Q&A: What Is Free Choice?
What Is Free Choice?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I assume you’ve already been pestered about this a lot, so sorry, but I have a question that has been bothering me for a long time about free choice. And even though I’ve read many of your articles, I haven’t managed to find a clear answer to it (maybe I didn’t look deeply enough).
What exactly is free choice? If I understood correctly, free will is defined as something that appears without a prior cause. The question is where it appears, and mainly who causes it to appear (apparently the answer is: nobody). If there is someone who causes it to appear, then that’s causality; and if there is nobody who causes it to appear, why is that considered something the person chose, if the desire appeared in his heart out of nowhere? If this isn’t randomness, I don’t understand what it is, and how one can then punish a person for a choice that he himself did not make.
If I understood correctly, the Rabbi does not claim that this is how free choice works, but rather through “judgment,” which is a vague concept that I don’t understand what it really means. If it’s some kind of calculation of the values and advantages and disadvantages in each of the options, then I don’t understand what is non-causal about that. And if not, then again—what is it?
If the answer is that free choice is something we do not completely understand how it works, then I don’t understand why one cannot argue that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows the future even though we have the ability to choose. After all, in any case we don’t understand what free choice is, so we can also not understand how He knows the future.
Thanks in advance.
Answer
If you’ve read what I wrote, I have nothing to add. Free choice is indeed a product of judgment, but judgment involves values that I choose. There is no cause for that, otherwise it would be deterministic. When you ask for a more concrete description of it (how it works), you are begging the question. You are expecting a causal explanation (what generates the cause), but the claim that the choice is free assumes that there is nothing at all that generates it.
I didn’t understand your question about God’s knowledge. If the choice is free, that means it cannot be known in advance. You can accept that or not, but that is the meaning of free choice.
Discussion on Answer
For choosing good values. Not because of a cause, but because they are good. A person decides to devote his life to acts of kindness. There is no cause that made him do this; rather, he chose it because it is his will to be good, and this is the way to be good. Why is it his will to be good? Because it is good. That is not arbitrary, but it is without a cause. Only in such a situation does he bear moral responsibility. Not in a situation where it is arbitrary-random, and not in a situation where it is deterministic.
So what is judgment then? Just words?
What mainly bothers me is the claim that free choice entails moral responsibility. My claim is that even if a person’s choices are not deterministic, they are still not a reason to punish him, since they were created without a cause. So why claim that a person who does bad things for no reason deserves condemnation? Why does someone who does good things for no reason deserve appreciation? I understand that the responsibility is for the values he chose, but since he chose them without a cause, what exactly is he being appreciated for?