Free Will Part 2 — How Our View of Free Will Shapes Society

An argument for “Fragile Free Will” as the most useful and productive for building a better world.

Preview…

In the previous article, I established a necessary framework for any functional discussion of free will. I argued that the term is useless unless we first deconstruct it into three distinct components: Freedom (the external factors that define our range of choices), Agency (the internal factors of competence and capability), and Will (the motivational impetus for our actions). I further proposed that what we call "free will" is not an innate given, but an emergent capacity that we manifest through the use of memory (reflection) and imagination (prospection).

For this next chapter, I am going to focus on the importance of this debate. While many online tend to treat it as a fun “shock” topic, the reality is that the collective thinking or social "zeitgeist" on free will has serious implications for civilization.

This is because, as a society, how we think about free will is a matter of life and death.

The topic is, perhaps, the most lethal philosophical debate in civilization, forming the building blocks for nearly every system of justice, governance, and atrocity ever committed. When we ask, "Do we have free will?" we are really asking, "What is the value of a human life?" and "How much responsibility do we bear for our actions and for each other?"

Our answers to these questions, whether conscious or not, have created the world we live in. Before we can debate the science of determinism, we must first confront the devastating consequences of our flawed philosophies….

NOTE: This is a companion article to the YouTube video which can be watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEwDZAKLpyY | The purpose of this article is to provide a deeper and more scholarly dive into the topics discussed. The full article can only be read on Medium.com, the link to the full article is provided below: