TANSTAAFL!

On the varieties of free lunch worth having

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch! Or at least that’s what this acronym stands for. The pithy but unpronounceable term is a favorite rhetorical cudgel of libertarians, who are convinced that there is a deep truth in it: a core economic principle that (conveniently) justifies anti-social behavior and uncontrolled greed.

Libertarian SF writer Robert Heinlein popularized it in his novel, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress“, and libertarian economist Milton Friedman entitled one book “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch“, which is more grammatical but less catchy. The Libertarian Party put it on their flag made it their logo. And anytime anyone anywhere suggests helping people, libertarians can be counted on to repeat this mantra as if it was self-evident proof that morality is pointless and counterproductive.

The supposedly profound core is that even a meal you get to eat without paying for isn’t “truly” free because there’s a cost that someone, somewhere is paying, individually or even (gasp!) collectively. This is, depending on how you interpret it, either trivially true, significantly false, or completely irrelevant.

It is trivially true that even something that isn’t charged for is not free “all the way down“. Those “free” salty peanuts at the bar are more than paid for by the additional drinks that thirstier patrons buy. Here, the cost is displaced and concealed but remains.

It is significantly false, in that making something freely available can take advantage of economies of scale and create sufficient positive externalities to more than pay for itself. For example, the road system generates much more wealth for society than it costs to maintain, so not only don’t we bother charging people to cross the street, but these streets are better than free because they’re profitable. Charging money would make them less profitable by discouraging their use and creation.

It is completely irrelevant because, to the person eating it, the lunch is simply free. It might not be free in a way that satisfies a libertarian, but who cares? Libertarians are greedy idiots, so what they think doesn’t matter anyhow.

Idiocy is not rare. There’s a long history of deep thinkers mistakenly insisting that something is essential when it doesn’t even exist. They raise the bar impossibly high, then act as if it matters that nothing real can meet their arbitrarily high standard. The classic example of the failure of this essentialist approach is vitalism.

Like the rest, this one begins with people facing a question that, at the time, has no available answer and being unwilling to accept this with intellectual honesty. Not knowing what it is that makes an organism alive, some were not content with admitting they had no clue, but instead hung a lampshade on their ignorance by plastering over it with a meaningless label.

They declared that the source of life was some sort of “vital essence” (or if you’re French, or pretentious, “élan vital“). Like the God of the gaps argument, this spurious placeholder not only offers no additional explanatory value, but leads to artifacts and illusions because it creates a rift between the behavior and its cause. Due to their theoretical baggage, they find themselves compelled to deny the legitimacy of what is observed.

With vitalism, the obvious artifact is that it becomes logically possible for an organism to act in all ways as though it’s alive while somehow lacking that “vital essence” that is (they insist) required for “true” life. In this way, vitalism allows for the existence of zombies.

Worse, it makes it impossible, even in principle, to ever distinguish someone from a zombie because no amount of “merely acting” alive is (according to them) sufficient. And if you believe that a vital essence is required for life, then the absence of any evidence for such a thing must mean that nobody is “truly” alive; we’re all zombies.

A similar, but more explicitly religious, error is the dogma that what makes us alive is a supernatural essence; the soul. The result of this move is that anyone denying the existence of souls will be accused of denying the existence of life itself. If not for souls, they insist, we’d just be “bags of chemicals“. It’s zombiism all over again, only with Jesus.

Parallel to these errors is the claim that what makes us conscious is yet another ineffable and utterly undetectable essence: qualia, which are defined as experiences (somehow) severed from behavior and behavioral dispositions. A consequence is that, according to this idea, it is now possible for someone to act in all ways conscious while somehow not being conscious: a mindless philosophical zombie.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here, and it’s a frustrating one. It’s hard to know what to say to someone who insists that there’s more to a behavior than everything about the behavior itself, and who defines it so that no evidence about the matter is even logically possible.

Earlier, I casually (yet entirely fairly) bashed libertarianism, but this term has an older meaning from philosophy. In contrast to political libertarians, who are just greedy anarchists and Nazis, metaphysical libertarians are convinced that what makes free will possible is yet another very special essence.

According to them, the only reason we can be held accountable for our actions is that they are (somehow) uncaused, making them ours and ours alone. In other words, they define free will as will that is free from causality itself, and conclude that we obviously have it. They attribute this seemingly magical ability to everything from Cartesian dualism and God to emergence and quantum mechanics. (In other words, their excuses span both the genres of fantasy and science fiction.)

Ironically, the opposite-but-equal hard determinists agree on the requirements but disagree on whether they’ve been met. They say, correctly, that acausality is physically impossible. They say, incorrectly, that this means we don’t have free will. I don’t blame them, though, because they were obviously predetermined to make that mistake.

Collectively, these two groups are called incompatibilists because of their shared belief that determinism is incompatible with free will. If you try to tell a metaphysical libertarian that it’s physically impossible for our actions to be uncaused, they’ll accuse you of denying that you have free will. If you say the same to a hard determinist, they’ll nod and say that this proves you don’t have free will. Tweedledee, meet Tweedledum.

The shared mistake is that they misdefine free will. First they ask the wrong question, then they disagree about the answer. But a broken question can’t be answered, only itself questioned and ultimately unasked. It generates a problem that cannot be solved, only dissolved.

Free will is, first and foremost, a type of will; wanting some things over others. We are capable of wanting because we form beliefs about how the world is and ought to be. These are formed as the consequence of interacting with external reality.

The world at large causes our will, so anything interfering with this, whether it’s supernatural or random, only undermines that will. If you want something for no reason at all, in what sense do you want it?

Causality is a requirement for any sort of will; acausality doesn’t make our will free, it destroys it. So why would we even want our will to be free from cause? Why would we make it a requirement?

Incompatibilists believe that, if our choices are determined, then we can’t be held accountable for them. As in: “Sure, I killed her, but I was predetermined to do so, therefore it’s not my fault, so you have to let me walk.”

This is bad, not only because the conclusion is both morally repugnant and obviously mistaken, but because we actually want to be able to be held accountable and to hold others accountable in turn. Otherwise, how can we cooperate? Without it, we cannot form a social contract.

Consider a more literal contract. In order to make a binding agreement, both parties must accept a responsibility to follow it and be held accountable for choosing not to. But this is only possible if entering into it was your choice in the first place; if you agreed to it of your own free will.

If you sign a contract with a gun pointed at your head, you didn’t really have a choice. Rather, you acted under duress—under the control of another’s will—so you can’t be bound to it. Likewise, if you genuinely agree but then violate it at gunpoint, that too was under duress and therefore not your fault.

We don’t have will that’s free from causality, because that’s physically impossible, but we don’t need it because it doesn’t matter. Will that is free from duress is the only sort of free will required for us to be held accountable and to hold each other accountable. Freedom from duress is not only sufficient for this, but unlike freedom from causality, it’s actually possible. In fact, it’s ubiquitous.

The conclusion that causality and free will are compatible is, predictably, called compatibilism. Much as those who deny the existence of various other essences—élan vital, souls, qualia—are accused of denying the existence of what the essence purportedly explains, compatibilists are accused of denying that free will exists.

This is true and false. Compatibilists do deny that acausal free will exists, but they also deny that it’s the sort of free will we need and have. They believe in free will, but not Free Will. When they make this clear, they’re accused of equivocating, of lying about what free will is, but the issue is deeper than definitions.

While compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree about the meaning of “free will”, this isn’t a purely semantic argument. It’s not just about which sort of freedom is meant, but which matters: which one we ought to mean.

Therefore, compatibilism isn’t distinguished by its definition of free will, but by its endorsement of this sort of free will as ethically sufficient. All three stances agree that freedom from duress exists, but compatibilists are the only ones saying it is worthy of fulfilling the ethical role of free will.

Why do incompatibilists disagree? I suspect it’s because they are in the thrall of an ontological error. Attributes like will, and beliefs, and thoughts, and so on, are mental. They are only defined in terms of minds, hence only visible at the level of the intentional stance. Physical causes therefore cannot undermine the will, but are instead required for it.

It’s something of a subtle point, but minds are not caused by bodies; they supervene. The mind exists in terms of the body, much as software exists in terms of hardware, as a pattern in it, an abstraction. But hardware doesn’t cause software; software is hardware seen from a distance, much as words are formed from letters but not caused by them.

(Naturally, yet another form of essentialism, Platonic idealism, insists that these abstractions are more fundamental than what they abstract from. Essentialism is the gift that keeps on giving: like herpes.)

This confusion about the relationship between the physical and the mental is what drives incompatibilism. It creates a categorical error, akin to trying to answer “Why did the chicken cross the road?” with “Because its molecules moved in that direction”.

Such an answer misses the point so badly that it’s not even wrong, and it’s a daunting task to even begin to unwrap the layers of false assumptions that underlie it in order to get through to them. You have to break down their beliefs, educate them with replacements, and then show them the connection.

So when compatibilists say that we have free will (because it’s free from duress) and incompatibilists insist that it’s not free enough for their standards (which require freedom from causality), it’s much the same as a political libertarian bothering you as you eat your free lunch by insisting that it’s not free enough.

And I counsel the same reaction: just enjoy what’s free and ignore them. Their requirements are solely their own and therefore completely irrelevant. Also, use condiments, even if they tell you not to.