“The Deontic Wager” – Dmitry Sereda (Central European University)
The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2025
When philosophers argue about free will, they typically concentrate on what one may call “classic questions”, such as whether free will is conceptually possible, and if it is, whether we have it. Those questions are important and exciting, but they are not the only interesting questions that we can ask about the topic. For instance, one less explored issue is how we should behave given that we’re uncertain about the classic questions. Recently, there have been several arguments that approach free will exactly from this angle. Although these wager arguments, as I call them, differ in some important respects, they have a common structure and reach similar conclusions. Roughly, the idea is that the existence of free will and its absence are equiprobable or should be regarded as such, and in the context of this uncertainty, it is better to assume that it exists than that it doesn’t. If you wrongly assume that free will doesn’t exist, something morally valuable is bound to be lost. On the other hand, if you wrongly assume that free will is real, nothing of moral value goes amiss. Hence, it is better to assume that free will exists. Different wager arguments differ in terms of what kind of moral value is at stake. Göran Duus-Otterström (2008) thinks that mistakenly wagering against free will is an affront against human dignity and worth; Katherin A. Rogers (2015) believes that it encourages moral laxness; and Bret Frischman and Evan Selinger (2018) are concerned with the negative societal consequences of wagering against free will.
All of these wagers face two objections. One is The Objection from Rank-Ordering. It says that the authors of the wager arguments are wrong in thinking that no moral disvalue comes from mistakenly assuming that free will exists. In fact, due to the connection between free will and moral responsibility, a mistaken wager for freedom would mean that we assign responsibility to people who are not free (because no one is free), and that’s an injustice. So, it is not clear that assuming we have free will is a better option. The second objection is The Objection from Probability. It says that it is simply not true that we should regard both the existence of free will and its non-existence as equally probable, because the latter is significantly more likely.
There are good reasons to think that both The Objection from Rank-Ordering and The Objection from Probability present significant difficulties for the existing free will wagers. Yet, I believe there is a wager argument that is a lot less vulnerable to them, and that’s exactly the argument I put forward in my paper forthcoming in The Journal of Value Inquiry. The wager I propose, call it the Deontic Wager, is concerned with a specific kind of moral disvalue. Namely, the disvalue of violating obligations. The Deontic Wager relies on how deontic morality, i.e., the part of morality that has to do with obligations, relates to the issue of free will. The wager goes roughly as follows. If we don’t have free will, we don’t have the ability to do otherwise. Ought implies can. Hence, if there is no free will, we never have an obligation to do otherwise, which means that we have no obligations whatsoever. Conversely, if there is free will, we do have at least some obligations. So, if we act as if free will doesn’t exist (i.e., as if there are no obligations) when it actually does, we will certainly wrong others. In contrast, if we act as if free will exists when it actually doesn’t, we don’t wrong anyone because there is nothing we ought to do. Our certainty that free will exists should, I think, be more than zero. Therefore, if we care about doing the right thing, acting as if free will exists is rational – it is better in some cases (that is, if it really exists), and worse in none.
Why does The Deontic Wager stand better against the objections than the other wager arguments? Let’s take a look at The Objection from Probability first. Notice that the wager doesn’t need the assumption that the existence of free will and its absence are equiprobable. For the wager to work, the probability of free will existing should only be greater than zero. That’s a very minimal requirement. So, the Objection from Probability doesn’t have bite. What about the Objection from Rank-Ordering? Although things are somewhat more complicated here for reasons that can’t be covered in a short piece, there is a good case to be made that it doesn’t have bite either – if free will doesn’t exist, we don’t have any obligations, so we don’t have an obligation not to assign responsibility to unfree people. All in all, the Deontic Wager seems to be in good shape when put against the objections.
I see at least two ways the Deontic Wager can be relevant for more substantive moral discussions. First, it can be relevant for discussions surrounding luck egalitarianism, a view that says that inequality is just only to the extent that it arises from free choices. Due to this emphasis on free choices, luck egalitarians are sometimes charged with making political philosophy too reliant on a particular answer to the metaphysical question about the existence of free will. I think luck egalitarians can acknowledge such reliance while offering a justification for it – the Deontic Wager. Second, the Deontic Wager may play a role in debates about retributivism, a view that criminals deserve or are liable to be punished. There are philosophers who think that retributivism requires free will to be plausible, and that we most likely don’t have it. From that, they conclude that we shouldn’t be retributivists. As far as free will skeptics are ready to admit at least some possibility that free will exists, the Deontic Wager provides retributivists with a good response to this kind of criticism.
In this post, I glossed over some important subtleties of the argument, so if you are interested in learning more or, even better, think that some of what I say is obviously misguided, I invite you to check out the paper. Even if I am indeed wrong about the virtues of the Deontic Wager, wager arguments about free will deserve more engagement, and I hope that my paper contributes to drawing some attention to them.
References
Duus-Otterström, Göran. 2008. Betting Against Hard Determinism. Res Publica 14 (3): 219–35.
Frischmann, Brett, and Evan Selinger. 2018. Re-Engineering Humanity. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press
Rogers, Katherin A. 2015. Freedom and Self-Creation: Anselmian Libertarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Free will, morality, instinct, conscience, there’s a lot of talk about these things given to or inherited by human nature. But how do we actually define them? Science, philosophy, literature?
What would it look like for any cognitively intact person (not held in bondage or otherwise coercive societal arrangement) to function in the world with the premise they lack free-will?
Let's stipulate the claim free-will is in fact a chimera, and can be irrefutably shown to be such.
And then?
It's evident that those individuals who sincerely claim that free-will does not- cannot- exist, go through their day like the rest of us, employing the same psychological mechanisms to navigate the material and social world. They may be convinced that free-will is a chimera, but they rely on this chimera every waking moment.
The free-will deniers operate in the world no differently from the foolish masses who succumb to the sham of free-will. There is no discernable distinction to be made between the deniers from the (purported) dupes.
If we continue to stipulate that free-will is a chimera, it raises an interesting question why such a thing would evolve in the central nervous system of Homo Sapiens, since the chimera is a universal feature of our species. It appears to have conferred a substantial survival advantage, as far as chimeras go.
Also, the experience of free-will plays a determinative role in social arrangements at every scale. It defines the conflict between pluralistic democracies and autocracies- constraining or eliminating the exercise of free-will is the raison d'etre of autocratic regimes. If I am a free-will denier, I suppose I should make no effort to oppose the establishment of an autocratic regime, because, hey, there's no free-will anyway. But if I oppose the autocratic regime, I'm donning the chimera because of perceived preference, which of course would also be mere phantasm.
Hmm... can't ever function in the world without the chimera of free-will, and denying free-will precludes making a moral distinction between pluralistic democracy and autocracy.
It's quite something to contemplate how much ink has been spilled, how many pixels churned, across how many centuries, to bring us to a point where nothing practical is achieved, and any consideration of morality becomes moot. Cool.
But at least the free-will deniers can proclaim 'Hah! We're right about the TRUE NATURE OF REALITY and the rest of you are wrong.'
Because that's what all this argle-bargle amounts to.