Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will. Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.
Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend.
I believe that free will is a necessary illusion. Right now, I feel free. But if you were to assure me now that the moment I said “right now, I feel free” I could not have said otherwise, I would accept that there is no such thing as free will. But we need that belief, perhaps false, in order to write. That is, we need to believe that we make free choices. That is, we may well be pieces on a board, but we must think of ourselves as the players moving those pieces. And it’s funny that you should ask me about it, since only yesterday I was writing a foreword for William James's The Will to Believe, which deals with this question of free will. And I also remembered Jonathan Edwards who wrote a defense of predestination a century and a half before. I think that if someone were to tell us now that from the moment we were born up until this very moment we have been mere puppets, we have been forced to do what we did, not by the will of some god but, you know, as a result of an infinite number of past events, we would accept it. But if anyone were to tell us right now that we are helpless, we would reject the idea. Perhaps the mere illusion of free will is enough for us.