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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 49
that he endorsed a purely mechanical determinism or at all doubts the
efficacy of the human will. For Hume, a man’s behavior was indeed determined
but not (at least exclusively) by the “behavior of the micro-elements,”
rather by such things as character, breeding, and education.
A sensible response to mechanistic determinism was provided in 1958
by Brand Blanchard. He insisted that he was a determinist, but his thinking
was closer to that of Hume than to either Minsky or Searle. His answer
is that there are different kinds or levels of causation. Will is free, in other
words, in that it is not determined by mechanical causation but by its own
rules and laws and “that in the realm of reflection and choice there operates
a different kind of causality from any we know in the realm of bodies.”
The higher levels of causality may supervene on the lower levels, and
“when causality of the highest level is at work, we have precisely what the
indeterminists, without knowing it, want” (11). He does not say so, but the
obvious inference is that the highest level is teleological: it is purposeful,
not blind.
This is a view of the freedom of the will that accords perfectly with
Shaw’s metaphysics: freedom of the will is a misnomer to the extent that it
does not deny all forms of determinism; it rejects only materialistic determinism.
6 The will operates according to its own principles and is independent
of what have been thought of as purely physical laws. Actually, since
both types of principles cause physical events, a more precise way of saying
this would be to use the Aristotelian terms: final causes are independent of,
and coexist with, efficient causes. Physical events influence volitional
events as well as the reverse, but volitional causes cannot be reduced to
materialistic ones. The two causal categories interact with each other much
as different materialistic laws interact, depending on the circumstances in
which they exist. But they are not the same. Beating a horse with a stick or
bribing it with a carrot is not the same, in principle, as turning a key to start
a gasoline engine. Final causes as well as efficient causes exist in the universe;
they exist, at least in part, in our minds, and are to a significant
extent identical with what we think of as our “selves,” our egos. In everyday
language: Things can happen because I want them to happen; I have
some power, feeble though it may be, to change the physical world in accordance
with my wishes. To maintain that volition can be reduced to, and
explained entirely in terms of, mechanical causation is to render the will
impotent. For the mechanical world, understood in purely materialistic
terms, is blind and indifferent. That is, efficient causes, understood as such,
are both unaware and uncaring of their effects. If my pleasures, pains,