A question of free will
Free will comes up at various points in Straw Dogs; the main treatment is in section 11 of The Deception (pp 64-69) entitled Lord Jim’s Jump. Lord Jim is a reference to the novel by Joseph Conrad (which I have not read). The jump in question is a jump to safety from an apparently sinking ship. Jim spends the remainder of the book grappling with the implications of this jump, in which he feels he has betrayed himself and the seaman’s ethic of bravery and service. The question, of course, is “was he responsible for this action, or could he have acted otherwise?”
Gray says that we cannot choose to be what we are born, so in that case we cannot be responsible for what we do. He then goes on to make a much more specific point: that recent research has shown that the “electrical impulse to initiate action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act” (p66). This, he says, has weakened the notion of free will even more. Recent research on mirror neurons, reported in a recent Scientific American, supports this. In general, the vast majority of neural activity involved in any action takes place at an unconscious level. But the major decisions we take in our life are not of this nature. A soldier is trained to respond both to obey orders, and to respond “appropriately” in a variety of circumstances, involving immediate threat or dire consequences if the wrong action is taken, in an unthinking and automatic way; pause for thought can often be fatal. But the decision to become a soldier was taken at a conscious level and perhaps even in a reflective manner.
Of course in a society where war is glorified, personal honour is satisfied by valiant conduct in battle, and perhaps there is an external threat, then many will become soldiers wihout giving it much if any thought. But then it has always been the case that mankind, en masse, is predictable. It does not however follow that a given individual is predictable. The training to obey orders deals largely with orders that require immediate action. The injunction that a soldier should obey all orders includes those involving future action, such as the killing of all women and children. The decision to obey such orders (or not) is categorically different from the decision to attack when threatened, or a shouted order to “fire”. In the latter case, the “decision” is outside conscious control, and is of the same nature as Jim’s decision, which haunted him for the rest of his life.
Most of us are not trained to act in an automatic fashion to specific circumstances, but we still find ourselves regretting our actions and impulses. Just as the solder is trained to act in a particular way (and can subsequently be retrained to act differently), so can we all train ourselves to react differently in future, and this brings back the notion of personal responsibility. In this sense, we are responsible even for those actions governed by the half-second phenomenon, in the same way that a drunk is responsible for his actions as he had the prior choice to become drunk or not, knowing what the likely consequences would be if he did.
On the wider topic of freedom of will: it seems that there are two separate questions: whether our every action is determined by a combination of our internal brain state at any given instant, combined with all the external inputs that are impinging on that brain state, and whether, by genetic predisposition and our life experiences (think of the the child soldiers trained to kill), we can ever be free, outside of a narrow band of possible choices, to escape this “programming” and freely adopt a different framework, of our choosing, for our beliefs and consequent actions. One might categorise these two as theoretical, or philosophical free will, and practical free will.
Gray has little to say on the former. It is essentially unknowable; there is no way, even in principle, in which we can evaluate the state of the universe at any instant, in order to predict what will happen next to any individual. To do so would involve stepping outside the universe into a higher frame of reference, which by definition is impossible. Even if we replace universe by world and thereby allow this higher universal frame of reference, there is no way that any prediction can be fed back to an individual inhabiting the world without changing the state of the individual and therefore the world, which would necessitate a new prediction, and thereby an infinite regression. So we have to act as if we have free will; we have no other choice.
Regarding practical free will - Gray states that we are not free in the way stated above. Again I think that he is extending the predictability of the masses - the above child killers will on the whole lead short, wretched and brutal lives - to that of the individual - there are those who have escaped this web of catastrophic circumstance to resume life as what we would regard as members of the wider human race. It is a truism to say that the lives of the vast majority of people are governed by circumstance and they fit in, largely unquestioning, into whatever framework they have been born and bred into (human society would not function were this not so). But I think that Gray is saying more than this; he is denying freedom of will, in the sense of control over life choices, per se. In this, I do not think that he has proved his point.
Finally, I do not think that whether we are free or not necessarily has implications for the way in which we order civil society. If we do not have free will, then nobody is responsible for their actions, but the whole system of criminal justice in that case is something that has evolved, without our having had any deliberate part in it, to create a society in which order prevails, social disruption is kept to a minimum and the notion of social engineering, or rehabilitation, returns to society those who can play a useful part in it. Societies organised along these lines will be successful, and we must therefore suppose that there has evolved a predisposition to organise society along such lines, in which we behave as if we have free will, and therefore notions of punishment and rehabilitation fit naturally into this framework. We also have notions of degree of culpability, in which the individual’s greater or lesser responsibility, depending on external circumstances, determines the extent of the punishment. In all of this we assume that the individual ultimately is responsible for her actions but whether this is so or not, the system is a universal framework to deal with deviant behaviour.