It’s a question word that, like all the other question words, can be used stand-alone as a fully formulated question in response to someone making a statement to inquire about the most important pieces of meta information about that statement. “I’m going to eat dinner soon.” - “When?” - “At around 7 pm” - “Where?” - “At home” - “What?” - “Probably spaghetti” - “How?” - “With a fork” - “Why?” - “Because I always eat dinner around that time” - “Why?” - “Because I don’t want to go to bed hungry” - “Why?” - “Because I don’t want to suffer” - “Why?” - “Because … How old are you? Four?”
Yeah, children discover that you can keep asking “why?” at some point and then they weaponize this knowledge to annoy the hell out of their parents. Most of them stop after a few times of being denied to watch their favorite TV show before bedtime as a result. But some especially obnoxious children never stop and become philosophers. Of course they soon discover that finding the meaning of life is a bit more difficult than following the chain of “why?” all the way to the end. But they are all committed to die trying.
So here’s my hot-take: the question “why?” is always underspecified. It’s an inquiry about reason, but reason always needs context. The only reason it works as a stand-alone question is because the other person might be able to infer the context from the situation. But if you’re asking “why?” just for the sake of it, any attempt to answer it first requires a search for a valid context to answer it in. So if you can’t find a valid context for it, it’s tempting to construct one, independent of whether the answer in that context will actually have any meaning. Why is this a hot-take? Because that’s how I think morality was invented.
Imagine you’re walking down the street and see a homeless person begging for money, so you reach into your pocket and give them a few coins. As you walk on, you don’t need to be a philosopher to ask yourself “why did I just do that?”. You just lost some money, money that you owned. You didn’t gain anything from it and you didn’t expect to. It was obviously still useful to you, money always has utility. There was nothing threatening you either, if you had just continued walking, nothing would be different for you except that you’d have a few more coins in your pocket. But you didn’t and if you were actually honest to yourself, you’d admit that you don’t know why. It felt like the right thing to do, but that’s not a very satisfying explanation. You can’t have this! You can’t be acting in ways you cannot explain, that’s what mad people do. Quickly, let’s invent ethics!
Ethics gives you a nice framework to answer the inconvenient “why?” question. You did it because it was the right thing to do. Why? Because you should give to those in need. Why? Because you would like to be treated the same if you were in need. Do you see the chain of “why?” finally continue? Problem solved. We now have a field where regular people can satisfy their need to be able to explain their actions and philosophers can keep asking “why?” until David Hume puts them on his Guillotine.
But if you construct a whole axiomatic system of core values, primary goals and ought statements that balances a delicate system of considerations, instrumental goals and justice, does that really have anything to do with why you reached for those coins? Or is it simply because you and the beggar locked eyes for a split second. The sudden rush of humanity connecting your souls. The fear that a shift of circumstance might cause you to be in a similarly desperate situation at some point or the shame of how much better you have it right now. Maybe it’s the realization of how much your donation could mean to that person and the anticipation of positive hormones that will rush to your brain when you hear them mutter a “thank you”. It might also be an irrational superstition that this sacrifice will increase your luck in the transaction or that you happened to be thinking about another person at the moment who you would like to appeal to despite their absence. It’s probably a linear combination of all of the above and more that I can’t even think of right now.
If you are a philosophically minded person (and why would you be reading this if you weren’t?), you might consider this a rebuttal of free will. After all, what I’m saying is that your actions “just happen”. That human decision making is a nebulous mess of reasons, all considered in parallel and weighted by biochemistry so they are as difficult to disentangle and as fruitless to try to explain as the process of thinking itself. Where would that leave space for free will? But the question of free will is just as incomplete a question as “why?”. It’s just as dependent on context and the context is just as often neglected.
If I show you a picture of a double pendulum and ask you how many degrees of freedom there are, you might answer two, because that’s how many joints the pendulum has. But you might also answer four because each of those joints has a rotation and an angular velocity and that describes a state of the physical system. You might also say zero, because it’s a picture and you can’t change a picture. It’s a bit ridiculous, but it illustrates how “freedom” is also context dependent and it’s the same with our will. I don’t know if determinism holds and if a perfect simulation of you and the beggar could accurately predict how many coins you would give them. But that’s an empirical question and maybe we’ll find out at some point. But if you included the entire universe and everything you could base your decision on (no matter if science has names for it) in the context, even the outcome of any random process that might be involved, how could there be any “freedom” left? If anything would be able to make you decide differently, it would be included in the context by definition. So no matter what you think how it works, we can always construct a context where there’s no free will.
But if we only look at “you” in the sense of everything that you would consider your “self”, of course you (can) have free will! You might not understand how these decisions come to be, as they are made by a mind-numbingly complex set of processes but those processes *are* you (if you want)! It’s not a question about prediction, understanding or reasoning, it’s a question about identity. Turns out the most important word in the question “do you have free will?” is not “free will”. It is “you”. Decisions are being made. Are they yours? It’s a matter of definition.
Anyways, this post has become quite long again, so I’ll end it here. But if I had a coin for every time someone tries to find the value of a constant, not realizing they are actually looking at a function and need to specify arguments … I’d probably give it to a beggar.
