Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 47
rationalists have always been hard-pressed to answer, although they cannot
be faulted for want of trying. They have striven mightily to maintain
that all motivation can be reduced to pain and pleasure, which in turn must
be derived ultimately from a few inescapable laws of physics. Shaw took
the commonsense line that both consciousness and will are primitive and
irreducible, but he did not assume that they were therefore incomprehensible.
Can will have its own law, its own governing principles, despite the
obvious fact that individuals are not alike and that nothing is more common
than conflict of wills? Is the difference in wills a matter of caprice?
Even if we subscribe to something we call free will, we do not imagine that
the alternative to strict determinism is blind chance. But what, then, do we
mean when we assert that our wills are free?
The Truth About Free Will
This question, although far from simple, must be addressed if we are to
comprehend Shaw’s belief in a world-will of which each individual’s will is
but an expression. Although Shaw defended the idea of free will against
the materialistic determinists, he recognized the conceptual difficulties
that the phrase involves. As early as 1888 he refers to the “insoluble problem
(or unsolved problem, let us say) of free will” (Holroyd 1:117, 4:155). 5
By this he meant that in a very real sense our wills control us, not we our
wills. We cannot arbitrarily change our own wills. When our wills are particularly
strong, we feel ourselves under their compunction. Shaw detested
the way moralists use the idea of free will to excuse cruelty to violators of
social norms. It is no use to claim that the criminal could freely choose to
obey the law; none of us are free to be other than ourselves. Our wills are
just as compelling when they represent a spiritual retreat as when they are
in the van of moral progress. There are men who beat their wives and can
no more help themselves than could Huck Finn bring himself to turn in a
runaway slave, although he “knew” how terribly wicked he was being. In
the end we must all stand and say, with Martin Luther, “I can do no other;
God help me.”
So in an important sense, no one really believes in total freedom of the
will. As Bertrand Russell points out, we never actually think that other
people have free will; we always assume that their actions have causes and,
in particular, that we can influence them (Philosophical Essays 43–44). Of
course the believer in free will could rightly protest that she never imagined
will to be that free. It would be small comfort to rescue our choices
from the iron vice of strict determinism only to deliver them up to the