What Makes You You
3. The Desire Argument Against Free Action
Colton’s action in HYPNOTIC DECISION isn’t free.But why not? The natural answer is that, although he made a choice and did what he wanted to do, his desires weren’t under his control: he wasn’t in control of the overwhelming desire to tackle Kabir. What this
suggests is that freedom requires more than just making choices and doing what you desire to do. It requires that your desires be under your control as well. And this is the insight that drives the first of my two arguments against free action. The argument can be stated as follows:
The Desire Argument
(DS1) What you choose to do is always determined by your desires
(DS2) You can’t control your desires
(DS3) So, what you choose to do is always determined by something you can’t control
(DS4) If what you choose to do is always determined by something you can’t control, then you never act freely (DS5) So, you never act freely
By ‘desire’, I mean any kind of wanting, including passionately yearning for something, but also less dramatic things, like wanting to buy some new socks. Let us examine the idea behind each of the premises, and then I’ll turn to two ways that one might try to resist the argument.
Here is the idea behind DS1. You made a choice about what to have for lunch yesterday, and you chose to have Taco Bell rather than Panda Express. Why? Presumably, it’s because you had a stronger desire for Mexican food than for Chinese. Or perhaps you decided to stay home and make a salad for lunch.
Why? Because your desire to save money or for a healthy lunch was stronger than your desire for some delicious fast food.
Let me clarify what DS1 is not saying. DS1 doesn’t say that you always act on every desire you have. Obviously, you don’t act on all of your desires. In the case just mentioned, you stay home and make a salad despite having a strong desire for Taco Bell—
which perhaps haunts you with every bite of lettuce. What DS1 is saying, rather, is that the choices you make are always a function of the various things you want and how badly you want them.
Think of desires like soldiers on a battlefield. Your desire for Taco Bell is fighting for you to choose Taco Bell for lunch. Your somewhat weaker desire for Panda Express is fighting, somewhat less effectively, for you to choose Panda Express. Meanwhile,
your desire to save money has formed an alliance with your desires to eat healthy, to stay home, and to finish the produce in your fridge before it goes bad, all fighting for you to make a salad.
As it turns out, this alliance was strong enough to overpower your desires for Taco Bell and Panda Express. DS1 says that you always act on whichever desire (or alliance of desires) is strongest, not that you always act on every desire that you have.
To see the idea behind DS2, notice that we do not choose our desires. Perhaps you’re pre-med because you like helping people.
But it’s not as if, at some point, you chose to like helping people.
At some point you realized that this is your passion, and at some point you chose to pursue that passion, but at no point did you choose to be passionate about it. Nor did you at any point choose to like Mexican food better than Chinese food, or dogs better than cats. We don’t choose our likes and passions and desires; they come to us unbidden. (Returning to the battlefield metaphor, you don’t get to decide which soldiers are on the battlefield or which ones have the best gear.) So, it would seem that which desires we end up with is not the sort of thing that’s under our control.
The final premise, DS4, is motivated by our intuitions about HYPNOTIC DECISION. Even though Colton did choose to tackle Kabir (no one is denying that people make choices!), he didn’t freely choose to do so, and the best explanation for this is that his desire to tackle Kabir was not under his control. In other words, because his choices were being controlled by something (his desire) which was not itself under his control, his action is unfree.
Generalizing from that: an action can’t be free if it’s controlled by something that’s not under your control. And that’s exactly what DS4 is saying.
Some will be tempted to reject DS4, insisting that even if your choices are determined by desires that are outside your control, they’re still your choices and your desires, and that’s enough to make them free. But HYPNOTIC DECISION shows why that’s a misguided response. It’s plain to see that Colton wasn’t acting freely when he tackled Kabir. And yet it’s true that he chose to tackle Kabir, as a result of his desire to tackle Kabir. So, the mere fact that one’s actions are the product of one’s own desires and one’s own choices is not enough to make those actions free.
Now that we have seen why the premises of the argument are at least initially plausible, let me address two important objections. According to the first, DS1 should be rejected because one’s strongest desires do not always win out. According to the second, DS2 should be rejected because there are ways of controlling one’s desires.