Recently I met with a number of African counterparts and they laughed at the difficulty one may go through when trying to prove the existence of free will.
Then they mentioned a local form a literature, which they called dilemma. Apparently, making collective choices, analyzing dilemmas and observing how different possible cause and effect chains work is a traditional pastime.
Someone even hypothsized that Aficans who still follow this tradition may show more free will than other people and the debate started. What do you think?
Since almost all African governments are either corrupt or authoritarian (or both) and since the individual’s needs and want are subsumed beneath that of his/her family, extended clan or tribe, African social behavior would seem (to an outsider) to be the antithesis of “free will.”
One is having Free Will to overcome the Determinism of the Universe. Most scientists and Philosophers believe that the universe is determined and therefore every human choice is determined by previous factors. (They leave behind the small number of philosophers who maintain that the Universe is not determined.)
Philosophers then divide into two camps. One camp believes that Free Will is still compatible with determinism; the other camp believes that Free Will is not possible with determinism. The Latter group have no belief at all in the phrase ‘Free Will’ having any meaning. The former group believe that despite the world being determined, it is still possible to speak of Free Will in some manner and for it to have meaning.
Such conceptions of Free Will in a determined Universe range from gentle lip service- Free Will is the best way to talk about Human Action, even though it is fully determined, through moral structures that suggest that it is necessary to use the concept of Free Will if Ethics is to have any meaning, through to the social utility of being able to blame and punish people without feeling that it is unfair to do so.
So it all depends on which camp people fall into- Free Will has a variety of very different meanings.
True, but none of these views of “free will” seem to have much to do with the OP.
I agree. The stories (which do not seem radically unlike stories told in other parts of the world, frankly) probably function to help people to learn to deal better with complex moral problems (as most stories do), but this has nothing to do with “how much” free will you have.
On some views of free-will, it is an all or nothing thing. On the compatibilist view (as outlined by Pjen, and the choice of most smart people who have taken the time to actually study and understand the issues) there may be a sense in which you have more or less freedom depending on your circumstances - you won’t have much if you are in prison, for instance, or if you live in a harsh police state, or in abject poverty - but you don’t get more just by becoming a better moral decision maker.*
I also know of no evidence to suggest that Africans aer better moral decision makers than non-Africans, and I see no reason to believe that “dilemma” stories teach moral decision making any better than do the story telling traditions of non-African cultures (including the modern west).
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*You might think I am equivocating of “free will” and “freedom” in that paragraph, but, in a sense, the compatibilist view boils down to the idea that it is a conceptual mistake to distinguish too sharply between them.