Who Bears the Burden of Proof Regarding Free Will: Advocates or Skeptics

Question

Debates on free will often raise the question of evidence: who will have the best evidence? However, before discussing evidence, I would like to know who bears this responsibility in philosophical and scientific discussions. Should it be borne by proponents asserting the existence of free will or by skeptics challenging its validity, given advances in neuroscience and psychology?

Answer 1

Honestly most of the answers here are absolute waffle. Here's the actual answer. Both of them. Burden of proof applies if you are making a claim. That's it. Sometimes people will emphasise the point more by saying 'positive claim' but that doesn't actually mean anything different in this context.

People are used to thinking only one side has burden of proof from arguments where someone is trying to convince the other party of their claim and the other party is not believing. The important thing is that these situations only arise if the other party PURELY lacks belief in the claim, NOT if they also start arguing the opposite or for an alternative.

The most widespread example I think people will have picked up on this is arguments on the existence of God. The atheist shouldn't be expected to 'prove' God isn't real because they're not claiming anything, they're simply currently unconvinced by the claims of others. However, if this atheist then made the claim that God ISN'T real (not just that they currently don't believe it is), they would also have a separate burden of proof for this claim. You can flip the situation by removing the believer's claim. If a believer is minding their own business and someone just starts claiming to them that God isn't real, they should not be expected to prove that God is real, lest the atheists claim be treated as correct.

To finalise the point, an advocate for the existence of free will has the burden of proving their claim. The skeptic also has the burden of proving their claim. If one of these sides dropped their claim and was simply considering and critiquing the claim of the other side, THEN there would be one side whom had the burden of proof (who would be whichever side was making the claim).

Answer 2

The Burden of Proof isn't an absolute property. There's no experiment you can perform on a person, a brain, or a position to show that that thing has the burden of proof.

The Burden of Proof is a social construct. Consider that in physics, there's a concept of inertia: objects at rest stay at rest, objects in motion stay in motion. In the realm of ideas and beliefs, the same concept is there: we have inertia with respect to our ideas. Just like it takes work to change the motion of an object, it takes work to change the beliefs of a person or of a group of people.

The Burden of Proof is a way of expressing the need for that work. If you want me to change my beliefs, you must put in some work to overcome my inertia.

If you don't have any desire to change someone's beliefs, then you also have no burden.

Answer 3

Human beings work on a presumption of free will; few people (outside of certain psychological disorders) believe they have absolutely no control over their actions moment to moment. Therefore the burden of proof lies with the determinists.

This is exactly the same as the belief that the sun rises and sets. This is how the world presents itself to direct sensory experience, and so the burden of proof fell on physicists to show that (in fact) the Earth rotates giving the appearance of the sun rising and setting. It may be that the presumption of free will is wrong, but until determinism is demonstrated through some empirical research we must (perforce) go with the way our minds present to us, as having a capacity for free will.

It's ridiculously easy to assert a counterfactual; every precocious adolescent does it with abandon. But counterfactuals are only as useful as the evidence supporting them. The argument against free will is (currently) a purely theoretical counterfactual that flies against what seems to us to be true. I won't quibble with the framework, but it lacks any connective tissue.

Answer 4

In dealing with our world, we have developed pragmatic models of a) selfhood, b) agency c) a physical world d) other mind are agents, etc for a large suite of conventional worldview assumptions. These models are developed in infancy and early childhood, and have the support of empirical pragmatism.

Denials of free will, agency, selfhood, time, consciousness, the external world, mathematics, morality or values, etc therefore have a burden of proof to overturn our cumulative pragmatically evidenced worldview.

Answer 5

From my perspective, both proponents and skeptics of free will should shoulder the responsibility of providing arguments. Proponents must offer compelling evidence demonstrating the compatibility of free will with scientific understandings of determinism, while skeptics should present thorough analyses of scientific findings in neuroscience and psychology that challenge the concept of free will.

Answer 6

If you have free will, you can decide whether you want to give evidence for your opinion of not. If you don’t have free will, then you don’t have the choice. And of course your opinion may not agree with reality.

So this is a weird question. Most questions about free will are weird.

Answer 7

the burden of proof lies on proving existential claims: if one claims that "there exist (a) non-white swan(s)", then they better exhibit a concrete example

this happens because the logic of empirical matters and observations is not classical, but constructive: even if it's possible to somehow 'prove' ¬∀x¬φ(x), the proof may fail to explicitly provide an object a such that φ(a) holds, and in such cases asserting ∃xφ(x) becomes suspicious; dually, it's not in general possible to "prove non-existence", that is, ¬Exφ(x), for this entails ∀x¬φ(x): even if all swans were in fact (non-non-) white, how could we hope to prove so?

just think about it: if some purported object simply happens to not exist, how exactly would it leave traces or evidence behind it, and of what kind?

Answer 8

Free will is not a theory or any matter of belief. Free will is a matter of definition. Free will is just a name given to a phenomenon that can be either real or imaginary.

Within the framework of one definition there are no advocates or skeptics. The definition tells, whether free will is a real phenomenon or an imaginary one.

In the absence of one "official" definition the debate is about what would be the most appropriate definition for free will. In any case free will exists, we just have to define what it is.

Answer 9

There are "existence" claims on both sides of the determinism/libertarianism debate. Both sides in some sense claim that something exists, either complete determinism or freedom of will (*).

One can certainly have a preference or disposition towards one position, of the debate, without necessarily having to justify this thesis to anyone. For example, one position might feel more natural in relation to the other. Certainly, in this sense, we all act under the unmistakable sense of having a degree of agency, and, denying the reality of this feeling is something of an extraordinary claim, in need of similar extraordinary justification.

In spite of the above, we can scrutinize the arguments one may use one way or another.

Determinists have to argue for the actual existence of complete determinism. Partial determinism, which is what science has observed and established up to now, does not mean complete determinism and failure of libertarianism. In fact, partial determinism is required by libertarian position. At most, established partial determinism can be used as a hint for the hypothetical existence of complete determinism that nevertheless needs to be verified.

Libertarians, on the other hand, need to argue for freedom of will. Lack of freedom or freedom that is not willed cannot do. Libertarians can point to established partial determinism as supporting free will by enabling both freedom, and a form of causality, both needed as prerequisites for willing. Furthermore they can point to various, objective and subjective, ways a free action can be attributed as up to the agent. For example, a) stated goals are indeed reached with such high probability that is substantially statistically significant than pure chance and/or complete lack of agency would make possible, or b) the existence of the irreducible sense of willing that cannot simply be explained away as global illusion, etc..

(*) Compatibilism in the sense of fully deterministic (unfree) will is not addressed separately but there are arguments addressing it here or there above. That said, will that does not actually will anything, since everything is bound to happen anyway, is rather a meaningless concept.

So, weight the arguments and feel free to choose..

Some references:

1. Why the Classical Argument Against Free Will Is a Failure, Mark Balaguer

[..]There’s a big problem with the classical argument against free will. It just assumes that determinism is true. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. But it’s actually not a commonsense truism. One of the main lessons of 20th-century physics is that we can’t know by common sense, or by intuition, that determinism is true. Determinism is a controversial hypothesis about the workings of the physical world. We could only know that it’s true by doing some high-level physics. Moreover — and this is another lesson of 20th-century physics — as of right now, we don’t have any good evidence for determinism. In other words, our best physical theories don’t answer the question of whether determinism is true. [...]Despite the failure of the classical argument, the enemies of free will are undeterred. They still think there’s a powerful argument to be made against free will. In fact, they think there are two such arguments. Both of these arguments can be thought of as attempts to fix the classical argument, but they do this in completely different ways.

[...]The first new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a scientific argument — starts with the observation that it doesn’t matter whether the full-blown hypothesis of determinism is true because it doesn’t matter whether all events are predetermined by prior events. All that matters is whether our decisions are predetermined by prior events. And the central claim of the first new-and-improved argument against free will is that we have good evidence (from studies performed by psychologists and neuroscientists) for thinking that, in fact, our decisions are predetermined by prior events.

The second new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a philosophical argument, not a scientific argument — relies on the claim that it doesn’t matter whether determinism is true because indeterminism is just as incompatible with free will as determinism is. The argument for this is based on the claim that if our decisions aren’t determined, then they aren’t caused by anything, which means that they occur randomly. And the central claim of the second new-and-improved argument against free will is that if our decisions occur randomly, then they just happen to us, and so they’re not the products of our free will.

2. Why There Are No Good Arguments for Any Interesting Version of Determinism, Mark Balaguer

This paper considers the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. Libertarianism requires a very strong version of indeterminism, so it can be refuted not just by universal determinism, but by some much weaker theses as well. However, it is argued that at present, we have no good reason to believe even these weak deterministic views and, hence, no good reason — at least from this quarter — to doubt that we are libertarian free. In particular, the paper responds to various arguments for neural and psychological determinism, arguments based on the work of people like Honderich, Tegmark, Libet, Velmans, Wegner, and Festinger.

3. An Argument for Libertarian Free Will: Hard Choices Based on either Incomparable or Equally Persuasive Reasons, Randall Firestone

This articles proposes that the best explanation for hard choices, which are choices made when there are either incomparable options or equally appeal- ing options, is the presence of libertarian free will; and that the two main al- ternatives, determinism and random choice, do not provide us with very compelling explanations. In the case of determinism, this is because the rea- sons supporting each option do not dictate or necessitate that we choose that option, and therefore any decision is necessarily underdetermined by the rea- sons for each option. Random choice fares no better since any choice made when the options are incomparable or equally appealing is supported by rea- sons and therefore is not random at all. As such, we should believe in free will.

4. A rationalist argument for libertarian free will, Stylianos Panagiotou

In this thesis, I give an a priori argument in defense of libertarian free will. I conclude that given certain presuppositions, the ability to do otherwise is a necessary requirement for substantive rationality; the ability to think and act in light of reasons. ‘Transcendental’ arguments to the effect that determinism is inconsistent with rationality are predominantly forwarded in a Kantian manner. Their incorporation into the framework of critical philosophy renders the ontological status of their claims problematic; rather than being claims about how the world really is, they end up being claims about how the mind must conceive of it. To make their ontological status more secure, I provide a rationalist framework that turns them from claims about how the mind must view the world into claims about the ontology of rational agents. In the first chapter, I make some preliminary remarks about reason, reasons and rationality and argue that an agent’s access to alternative possibilities is a necessary condition for being under the scope of normative reasons. In the second chapter, I motivate rationalism about a priori justification. In the third chapter, I present the rationalist argument for libertarian free will and defend it against objections. Several objections rest on a compatibilist understanding of an agent’s abilities. To undercut them, I devote the fourth chapter, in which I give a new argument for incompatibilism between free will and determinism, which I call the situatedness argument for incompatibilism. If the presuppositions of the thesis are granted and the situatedness argument works, then we may be justified in thinking that to the extent that we are substantively rational, we are free in the libertarian sense.