The Gates of Will: The Meaning and Place of Free Will – Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, Bar-Ilan University

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So once I saw—actually, every time I hear election results in Syria, I hear that the president was elected with ninety-nine point eight percent. And I always wonder: what is the missing zero point two? If there were blank ballots, it’s hard for me to believe there would be so few. I assume—again, I haven’t checked—that there probably aren’t blank ballots there either. So what is it? I don’t know exactly what happened there. Maybe the birds of the sky stole a few ballots, I have no idea. In any case, since nobody counts anything there anyway, what difference does it make what they publish as the result. Fine, in any case, that’s elections in Syria. Elections in Switzerland are a second kind of election. What happens there? A person walks into the voting booth and freely chooses one of several ballots lying there. At the end they count, and whoever most of the public wants is the president. Except that in metaphorical Switzerland—yes, the real Switzerland isn’t like this, but in metaphorical Switzerland—there are no problems. So if there are no problems, why should I care who the president is? Let’s just draw lots. In other words, the only question is who gets the salary. If there are no problems to solve, then freedom to choose a president has no meaning, right? When does that freedom have meaning? When we bear the consequences of whether we chose correctly or incorrectly. There’s gain and loss, reward and punishment. If there isn’t, then you can just draw lots. And again, that’s really an illusory freedom. There is freedom there—nobody forces me and there are several possibilities—but that freedom has no significance.

There is, of course, a third model, which may be closer to us. You enter the voting booth and choose one of several ballots. At the end they count, and whoever the majority wants becomes prime minister. Except that in every case the same thing comes out. Everyone does the same thing anyway. That’s a third model. What’s the fourth model? I said all those just to clear away the noise. What’s the fourth model? The model of a real democracy. It’s a place where there are several options. Each option has costs and benefits. Okay? We choose and bear the consequences. If we chose well, great. If we chose badly, less great. So in such a place there is meaning to the freedom to choose. What really is the difference between the models? Look, in the Syrian model ostensibly nobody is forcing anything on me. I go in, choose a ballot, everything’s fine. Except that there’s only one ballot. That is exactly determinism, right? There’s what philosophers call—and it’s going to become very fashionable lately—compatibilism. Compatibilism is the view that basically, as long as I do what I want, even if there’s only one option before me, that doesn’t matter. But since it’s what I want, then I have moral responsibility and that’s called having free choice and so on. To me that’s nonsense, but that’s basically the meaning. It’s not really free choice; it’s determinism.

Okay, what happens in Switzerland? In Switzerland I have free choice—it’s freedom—but there’s no meaning at all to what I chose. The two paths produce the same thing. Okay? They produce the same thing because there are no problems, no costs, perfect Switzerland, a perfect state, nothing will be lost or gained from a good or bad choice. Okay, in such a situation the process of choosing is really a lottery. Right? We could just as well have drawn lots—what difference does it make? We did the lottery in that form; it has no significance. So there too we’re talking about freedom, like in Syria, only in Syria it’s determinism and in Switzerland it’s indeterminism. Indeterminism means randomness. Let’s say, by analogy to—well, I’ll make the analogy in a moment.

What happens in the fourth model? Leave the third aside, it’s like Switzerland. But what happens in the fourth model? In the full fourth model, yes, where there are consequences and there is freedom and we really bear responsibility for what we chose. In that model we truly have to decide freely which path we choose, and it has meaning; you can’t draw lots. There are different weights, there is a right way and a wrong way, these costs, those costs. That is the third model. Now notice that this is actually what corresponds to free will. Free will is a situation in which indeed many things are not up to me, but I can decide what to do within that situation. Of course the costs afterward will come down on my head whether I want them to or not. So I don’t decide the environment in which I act; this is not absolute freedom. Free will—many people make a mistake about this—free will does not mean acting in a vacuum where everything depends on me and I do whatever I want. Of course not. Free will means that given the existing system of constraints, I have the ability to decide which of the paths I choose, while my decisions will bring consequences upon me that do not depend on me. Okay? That is called free will. And that is a third state. It’s neither determinism nor randomness; it is a third state.

Since now I’ll move to the analogy itself, think about a human action. There are three mechanisms, it seems to me, that we can think of regarding the connection between action A and action B that follows it, or just the coming into being of actions. One mechanism is the deterministic mechanism. That is a mechanism that says that given the current state, I can tell you what will happen in the next moment. In other words, the current state determines in a one-to-one way what will happen in the next moment. And it makes no difference whether the person doing it feels free and happy and doesn’t understand that he is actually being channeled in the direction he is going, or whether he does feel it. It doesn’t matter at all. That is exactly Syria; it’s not interesting. Whether he feels it or not, as long as the present circumstances determine unambiguously what you will do, that is determinism. Okay? When I speak about circumstances, I mean both external and internal circumstances. All right? It doesn’t matter whether the circumstances in question are internal or external. So that is one mechanism: the deterministic one.

The second mechanism is the mechanism—it’s hard for me to call it this—the random one. What does the random mechanism mean? It means that the action I do comes from nowhere. Just a lottery, yes, parallel to Switzerland. I just do it—there are no considerations this way or that way, nothing. Let’s say my hand just flies about in all sorts of ways with absolutely no cause making that hand move. Okay, that is basically a random action. It’s so hard to describe such a state because we don’t really believe there is such a thing. What do you mean something just moves without there being a cause? Whenever there is something, we think: what was the cause? Maybe we don’t always find the cause, but we confidently assume that there always is a cause. But that is what is called randomness. Randomness means that something happens without a cause. That is indeterminism. Okay?

The question is whether free choice is one of those two, and the analogy of political elections is meant to sharpen that. Free choice is neither of those two; it is a third mechanism. It is a third mechanism that says that when I move my hand, even if someone knew the entire array of circumstances prevailing at the present moment, he still could not know with certainty what I will do in the next moment. He can guess, but not with certainty. With certainty he cannot know—on the one hand. On the other hand, it’s also not true that it just happens like that, that it’s a lottery. Because we experience very clearly the deliberation we engage in; we try to decide what we want to do, what we want to achieve. In other words, this is not an action done arbitrarily, completely without context. There is context, only the context is not in the past but in the future. The context is what I want to achieve, not what was, not what the circumstances were that prevailed the moment before. Okay? That is free choice. Therefore free choice is something that is neither randomness nor determinism. If it exists—I’ve only defined the concept, I’m not yet claiming that it exists—but that is the definition of the concept.

Now, once I’ve defined the concept this way, then of course the dilemma argument falls immediately. Because the dilemma argument attacks on the conceptual level. We are not yet getting into the question whether we really have free choice or not, but whether such a concept can exist at all, whether the concept is even coherent. All right? Now how did the dilemma argument work? It says: look, if there is a cause for what you do, then that is determinism. And if there is no cause for what you do, then that is randomness. So that means there cannot be free choice. What is it assuming? It assumes that there are only two possible kinds of mechanisms: either randomness or determinism. But if it is attacking the position called the libertarian one—that is, the position that upholds free will—then it has to attack it on its own terms. You can’t attack someone using your own assumptions. If you want to persuade him, start from his assumptions and show him that he is wrong, right? So let’s start from the libertarian’s assumptions. The libertarian says there are three mechanisms, not two. So when you tell me that this action was not done out of a cause, you cannot infer from that—on my view—you cannot infer from that that therefore it is an arbitrary or random action. Because the fact that there is no cause still leaves me with two possibilities, not one: either arbitrariness, randomness, or free choice. Two possibilities. Therefore, once I do not accept the dichotomous assumption at the base of the argument, then the argument is worth nothing. That is to say, maybe it’s correct, but it begs the question. In other words, if there really are only two mechanisms in the world, then it is right, and if not, then not. Fine, that much I know: if there are two mechanisms in the world, then whoever says there are two mechanisms is right. I don’t need arguments for that. This argument adds nothing; it begs the question. Yes.

[Speaker B] But doesn’t the determinist disagree that there is a third state?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. I haven’t proved to the determinist that he is wrong. Okay. I only said that the proof the determinist wants to present against me is incorrect, invalid; it begs the question. All right? Now I’ll say more than that. Usually questions of this kind assume that even if there are three such mechanisms, the first two are somehow more familiar to us, clearer to us. The third is more dubious: the question is whether there is free will or not. Randomness and determinism are fine; nobody has to justify himself if he thinks the world is deterministic. The feeling is as though that is the default. Whoever wants to say there is free will, the burden of proof is on him. But let’s try to think philosophically for a moment: among these three mechanisms, which one is really more familiar to us intuitively? Which one would I bet exists? That too is an interesting consideration in this debate.

Look, randomness—I don’t understand at all what people are talking about when they say that. I have never in my life experienced something that was truly random. I assume the women sitting here in the hall haven’t experienced it either, and if they did, then in my opinion it was an illusion. As far as we know, there is no random thing in the world, so the concept of randomness is really an abstract concept. We may perhaps be able to define it conceptually—that is, there’s no conceptual problem with the thing—but it seems to me that none of us has ever really experienced an occurrence that had no cause, or that was arbitrary. It just happened without a cause? If I were, I don’t know, to hear a sound behind me, immediately I would turn around to see what made that sound. If someone next to me told me, why are you turning around? Nobody made that sound; a sound just came out, there’s no cause—I would hospitalize the person next to me. There’s no such thing as a sound that comes out without a source, right? Without something producing it. In other words, our simple assumption is that randomness or arbitrariness—there is no such thing. Randomness is perhaps a somewhat confusing concept; arbitrariness is more accurate. There is no such thing.

What about causality? Surprisingly, causality too is not familiar to us from anywhere. The causal relation too, determinism. Why? There was an eighteenth-century British philosopher named David Hume, yes, who argued that even the principle of causality, and the causal relation in general, we can never derive from observation. Let’s say I kick a ball and the ball flies. We are used to saying that the kick was the cause of the ball flying. How do you know the kick was the cause? All you know is that first you kicked and afterward the ball flew. That’s science—that’s science. But how does science know that? Saying it’s science isn’t an answer. The question is how does science know that? Again, many times, every time you kick, the ball flies. Who said the ball flew because of the kick?

[Speaker B] Because it has the ability to fly. Because if we kick a stone, it won’t fly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, it has the ability to fly, but when I don’t kick it, it doesn’t fly, right? It has the ability to fly and I also kicked it, but who said the kick caused it to fly? Causing, a causal relation—it’s not enough to say that if A happens then B happens. There is something in the physical relation of cause that goes beyond the logical relation of if-then. Right? For example, let’s say—this is Leibniz’s example—that there are two clocks on the wall that always show the same time. So the “if-then” exists there too. If this one shows three-oh-five, that one will also show three-oh-five. Can I say that this one is the cause of that one? No. Meaning, the logical relation between the events is not yet a causal relation.

[Speaker B] You can take one clock away and show that there really is no connection between them; it just happens that there are two clocks showing the same time. Right, so. You can take one clock away and see.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe electromagnetic rays are passing some connection between them. But never mind—even if, let’s say, you can, then what does that mean? It means that there can be a correlation without there being behind it a relation of cause, of production.

[Speaker B] You can shatter the idea.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So then with the ball and the kick it’s the same thing.

[Speaker B] Right, so prove that there isn’t a kick after which the ball stayed in place.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you yourself said that would not be a proof. Here, I’ll prove to you: I take this clock, remove its motor, it will stop and the other will keep moving. So we see there is no causal relation, even though when they both move together all the time, if this then that, right?

[Speaker B] And here the clock will keep working, and here if you don’t kick it, it won’t continue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously, if there’s no clock—if there’s no kick, then there won’t be flight. I’m claiming that there is always flight after a kick. But the question is whether the kick causes the flight. How can one know such a thing? By no observational instrument whatsoever will you be able to extract a causal relation between events. There is no such thing in the world. The existence of a causal relation between events is an assumption of ours. We come with it from home. Empirical? No, not empirical; the opposite.

[Speaker B] No, we know that when you kick it, it flies.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We know that if you kick it, it flies; we do not know that it flies because of the kick.

[Speaker B] How did we learn that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We learned it, fine, I learned many things. You know, if I believed everything I learned, I wouldn’t get very far. Experience? No, experience does not say that. Unequivocally, it does not say that. Experience says that if there is a kick, the ball will fly. Experience does not say that the ball flies because of the kick. Those are two different things. Two completely different things. True, one always comes after the other, but the question is whether the second is the cause of what comes after it. I don’t know—that is our assumption. We assume that if B always comes after A, then apparently A causes it. I’ll give you an example. Whenever there is thunder, there is lightning before it. Is the lightning the cause of the thunder? Certainly not, right? So here is an example where whenever there is lightning, thunder follows, but that does not mean there is a causal relation between the events. So when we learn from observation that whenever there is a kick the ball flies, we can infer at most—and this too is another of Hume’s claims about induction, but let’s leave that aside for the moment—we can infer at most that whenever a ball is kicked, it flies. We cannot infer that it flies because of the kick. That does not come from any observation. It is our assumption. We come with it from home. That is to say—

[Speaker B] So what is the cause of its flight?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who said there is a cause? Maybe there is no cause? Maybe—yes—who said there is a cause?

[Speaker B] That’s exactly what Hume argues.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even the principle of causality itself—that everything must have a cause—has no source outside us either. We—this is an a priori intuition of ours. No, we did not draw it from observations. Okay? So what does that actually mean? It means that among the three mechanisms—determinism, randomness, and free choice—it seems to me that if there is one mechanism that is the natural candidate, the one I know in the most intimate and clear way to exist, it is free choice. Because that I know within myself; I feel it, I see it. It may be that I am mistaken; it may be that I live in an illusion. I’m not making the claim that because of that it certainly exists. But I am saying that if I had to bet which thing is the candidate to be removed from the map, it certainly wouldn’t be free choice. In other words, to present the two alternatives—after all, whenever people ask, all the philosophical problematicness in the concept of free choice stems from attempts to set it up in terms of cause and effect. What is it that leads to the problematic nature of the concept of free choice? It is always: wait, so what caused you? But if something caused you, then you didn’t choose; it did it. Oh, nothing caused you? Then wait, what are you saying? Did something happen here without an agent, without a cause? That can’t be. In other words, the arguments are always of that kind. And what does that mean? What do arguments of that kind reflect? They reflect that we have some clear assumption that everything must have a cause, and we are trying to set up even our free will—yes, in the reductive sense, meaning to explain it—according to deterministic explanations of cause and effect. Maybe yes; likely yes. Fine, so what? It’s our way of thinking. Mark Twain once said that the world owes you nothing; it was here before you. The fact that you were born with a certain way of thinking does not yet mean that this is really true of the world.

[Speaker B] Right, I feel that I choose. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem. I’m saying, I’m presenting what I think. Obviously each person will formulate her own position. I’m only saying that if I had to choose among these three mechanisms, it seems to me that the one among them most familiar to me in the most immediate way is freedom of the will, the fact that I choose freely. Everything else is speculation. Causality is speculation. Randomness is just not true; it isn’t even speculation—there is no such thing. Maybe in quantum theory, and even there there’s a dispute. So that only proves that the logical condition exists—that if there is a kick, the ball flies. But a causal relation is not a logical condition. A causal relation contains something beyond logical conditioning. In a causal relation, it’s not only saying that if I kick, then it flies—that is certainly true, certainly. That is just a simple generalization. But the question is whether it flies because of the kick. That is something else.

[Speaker C] Fine, even if there weren’t

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] lightning, then there wouldn’t be thunder afterward—so what? Does that mean the lightning is the cause of the thunder? It could be—why not? It could be. But we don’t think so. In fact we know that’s not true. The lightning is not the cause of the thunder. So no, that conclusion—not that it is false, but rather that the conclusion does not follow from observation. I do think it’s true. I think there is a causal relation between the kick and the flight of the ball. I am only drawing your attention to the point that when we think this, we are simply bringing some thought from home. It is not the result of observation. Now, whether it’s true or not—one can argue about it. I think it’s true, but I don’t know, I have some trust in my intuitions. What?

[Speaker B] According to Judaism, there is cause and effect.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what “according to Judaism” means, and I don’t know what it means to say “there is cause and effect.”

[Speaker B] There are things that happen in the world that have consequences.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what “according to Judaism” means. I definitely think that things that happen in the world have causes; I personally agree. I don’t know what “Judaism” means here.

[Speaker B] Only that there is more of a connection there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, I agree. No—again, maybe I should clarify. I did not mean to attack those who think there is a causal relation between events. I think so too. What I meant to say is that this thought is not the result of observation. All right? Belief, or an a priori thought, intuition, whatever you want to call it. But it is not the result of observation. I personally think it’s true; I’m not arguing against it. But it is not the result of observation. Therefore this feeling that those who uphold free will are obliged to supply a causal explanation for what is happening there—which is what leads to all the philosophical loops around this issue—is a very problematic assumption. Because causality is not something more familiar to me or clearer to me than the fact that I choose freely. On the contrary, the fact that I decide that causal relations exist in the world, or that the principle of causality is correct—that is a result of my own free judgment. If I had no free choice, then my deliberation would have no meaning at all. I deliberate and arrive at the conclusion that this is the right thing. But if my deliberation is merely the product… of some blind mechanism imposing itself on me, then what meaning do my conclusions have at all? So in some sense even the causal conclusion itself sits in the background on some assumption of free deliberation. In this case it’s not value-based but scientific deliberation, but it doesn’t matter; it’s the same principle. So these arguments against free will are really arguments that beg the question. That does not mean, by the way, that those who make these arguments are not right. It only means that there is no need to get too excited by these attacks. And everyone can remain with the position he finds appropriate to adopt.

If nevertheless we want to sharpen further the issue of causality versus free will—and here I’ll clarify where the point of difficulty is, perhaps in a sharper way—look, when we think that a person does things out of free will, basically when a person does things, that is a physical event, right? Yes, his limbs move; in other words, things happen in the physical world, okay? Things in the physical world are supposed to have physical causes. Right? That is a common scientific assumption—and again, an assumption—but it is a common scientific assumption. So what does that mean? Let’s say, I don’t know, I raised my hand, so there was some electric current in my nerves that caused a muscle to stretch, and so on. Where did that current come from? From some electric field in the brain. Where did that electric field come from? I don’t know, from something else that caused it. There is here a physical chain that ends in some action of mine. Okay. The question is how this chain begins. If I truly believe in free will and not determinism, then I am basically saying that this chain has a beginning. That is, there is a point at which an electron moves without there being a physical cause for it. Right? Because if there were a physical cause for it, then that would mean that the physical circumstances prevailing at that moment were the ones that dictated that I moved my hand. Take the whole causal chain backward. If I want to argue that I have free choice, that means that given those same circumstances, I can do X and I can do not-X. So that means that something happened here not as a result of the physical circumstances prevailing at that moment, right? It is not dictated by the physical circumstances prevailing at that moment—or in other words, some electron began to move without a force acting on it. Or a field began to form without having sources. What?

[Speaker B] Doesn’t that bring us back to randomness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To randomness? No, no, I’m not going back to randomness; that’s why I gave the introduction—just a moment. So this is actually the main problem raised by libertarianism. Libertarianism encounters the principle of causality and collides with it head-on. Because basically, if you are a libertarian, there is no escape. That’s where we need to put our finger. There is no escape. In other words, if you are a libertarian, it means that some electron somewhere in your brain moves without a physical cause. Now, that is problematic in the accepted physical conceptions. When particles move, it’s because a field acts on them or a force acts on them. Particles do not just move like that. Okay? So this is where libertarianism meets determinism, or the causal conception: it actually contradicts the principle of causality, that everything must have a cause. But it’s not so simple. Let’s go into this with a slightly finer resolution. When I make a decision to move my hand, say, that decision is a mental event. A decision—what we experience as a decision—is a mental event. This mental event, if I am a libertarian, is not caused.

[Speaker B] What is a libertarian?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A libertarian is someone who believes in freedom of the will. Liberty means freedom. So if I believe in freedom of the will, then this mental event is what starts the causal chain that leads to the action, right? It moves some electron, creates some current, that passes to the nerves, the nerves stretch the muscles, the muscles move, and something happens, okay? In other words, the mental decision caused a physical chain. The decision itself, as I said before, is a mental event. The decision has no cause, because if it had a cause, then once again we would have determinism. Then it would not be free choice, because then what would be happening is that the circumstances prevailing at that moment—whether mental circumstances or physical circumstances—dictated what I chose. But if I am a libertarian, then nothing is dictated; I have two possibilities before me, either to act this way or to act that way. So that means that neither my mental state nor my physical state at that moment dictates what I will do in the next moment.

[Speaker B] If the decision has no cause, isn’t that randomness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that’s exactly why I gave the whole introduction. No, it’s not randomness. In a moment. So that’s why I say that this mental decision basically moves an electron and starts a physical chain. The mental decision has no cause at all, but it is a mental event, not a physical one, and that does not contradict the laws of physics; it contradicts the principle of causality. Right? The principle of causality said that everything must have a cause; “thing” includes a mental thing too, so it contradicts the principle of causality, but it does not contradict the laws of physics, because the mental is not subject to the laws of physics. What happens when the electron begins to move? What caused the electron’s movement? The decision, right? Meaning that the electron’s movement did not happen without a cause; it has a cause, so it does not contradict the principle of causality. It has a cause—the mental decision. It has no physical cause, which means it contradicts the laws of physics, not the principle of causality. I’m breaking down the problem. The decision, which is a mental event, contradicts the principle of causality but not the laws of physics. The electron that moves as a result of the decision—there the principle of causality is preserved, there is a cause, but the laws of physics are violated because the cause is not a physical cause. Okay? Now why am I saying this is not arbitrary? Or why is it not random, as was said here a moment ago?

[Speaker B] Why is it not a physical cause? If there is some kind of short circuit in the segment between what you have in your head and the nerves and muscles and everything, then it won’t happen; there is something physical there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but clearly that is not a physical cause. There are physical conditions required in order for that cause to succeed in moving the electron, but no—that’s not—the cause is not physical; it is a mental event.

[Speaker B] The mental event?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Okay, so let’s look for a moment at our decision process. After all, the decision process is really the problematic thing, because it contradicts the principle of causality, and it happens without a cause. It happens without a cause, but it happens through deliberation. After all, when I decide, I’m not just tossing a coin, I’m not just running a lottery, whatever comes out—that is not the decision process we experience, right? What is the decision process we do experience? We deliberate, decide what our values are, where each step will lead, what will happen as a result of what I do in each of the possibilities, and arrive at a decision about what I choose to do. Such a thing is definitely not an arbitrary step. On the other hand it is also not deterministic; the fact is that I weigh things in my mind, I can decide this way, I can decide that way, okay? So here we have the essence of where this third mechanism appears, one that is neither causal nor random. What happens there? How should one define it in terms of the principle of causality? In terms of the principle of causality I would say this: a causal process is when an event has a cause. A random process is when an event has no cause and also no purpose; it just happens, that’s all. An event of free choice is a state in which the event has no cause, but it does have a purpose. After all, when I decide to do something, I do it in order to reach one result or another; that is, I have what is sometimes called a final cause, a purposive reason. There is no cause that created the decision, but the decision does not exist in a vacuum. The decision points to what I believe in, what I don’t believe in, what my assessments of reality are. In other words, this is not merely a lottery, not something arbitrary. It is deliberation—what is called deliberation. Deliberation does not mean causal determination; the causes do not dictate the result. But deliberation is also not randomness. Randomness means whatever comes out, comes out. I don’t need to weigh things in my mind, think, bring in values, assessments of reality, and decide. What is a decision then? Just whatever comes out, comes out. Here—we said before that we know this third mechanism of free choice in a very intimate way—here it is. In other words, here we see exactly that it is not causal, but it is also not random.

So if I summarize, then it’s like this: a thing that has a cause, an event that has a cause, is an event that occurs deterministically. An event that has no cause can be of one of two kinds: either it also has no purpose—it has neither cause nor purpose—and that is randomness. If it has a purpose and no cause, then that is free choice, deliberation, yes, free choice. Excuse me? And if it has

[Speaker B] a cause?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So, determinism. Okay? So this is actually perhaps the sharper definition of the three mechanisms I talked about earlier. It’s true that this applies to the decision itself, meaning the decision really is made without a cause, but with a reason. Leibniz spoke about what he called the principle of sufficient reason. He said it in connection with proofs for the existence of God, but the principle of sufficient reason is something broader than the principle of causality. The principle of causality says that everything that happens must have a cause. The principle of sufficient reason settles for less. It says: if something happens, there has to be some reason for it. That reason could be a cause that brings the thing about, but maybe not a cause.

I’ll just give you one example of an implication of this idea, one that’s somewhat close to the original intent. Say we have proofs for the existence of God based, for example, on the complexity of the world, its purposiveness, and so on, right? One type of proof. Now there are many objections to those proofs, mainly coming from evolution and things of that kind. Evolution shows that something complex can come into being without a guiding hand. And if so, then the assumption that because the world is complex there must be some guiding hand involved in creating it—that’s no longer a necessary assumption, okay? Because we have a scientific mechanism that shows the formation of complex things without a guiding hand.

But now we can ask—or I’ll ask—what is the evolutionary process taking place within? The evolutionary process takes place within a system of laws of nature. Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that we’re being complete reductionists: four basic physical forces. That’s what governs the whole thing, and for the sake of simplicity let’s assume that this also determines physics, chemistry, biology, and whatever else you want. Okay? Now within this system of four laws, an evolutionary process unfolds. And let’s say the evolutionary process really does explain to me how a complex thing can arise without a guiding hand—but there is a guiding hand here: the hand that created the laws. After all, without the laws, this wouldn’t happen.

This is what’s called the fine-tuning argument, for those who know it—the argument about the values of the physical constants. There’s some sort of fit among them that is directed toward the creation of life. Meaning, if the values of the constants had been a little different, then there would be no biology, no life, nothing. So this argument from the fit among the laws replaces the usual argument from the complexity of the world.

But notice: someone might tell me, “Look, maybe the laws always existed, so you don’t need a cause for why they’re special. They just always were; nobody created them.” So again, that would seem to make unnecessary the assumption that there has to be someone who created the laws or created the fit among them. Do you think that’s a good argument? That because the laws always existed, there’s no need for an explanation of why they are coordinated with one another? There’s still something problematic here, don’t you feel? With all due respect to the fact that it always was that way—fine—but why exactly is it this way and not otherwise?

Here’s the point. I don’t want to get into that whole discussion, just to illustrate the difference between a cause and a reason. If it always existed, then I can’t ask what caused the laws to be coordinated with one another. A cause has to precede its effect. But that still doesn’t solve the problem—not the whole problem—because I still ask myself: why is it precisely this way and not another way? It always was—fine—but how did it turn out that the world is exactly this special and not a little different? That too calls for explanation. That explanation will be given in terms of reason, not in terms of cause. Meaning: some reason for the harmony among the laws.

So I think that’s a good illustration of the difference between the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of causality. The principle of causality says everything must have a cause. But something that always existed doesn’t need a cause. A reason, though—that’s another matter.

So if I come back to our issue, I’d say this: the decision a person makes has no cause, but it does have a reason. In other words, such a decision really does contradict the principle of causality, but it fits the principle of sufficient reason. Because it has a reason. I don’t do things for no reason. I have a reason why I decided to do it. Okay, it’s not a cause, because I decide freely. But it is a reason. Unlike an arbitrary event, which has neither a causal explanation nor a reason—it has no purposive explanation. There’s no reason why it happened; it just happened because that’s how it came out. Okay? So that’s just to sharpen this point.

Now, what do we do with the contradiction at the second stage? At the stage where the decision is translated into the movement of an electron? There, it doesn’t contradict the principle of causality, because the movement of the electron does have a cause: my decision. But it does contradict the laws of physics, because the movement of a particle requires a physical force. Without a physical force, a particle doesn’t start moving. And here there was no physical force. There’s no escaping this. Here you have to decide: either we fully adopt the principle of causality, and then we become determinists, or, if we are libertarians, we have to assume that there is a violation of the principle of causality at certain points or at certain stages in our functioning—apparently in our brain’s functioning. There’s no way around that.

I just want to explain why I think it’s actually reasonable even to make the second assumption—to accept this violation of the principle of causality. In jurisprudence, one of the interpretive rules, when there’s a problem of interpretation and you have to decide what to do, one of the interpretive rules that deals with contradictions is called lex specialis. Lex specialis means that the more specific law overrides the general law. Okay? I’ll give you an example.

In the Torah there is a prohibition: “You shall not murder.” It is forbidden to kill. But there are offenses in the Torah that incur the death penalty. Someone who desecrates the Sabbath intentionally, in the presence of witnesses and after warning, is liable to death. Now the religious court is facing a dilemma here. On the one hand, there is the prohibition “You shall not murder,” so it may not kill the offender. On the other hand, there is a commandment to execute a Sabbath desecrator. What do you do in such a situation? We have a contradiction between two laws.

So let’s see the two options before us. One option is to say that “You shall not murder” overrides, and then that means the verse that imposes death on someone who desecrates the Sabbath is effectively deleted from the Torah; it has no application, right? But if I adopt that verse—meaning, if I assume that the obligation to execute a Sabbath desecrator overrides—I don’t need to delete the verse “You shall not murder” from the Torah. The verse “You shall not murder” remains; it just has an exception, right?

So a specific principle always has an advantage over a general principle, because that specific principle speaks only about the specific case it addresses, and if it says that, then presumably that’s what it meant. As for the general law, I can say that it means generally, except for those places where the Torah gives me exceptions. Okay? Therefore this is a very sensible interpretive rule: I prefer to adopt the specific principle over the broader, more general law.

What happens in our case? On the one hand we have the principle of causality, or the laws of physics if you prefer, and on the other hand free choice. And both are very strong intuitions that I have. I’m speaking personally now. I very much believe in both sides here, both in the laws of physics and in free choice. What do I do in such a situation? I now have to decide which one overrides. Right? Two intuitions that I have, and now I need to decide which of them is stronger in order to formulate a position on this issue of free will.

I said, look: if I decide that causality overrides, then that means I have no free choice, right? Or the laws of physics override. So then there is no free choice, because an electron can’t move unless there is a physical force moving it. But if I adopt free will, I don’t need to give up the principle of causality. I only need to qualify it. I have to say there are certain points where it is violated, or where the laws of physics are violated. Therefore, in my view, this principle of free choice has an advantage in that it is more specific. Adopting it does not require me to give up the other side of the equation, only to qualify the other side of the equation. By contrast, adopting the other side forces me to give up entirely the intuition of free will. So that’s why I personally think, for example, that this decision is much more reasonable—a libertarian decision.

Now maybe I want to move on. What does it actually mean when I speak about free choice? Basically it means there is no cause that makes me do what I do. Does that mean that the internal circumstances—brain, genetics, and so on—and the external ones do not affect what I do? A great many arguments against free will assume that, but again, that’s a mistake. Obviously there’s no problem at all with, say, doing statistics on psychological events. If the view were that this is complete freedom, that circumstances are totally unrelated to what happens, then there would be no point in doing statistics on human behavior, right? Because basically everyone just does whatever they want; there’s nothing here for you to study, there’s no structure, there’s no effect of environment on human action. So what’s the point? There’d be no point at all in doing those statistics.

Say 100 people are punched in the face, and 80 of them punch back while 20 restrain themselves. Does that tell me anything about the next person? Nothing. Because if I assume there is complete freedom here—meaning if the circumstances, in this case getting punched in the face, do not dictate in any way what you will do—then it’s completely accidental that it came out 80–20. Next time it’ll be 40–60, or whatever you want.

[Speaker B] There’s no—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] point in doing it at all, doing those statistics.

[Speaker B] You can test it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And it can repeat itself. Okay. So the claim against libertarianism is: we test it, and in fact it does work, it repeats itself. Again, not with certainty and not exactly—it’s not an exact science—but yes, there are psychological correlations. We can talk about structures, about distributions of human behaviors. But that’s a mistake. It does not contradict free will. Even someone who believes in free will accepts the fact that the environment within which I act affects what I do. What he does not accept is that it determines what I do. Those are two completely different things.

Think in terms of a topographical model. Okay? Say I’m walking along some kind of topographical terrain: mountains, hills, valleys, saddles, and so on. If I were a little ball—it would take some dieting for that, but let’s suppose I did it—and now I’m a little ball moving along that surface, then obviously I always roll down to minimum energy, right? If there’s a valley, I’m there. I’m never going to climb the mountain. I can’t. That’s determinism, right? What is randomness? Randomness is some little ball that hops up onto the mountain, then goes down into the valley, with no relation to the terrain. Okay? Just randomly doing things for which we have no explanation, no connection—we can’t understand them from the context.

Free choice means that I consider the fact that here there’s a mountain and there there’s a valley, and I decide what to do. Now notice what this means. Say there are 100 people standing at a point that’s, let’s say, between a mountain and a valley—a kind of saddle point. Okay? And they have to decide whether to climb the mountain or go down into the valley. If all the other circumstances are the same, and the view in both places is equally beautiful, and so on, I assume a large majority of people will go down into the valley. Right? Meaning that the terrain within which I operate affects my decisions. But that doesn’t mean I had to go down into the valley. It doesn’t turn me into a little ball. I could also climb the mountain.

For example, if the view at the top of the mountain is more beautiful, then more people will climb the mountain. There will still be lazy people who go down into the valley, or people who don’t like scenery, but yes, the statistics will change. In other words, the circumstances definitely affect our action even in the libertarian picture. It’s not true that in the libertarian picture I simply act in a vacuum, in some kind of Switzerland, right—action without environment, without constraints. There are constraints. The claim is only that the constraints do not dictate the outcome unambiguously. They influence the outcome, but they do not determine it. Therefore all those statistics can continue to be done even in a libertarian picture. This is a point that often comes up in arguments of this kind.

[Speaker D] Up to what level is our free choice? Meaning, you’re giving a picture here in which a person can ultimately decide to choose whatever he wants, and we’re supposed to choose the good. Let’s take Sabbath observance, okay? It says in the Torah that someone who doesn’t keep the Sabbath is liable to stoning. Meaning, a person reaches a point where he’ll choose to keep the Sabbath not because he thinks it’s right and good, but because he’s afraid of the result. The question is whether, basically, once we are born Jews, we enter a certain framework and we have to stay within the range of that framework, and we have a kind of day-to-day choice within it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Good, that’s a good question. I really might devote a few minutes to it, because it’s needed in order to complete the picture. But I’ll start—I’ll get to it in a moment. I want to start with one more point first.

Look, there’s a certain feeling—I once read an article by Ari Elon, maybe you know him, the maggid, the son of Judge Elon of blessed memory, who became non-religious and turned into a kind of secular preacher, lecturer. He writes very beautifully; he really does have verbal ability and impressive writing. And in one of his articles, I think I saw somewhere, it’s called “The Rabbinic Man and the Sovereign Man.” The rabbinic man is the person who lives according to the commands of Jewish law, and the sovereign man is the person who legislates his own laws, his own values.

Now he makes a conceptual mistake in this very distinction, because I think that when we speak about a free person, in the sense in which freedom has value—not in the sense that he is free because he has no constraints, but freedom as a value as we understand it today—that is not freedom to legislate your own values. Not at all. Someone who legislates his own values is just a nihilist. A free person means a person who freely decides how to realize the correct values. The question is: what are the correct values? Nobody claims that in the name of sovereignty I can also decide to murder or steal or harm people or things of that sort. I assume he doesn’t mean to claim that either. So what is this sovereignty he’s talking about? It’s just a mistake.

The freedom we’re talking about, when we speak about freedom as a value, about the sovereign autonomous person, we do not mean that the person determines his own values. Absolutely not. We mean that he decides how to live his life and realize values in the best possible way. The feeling that a person must determine his own values—that demand that a person determine his own values—means he will always come out righteous. Since he determines what the right values are, then if he’s a contract killer, he’s righteous, because from his perspective that’s the value he chose. Right?

[Speaker D] But that’s a different claim, because that harms another person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If we—

[Speaker D] live within a state.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What difference does that make? What difference does it make?

[Speaker D] Because you can understand the laws of the state, because they are laws that let you live within a society. Part of—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] of the decision—

[Speaker D] to live in this state is that we accept its laws upon ourselves.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And if someone doesn’t accept those laws, you wouldn’t agree, right? You wouldn’t agree to someone who tells you, “I don’t want to, I don’t care, let them kill me too, I want to be a contract killer. That’s what I decided—what’s wrong with that? It pays well.”

[Speaker D] There’s a difference between a decision where you harm someone else and a decision—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t see any philosophical difference. I can understand someone who says: I accept upon myself only values of not harming another person as something imposed on me, and beyond that I want to determine everything for myself. And someone else will say: I accept upon myself a few more values besides the values of not harming another person. But neither this one nor that one determines his own values. One just has fewer values than the other. So what? That still isn’t sovereignty in the sense he means.

Now, one can argue whether it is really proper to enforce values that are not values of harm to another person but Sabbath observance—assuming that this doesn’t harm another person, never mind, okay? That’s a different debate. I hear that claim, but it’s a completely different debate. And therefore I say that the question of whether I advocate choice—the fact that I demand that a person choose—does not mean that I leave it to him to determine the values he will choose. Leave it to him in the sense that there are no sanctions. I leave it to him—he can choose to be a contract killer; he will bear the consequences. He can also choose to desecrate the Sabbath; he will bear those consequences too.

In other words, free choice with no consequence at all for what you do—that’s Switzerland. You choose freely, no matter what, there’s no way to judge you, do whatever you want, there’s no implication, no result. That’s not something I’m willing to see as a person whose life has value. My free choice has value only where there are costs, positive and negative, to the things I do.

Now, one can argue over what the cost should be. It could be that because of this Ari Elon doesn’t need to repent. Meaning, it could be that a person says: I do not accept these values, they do not seem right to me. In my view, only not murdering, not stealing, and not harming others is right; I’m not interested in kosher eating or Sabbath observance or honoring parents or whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. None of that seems right to me. Fine. That’s another debate. But the principled claim that a person ought to legislate his own values is simply a mistake. It’s a mistake. Because the things you legislate for yourself are not values. They’re just the way you decide to live your life.

After all, if I’m supposed to judge you by your values, how can I judge you? If I judge you according to the values that you yourself decided on, you always come out righteous. Rather, when I judge someone—when I say that such behavior has value—I am by definition assuming some objective standard against which I judge his behavior. But he didn’t legislate that standard. So either way, if your actions have moral significance and can be judged as good or bad, then that means there is some measure that you did not determine, some universal standard by which you are measured. Now we can argue about what the standard is—again, I’m not claiming that the standard is necessarily the halakhic one. But there has to be a standard that you did not determine.

Everything else, of course, you can decide for yourself however you want, but don’t claim those are value-laden lives. Don’t claim that here I’m supposed to judge you as a good person or a positive person. Why exactly? You legislated for yourself and lived according to what you legislated. Fine, of course—you always come out righteous by that measure. By that measurement you always come out righteous.

So I’m saying that in the religious context, to come back to this: the fact that the Torah imposes a punishment for Sabbath desecration does not deprive us of the choice to desecrate the Sabbath. There’s just a price. A heavy price. If you’re foolish enough to receive a warning and say, “Yes, and on that condition I’m doing it,” in front of two witnesses, then I’m not sure you should be executed, because that’s just temporary insanity. But okay, there’s a price. But the price does not mean you have no choice. The price only means it isn’t Switzerland.

[Speaker D] I understand what you’re saying: we were more or less born into a certain framework of certain values, and we just have to decide what we accept and what we don’t. Right, right, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or how we fulfill the— No, no, that’s a somewhat reduced version of choice, but we need to understand this well. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’ll still add one more point here. I hadn’t planned to get into it. All right, a little more.

There’s an article by Amos Oz called “A Full Wagon and an Empty Wagon.” And there he writes that Jewish law—the halakhic world—is like some kind of big bang at Mount Sinai, where, yes, some room was created. And ever since, we keep filling it with furniture and never remove any furniture. And in the end it becomes so crowded that we have no room at all to move. And that’s his criticism, supposedly, of the heaviness, the halakhic conservatism. Okay?

[Speaker B] Someone once explained to me that article, “A Full Wagon.” What? I can’t hear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s based on the saying of the Chazon Ish—that’s where the title comes from. But of course he’s arguing against it.

Now there’s a very basic misunderstanding here—mathematical, I’d say. Look, there’s a room. In the room there are 100 squares. Or say a chessboard: 64 squares, okay? Eight by eight. We have one chair that takes up one square. How many combinations are there for arranging the room? Sixty-four, right? Now we have two chairs. How many combinations are there for arranging the room?

[Speaker B] Sixty-three.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Basic combinatorics. Right. 64 times 63 divided by 2 if they’re identical. Right? If they’re not identical, then it’s 64 times 63. We have 63 times more ways to arrange the room when the room is fuller—when it has more furniture. And if there are three pieces of furniture, then the number of ways to arrange the room is 64 times 63 times 62. That means the more furniture there is in the room, the more combinations there are for arranging it.

And this parable is not just a parable; it’s a true parable. Because a person who believes in nothing, like Amos Oz—in the Jewish context, I mean—believes in nothing, so he arranges the room and it has no significance. He legislates the room for himself, yes, in that language. What does that mean? There’s no standard against which to judge him. Why is that interesting? But a committed person has 60—what’s the maximum? Where do we reach the maximum number of possibilities? With 32 chairs, right? From 33 onward it’s like 31. That’s how it works. A person who has 32 chairs—half the room full—has the greatest number of combinations to choose from. He can arrange his room in infinitely many ways—it’s an astronomical number of ways.

In other words, specifically the person whose world contains constraints that he did not determine has many more possibilities for choosing how to realize them. Now I’m not talking about choosing whether to observe them or not, because not observing them means taking furniture out of the room. No—I’m talking now about a different kind of choice: how to realize those same 32 chairs. And we know that Jews who are committed to Jewish law can live in very, very different ways, morally too—not just wear different clothes, but morally. There are many ways to realize the same set of values.

A person who does not accept any of these values, who legislates for himself, can remove and insert whatever furniture he wants into the room, but the arrangement he makes has no significance. Against what am I supposed to measure him? When I have constraints, then I can evaluate a person: let’s see whether he found an interesting way, if we’re speaking aesthetically; or a good way; or a moral way, if we’re speaking about ethics or spirituality, and so on.

So the fact that the room fills up with furniture and we don’t remove it does not reduce the number of choices; it only increases it. Because the number of ways to serve the Holy One, blessed be He, given all the commitment to all of Jewish law and whatever else you want, is much larger than the number of possibilities available to a person who accepts none of it—which is only one possibility: simply do nothing. That’s all.

And therefore the question of how much variety we have to choose from is not at all opposed to the fact that we have a lot of furniture in the room. On the contrary. The more furniture we have in the room, the more combinations we have. Of course, we also have the combinations of removing furniture and getting punished for it, or adding furniture and also getting punished for it—“do not add and do not subtract,” both are transgressions—or arranging the same furniture that is inside, meaning choosing my way of life in a way that realizes those values in a very particular way. And someone else will realize them in a completely different way.

So the fact that we act under constraints—to return to the Switzerland example—the fact that we act under constraints does not mean we have no free choice. On the contrary. First, it means our choice has value, because there is a standard against which to judge us; there are prices for what we do. It’s not “choose and do whatever you want, there’s no way to judge you.” And second, finding the path or the way to live under those constraints obviously involves choice among far more ways than someone who doesn’t have that system of constraints.

All right, so basically if I summarize: we have an obligation to choose, and also an obligation to choose the good. But as I ultimately conclude, there are two kinds of choice. One kind of choice is choosing between good and evil—taking furniture out of the room or leaving the furniture in the room. The second kind of choice is choosing how to arrange the furniture that is in the room, which is a choice between one good and another good. Meaning, maybe one person is less good, maybe more good, maybe equally good. There are many ways to serve God. Some of them can even be problematic, even though they are disciplined by—or sound obedient to—all the furniture in the room, because there are a few things beyond that and it can still be, let’s call it, crooked. Okay?

And there really can be different ways that are not necessarily better or worse than one another, but they are still different ways of realizing the value system given to me. Therefore the obligation to choose, with which I began, seems to me to include both possibilities: also to choose between good and evil—preferably the good. That’s level one: first of all, choose. And second, even after I choose the good—which good? There are many ways to realize that good.

And there can be arguments here, where one person’s good may look to someone else like evil. There can be disputes within the room. You interpret Jewish law this way; someone else says you’re a transgressor, or I don’t know, or morally not okay, or whatever you want. Meaning, there can also be disputes—sometimes, usually even more difficult disputes—the disputes conducted within the room are often harsher than the disputes with someone outside the room. May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.