sense than just voluntary action) appears to be threatened if the real springs of our actions lie in non-rational causes, whether this be some Freudian subconscious motive or the interactions of subatomic particles. It is the question whether rational thought and choice are causally efficacious in virtue of their own unique properties, or whether they are “epiphenomena” generated by other non-rational causes.