The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 77
at every moment doing exactly what he wants, and, therefore, according
to the compatibilist account of free will, each of them enjoys a life of
perfect freedom. What each of them wants, of course, is to do as he is
told to do by those appointed over him, but the account of free will we
are examining says nothing about the content of a free agent’s desires: it
requires only that there be no barrier to the agent’s acting on them. The
deltas and epsilons are not very intelligent, and are therefore incapable
of philosophizing about their condition, but the alphas’ techniques
could as easily be applied to highly intelligent people. It is interesting
to ask what conclusions such people would arrive at if they reflected on
their condition. If you said to one of these willing but highly intelligent
slaves, ‘‘Don’t you realize that you obey your masters only because your
desire to obey them was implanted in you by pre-natal conditioning and
genetic engineering?’’, he would, I expect, reply by saying something
like this: ‘‘Yes, and a good thing, too, because, you see, they had the
foresight to implant in me a desire that my desires be so formed. I’m
really very fortunate: I’m not only doing exactly what I want, but I
want to want what I want, and I want what I want to be caused by
pre-natal conditioning and genetic engineering.’’ Again, such a being
can hardly be said to have free will. I have no theory of what free will
is—lots of philosophers do; unfortunately, all their theories labor under
the disadvantage of being wrong—but I can see that this isn’t a case
of it. Therefore the argument we are considering, the argument for the
conclusion that an omnipotent being could determine the free choices
of its creatures, rests on a false theory of free will.
Now my argument, my argument for the falsity of the compatibilist
theory of free will is, of course, a philosophical argument and is
therefore, by my own testimony, inconclusive. But let us remember the
dialectical situation in which my inconclusive argument occurs. You
will remember that at the end of the previous lecture I declined, out of
courtesy to my fictional creation Atheist, to represent her as replying to
Theist’s presentation of the free-will defense by employing any of the
three arguments about free will that we are now considering. But let’s
suppose that Atheist has a rather dim sister—Village Atheist, I’ll call
her—and let’s suppose for a moment that Village Atheist and Theist are
engaged in debate, and that Village Atheist is dim enough to employ the
compatibilist response to the free-will defense, and that Theist replies
to the compatibilist response more or less as I have. Let us pay attention
to where we are in the debate when this much has happened; that is,
let us remember who is trying to prove what and to whom and in what