Sentience & Free Will

In this section I hope to show definitions for sentience and free will in ethical terms. I will do this by defining and discussing more exact terms and how they relate to the larger concepts of sentience and free will. I will also discuss how and why free will is required to be the agent in an ethical issue, sentience is required to have free will, and that the ability to experience is required both to be an object of ethics and to be sentient.

I will start with a rock. My pet rock named Billy to be exact. Billy is most certainly not sentient, and most certainly does not have free will. These are facts that all but the most tenacious of skeptics will concede to readily. It just seems like common sense. But why is this exactly? That is a little more difficult to articulate.

Well, for one thing, nothing I could do could ever possible matter to Billy. I could sing to him every day, or leave him out in the rain, and it won’t make a bit of difference to him. Sure, some things I can do can change Billy. I can break him into pieces, or melt him, or any number of things. None of these things would affect Billy in any way, however. They would take effect on his physical form, certainly, but they could not affect him subjectively because Billy is incapable of subjective experience.

Since nothing I can do could ever matter to Billy, I cannot do anything ‘good’ or ‘evil’ to him. Thus subjective experience is a requirement for being considered in an ethical discussion. This is not to say that things like global warming cannot be considered ethical questions, only that they are ethical questions only in so much as they affect beings capable of experiencing the change or its effects subjectively.

It is important that this is subjective experience too. It could be said that a weather balloon with all its instruments and recording devices experienced the trip through the atmosphere. After all, it sensed the environment, recorded the data, and perhaps processed it as well. But this type of experience does not lend itself to ethics, only subjective experience falls into the ethical sphere, because things can only be good or bad in a subjective way, as a value judgment.

Not only is subjective experience required for ethical considerations, it is the only thing which is needed to be considered in an ethical matter. You will observe that if there exists a being which can experience the world in a subjective manner (hereafter referred to as an ‘experiential being’), and there is a particular experience which can be properly demonstrated to be a “bad” experience, then it is definitively wrong to take an action with the sole intent and effect of imposing this bad experience on the experiential being. Thus we come to understand that all experiential beings are the consideration of ethical questions.

Are all experiential beings sentient? Consider if you will an experiential being with no memory, capacity for thought, or will. This being may experience the world, but cannot understand, reason, or even feel emotions in the human sense as emotions are based largely in our memory of past occurrences and our understanding of what we experience. This being, while experiential, and an object of ethical considerations, is not sentient. For this, more is required.

Reason is undoubtedly a requirement of sentience. Reason itself is composed of many things, including but not limited to: memory, thought, logic, abstraction, and conceptualization. Reason gives a being the ability to take experiences and learn from them, to think, to ponder, and to grow. Reason is what gives us our mental life. But even reason and the ability to experience subjectively do not make a being wholly sentient, a final tiny bit is required.

That final piece is self-awareness. A science fiction supercomputer may be able to reason logically after the manner of a human, could even be taught to have subjective experiences if advances in neuroscience and computers continue far enough, but until it knew it existed it would not be sentient. The crux of sentience is not that ‘I think’, but that ‘I am’.

Perhaps I am mistaken on the point of self-awareness. Perhaps a sentient being could exist without a sense of self. It is unintuitive to imagine, but that does not make it impossible. In any case, I am not aware of any such being, so I have little need to consider the possibility, and I do not expect to rely on this point in the future; it is merely written to fill out my idea of sentience. If warranted, I could explore this topic at length in another entry, but I doubt I will see a need.

Having ascertained the nature of sentience, it can be clear what relationship sentient beings have with ethics. They are most certainly of consideration in ethical questions, being by definition experiential, but can they be the ethical actors in an ethical question? No; not unless they have more attributes than we have defined, that is.

In addition to sentience, a being requires the abilities to choose and to act before it can be the agent in an ethical scenario. These abilities can be further described in more basic terms: volition and power. Volition, or a will to do something, is required because without it the being could not choose the action. The being must choose the action being performed, because anything that is done that a being does not choose to do is not that beings doing, not the beings responsibility, and does not enter as an ethical consideration (except perhaps in cases of inaction when action was morally required, which will not be considered until later). This is not to say that a being is not responsible for the unintended consequences of its own chosen actions; the important thing is that the being chose the action in question. Power is also a requirement for being a moral agent. If a being has no power, it cannot affect the experiences of any other being; therefore it cannot be a moral agent. Thus we see that a sentient being with volition and power can be an ethical agent.

We seem to be closing in on a definition of free will. It is clear that free will is related to the idea of being a moral agent, but to be clear we must see if there is anything which may be taken away from, or must be added to, the requirements of being an agent in order to form a complete definition of free will. To do this, let’s take a step back and examine the idea of free will separately.

Free will, strictly speaking, is freedom of volition. Thus by nature it requires a being be possessed of volition which can be free, and a means of directing it. Free will also implies the ability to act in such a way as to implement our volition, which requires power. This is all that free will requires.

Power in this context is the ability to act on some choice. It does not imply the ability to achieve the goals in mind, merely to take the action being considered. A lack of power implies a lack of choice to make a given decision, as the being does not actually have the options being considered, and therefore is excluded from ethical considerations on this point. This is merely to say that a being is not ethically accountable to those actions over which it had no choice; see above.

The means of directing will is reason. Without reason the will is nothing more than a manifestation of our physical states, such as hunger, thirst, or pain, which are in turn manifestations of our environment. To break this dependency on environment for directing our will, we must apply reason. We may use reason to consider the environment and the states it reflects in ourselves, and determine how we will choose to respond.

Some might contend that reason itself is deterministic, that it is merely a reflection of the situations we have encountered and our physical states. If this is so, then at root, our decisions are a result of the environment, not of any free direction of volition, and thus, no physical being can truly possess free will, or be the agent in an ethical consideration. With no agents, there can be no ethical considerations, and ethics merely do not exist.

I reject this because there is an overwhelming appearance of free will among individuals, and no evidence for direct causal relationships between environments and chosen actions has been brought to bear. Certainly an environment affects a person, and in turn the choices they make, but by no account do these environs seem to determine the actions, but rather that the person in question acts as an intermediary between the physical states and the choices made. This may be a very persistent illusion, but as most of the evidence lies if favor of a free will model, I will accept it as true.

We can now see that free will requires volition, reason, and power. If a being is deprived of these it loses its free will, and simultaneously loses its ability to be an ethical agent. It is thus clear that free will and the ability to be an ethical agent are closely linked; so much so that I will treat them as synonymous unless I find good reason to do otherwise.

This also shows that people are not ethically responsible for actions they have taken under extreme duress, force, or while drugged against their will, etc. If a persons reason, will, or power are forcibly removed by any means, then their ethical responsibility in the situations which follow are also removed. In practical terms, a person always retains some choices, and some degree of free will while conscious, so practically speaking, a persons ethical responsibility is diminished partially, in accordance with the amount to which their free will was diminished.

It is interesting to note that free will does not, strictly speaking, require a being to be able to experience anything. This results in a situation where a moral agent, or a being possessed of free will, is not necessarily sentient. This is a thorny matter, but since it has little practical considerations in the real world, and since it seems likely that being experiential may be required to possess volition, I will not bother to treat these issues. For the purposes of my work, all moral agents will possess free will, and all beings with free will shall be assumed to be sentient.

I believe that finally, after a great deal of examination, have found the defining factors of sentience and free will. As these are intertwined with the requisites for participating in ethical consideration, I believe that these factors are also defining factors in ethical roles. I believe they will assist greatly in coming to a solid foundation of rational ethics.