Economics Doesn't Care About Your Free Will

A while back, the New York Times ran a few interesting pieces on free will as part of "The Stone", their philosophy blog feature. Now that the academic community has come to accept that our minds are essentially physically determined systems, though, the debate quickly becomes tired. The big questions that lure most people to the subject--i.e. "do I really have agency, or are my actions predetermined?"--have been set aside and replaced by legalistic, technical discussions about responsibility and ethics--"given that the mind is a product of physical processes governed by the laws of physics, how can one assign responsibility for a wrongdoing?" However, I suspect that outside of academia, most people still carry with them the question of whether or not their thoughts and actions are really predetermined. Determinism is a hard pill to swallow.

What I find really interesting, though, is that, from the perspective of rational choice theory, our actions are effectively predetermined even if we have complete free will. In economic and decision theory models, people come to the table with preferences and a set of choices that entail various costs and benefits (and, to be accurate, certain beliefs about their situation). Even if individuals have complete free will, as long as people do what they are motivated to do as guided as their beliefs (this is what I understand to be meant by "rationality," and it is tautologically true), every decision and action will be a function of their beliefs, values, and choice set. That is to say that even if one has complete agency, the use of that agency is predetermined by one's innate preferences and the outside environment. Therefore, even back in the days when one could claim with impunity that the free mind was a thing apart from the brain, behavior could still be described as deterministic.

Admittedly, this account focuses narrowly on instrumental rationality. One might claim that we can escape from rational choice determinism through the choices we make about our values and beliefs. But that begs the question--on what basis are those higher-order decisions made? If we follow some higher ethical code as necessitated by rationality, then that code is determined outside our minds, and there must be some basis for us choosing to do so. It seems likely to me that, as long as the individual in question is an agent with a unified, self-consistent thought process, some sort of determinism will necessarily result. Of course, the brain is not really a unified, self-consistent thought process, but then we're getting back to the basic questions of the nature of brain processes and free will.

What's worth noting, though, is that in economic models, agency doesn't really matter either way. If we were somehow granted free will after lacking it beforehand, all that would change is that we would get to feel good about having free will. Life would go on the same.