Philosophical Dialogues, Is Free Will Good, Why do we need Names?, Hunter and Bain, Jake Jackson

Dialogues | Is Free Will Good?

Hunter and Bain nod to the android waiter who delivers their coffee, and receive the usual tepid response. They sit on the fringes of a market square, with the sunlight casting shadows through the trees, watching the patterns of age on the ancient stone ground. The population of old Jerez slinks past, either trying to avoid the direct heat of the sun, or entirely oblivious to its consequences. These two groups seem to avoid each other expertly, although the occasional collision sparks a hot-headed response from one of the injured bodies, red-faced, and sullen; a fight seems to lurk always in the potential energy of the square.

The time does not matter, nor the year.


Bain: Oh, there’s another one. On the other side.

Hunter: I didn’t know this place could be so entertaining.

Bain: I suppose there must be a pattern.

Hunter: Not everything is pre-determined.

Bain: That’s not what I meant, although now you mention it…

Hunter: I’m going to regret that…

Bain: No, but if it is random, it must be subject to Free Will.

Hunter: What must?

Bain: The ‘everything’ you mentioned.

Hunter: You mean everything is subject to Free Will?

Bain: That doesn’t sound right, if you say it like that.

Hunter: Well, narrow it down then.

Bain: Ok, so people are subject to Free Will.

Hunter: Not androids, robots, creatures or other living entitles?

Bain: Now we’re straying into the consciousness discussion. I do mean Free Will itself, in whatever manifestation, as it applies to any conscious being.

Hunter: Ah. Is that a good thing?

Bain: Not sure that matters, it’s just a thing.

Hunter: So it doesn’t matter if Free Will is good or not?

Bain: Well, it doesn’t matter in the greater scheme.

Hunter: It would if one of your human buddies exercised their Free Will and blew up another planet. Or exercised their collective Free Will and consumed so much of Old Earth’s resources that nothing could survive on it anymore, except the machines that farm the oceans and filter the skies.

Bain: Well, who’s to say that’s not part of an ecological cycle, that the exercise of Free Will did not make a difference to the climate or the planet, manifested through the agents of Free Will, humans, their inventions, or otherwise?

Hunter: Apart from the logic of several hundred years of industrialisation, then technological consumerism, it’s an observable fact that making a choice has an effect, for good or ill. Your species is very good at self-destruction.

Bain: Maybe, but not exclusively, and that doesn’t make Free Will itself either good or bad.

Hunter: No, that’s true, it’s the way it’s used.

Bain: So it’s the consequences that are good or ill, the fact of Free Will has nothing to do with it.

Hunter: That can’t really be true. If there’s no Free Will then your planet would have survived longer, fewer people would have died, fewer species extinct. You’d not have had to colonise the rest of your galaxy and start the same cycle on hundreds of other planets.

Bain: So you are saying that the existence of Free Will is the problem?

Hunter: Not the problem, but you can’t ignore the effects, and there would be no effects if Free Will did not exist in the first place.

Bain: But if there was no Free Will then there would have to be some sort of grand design, under which the death of one planet, and the human expansion to others would merely be a small part, and probably irrelevant.

Hunter: That assumes a grand design is the only other alternative.

Bain: Okay, so it could be a series of random events, where species and planets cycle through birth and death without meaning or significance.

Hunter: Well, in either of these cases, the grand design or random events, then the issue of good or ill effects does not occur.

Bain: Hold on, it does, if the grand design is created by an original entity, a God or Universal Being.

Hunter: Hm, I don’t even countenance that in the grand design, I spoke in terms of cause and effect, energy and matter, not supernatural beings.

Bain: But there are many religions who disagree with you on that! They would point to the moment of creation, and the granting of Free Will, within the context of an overall design, or that every action is pre-determined.

Hunter: I think the operative word there is “many”. Many religions, with different Gods, or different aspects of the same Universal Being, each have views on grand design in relation to humans and other species.

Bain grimaced: Perhaps that’s another discussion then.

Hunter: Yes, although it still brings us back to Free Will because in any of these other circumstances the exercise of Free Will at a local level is possible, likely even, whether it effects a great scheme or a random universe.

Bain: So Free Will itself is neither good nor bad?

Hunter: Unless you take the view that it always and ultimately leads to poor choices.

Bain: And that’s one of your “human weakness” tropes. You do believe that. I know you don’t take account of affection or mercy, or sympathy.

Hunter: Are those not just mitigating factors?

Bain: Perhaps. But you are biased.

Hunter: And I have no free will, I do follow a grand scheme.

Bain smiles ruefully: Your sole task, to restore the fallen. How could I forget!

Hunter: In that respect I am more limited than you, if we accept that you have Free Will, as a human.

Bain sighs: Oh, do we?

They lapse into silence again, watching another altercation in the market square, with several other onlookers drawn in to separate the flustered, colliding creatures. The patterns of shadow and light strewn across the ground by the sunlight through the shifting trees are oblivious to the angry scuffling amongst them.


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