The slides for today talk about the loss of self, memories, dreams, the ability to control one’s life that appears so often in Philip Dick’s work. On the first page of “The Minority Report,” Ed Anderton asserts his free will to Ed Witwer, the young man who intends to replace him: “I’m under no compulsion to retire. I founded pre-crime and I can stay here as long as I want. It’s purely my decision.”
The rest of the story thrusts Anderton into a wild conspiracy (or is it one?) that raises questions about the existence and value of free will. At the end, do you think “The Minority Report” sees Anderton as acting freely, as absolutely constrained, or as having a real but limited capacity for self-determination? Why? Point to one or two specific moments or images that drive your thinking.
While “Minority Report” initially seems to support determinism, by the end I believe Anderton’s character affirms the existence of free will. Though Anderton initially refuses to believe the reports, he eventually murders Kaplan to preserve the existence of Precrime and, in doing so, fulfills the final report. This suggests that at the end of the story, Anderton’s actions are completely constrained. However, the very fact that Anderton was able to successfully murder Kaplan even with the precog information speaks to the fact that the system is broken. In this way, determinism exists because of the existence of free choice.
For this reason, I believe Anderton has a very real capacity for self-determination and thus also has free will. The lapse in the system which allowed for the murder was due to a failure on the part of law enforcement, not Precrime’s prediction capabilities. This was able to happen because in the world of “Minority Report,” there are multiple time-paths that can have different endings depending on whether fate or free will wins out. Thus, the only way that Precrime’s precognition functions is because people are able to influence and even change the future. The part of the story that really sold this point to me is when Anderton is at the hotel listening to the radio show which details the multiple time path theory. The radio show explains that if there were only one time path then precognition would be useless since only one possibility would exist. However, because multiple time paths, thus multiple outcomes, exist, precognition is able to give law enforcement the information needed to stop crimes. This proves the fact that humans must have the ability to choose and alter the future. Essentially, Anderton demonstrates that he does in fact have some limited capacity for free will for if he did not and his murdering Kaplan was truly inevitable then there wouldn’t even be three reports and Precrime would have no use.
I’m still reconciling my line of thinking here with the reveal of the order of the reports. The fact that the final report stated that Anderton would change his mind and go through with murdering Kaplan to protect Precrime makes his whole arc appear predetermined. However, I’m sticking by my albeit confusing assertion that the existence of multiple time paths and multiple outcomes to different situations, determined by individuals’ choices, affirms the existence of free will. I’m still making sense of this, but the way I understand it, precognition only exists because people make choices of their own volition thus creating the reports, not the other way around.
I’m really going back and forth on this one. On one hand Anderton makes it clear that he is intentionally making the decision to kill Kaplan, but on the other hand we are very much told that this was his fate.
I think that what Dick is trying to propose is that just because something is “predetermined” doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Some things simply have to happen the way that they do. I don’t think it has do with active decisions people make, but more so the paths that open up for them. Anderton does what he can with the paths laid before him. He has the choice to follow whichever he wants, but the context and circumstance is already there. Free will is obviously a question here, but I actually think it takes a back seat to the reality question that Dick seems to be obsessed with. There are constraints imposed upon Anderton from the get go; the reality and society he exists within and the socio-political conflicts that accompany it. He functions and acts according to his desires within those constraints, but never will he have the true freedom of willpower to act outside of them. So, in a way, maybe Dick is saying all things are set ahead of time because when a path is laid before you, you tend to want to follow it.
I believe the minority report argues Anderton actions are absolutely and fully constrained. Towards the end of the story, he describes how the majority report that he would kill Kaplan was an illusion based on pieces of each of the pre-cogs description of the future. Two of them arrived at the same conclusion along different timelines. In the story, Anderton explains how the minority report contradicts the first report based on the fact Anderton will learn he is going to murder Kaplan. Afterwards, new information is presented and the final outcome changes because the third computer calculated the fact Anderton would discover the plan and resort back to the outcome of the original report. As I listened to the story, I understood Anderton as a perplexed leader stuck in a catch 22 of his trust in the pre-crime system, and his own personal choice to not be a murder. He seems like a free acting individual stuck in a world believing determinism. In the final section of him explaining the illusion created by the “computers”, we see Anderton did not have free will because every step in his belief process had been predicted. It appeared the pre-cogs might be wrong, but really they were all correct based on their processing point in the overall timeline. If had the opportunity to kill Kaplan at the point the second (minority report) calculated, he would not have killed him. At each point in the story at least one of the pre-cogs were correct.
The ideology and structure of the pre-crime unit in which Anderton is the leader rely on free will being nonexistent. In this structure, precogs, which are a mutant form of humans, supposedly forecast future crimes, and then the pre-crime police officers arrest the criminals of the future. At times, the precogs give conflicting reports where two agree on an outcome that produces the majority report. One precog delivers a contrasting outcome that comes to be known as the minority report. Anderton’s case is an example of when there is a minority report. Because Anderton’s actions uproot and disprove the system of pre-crime, the short story sees Anderton as acting freely. Of course, Anderton’s decided to kill Kaplan to validate the design of pre-crime. But, as the reader with access to inside information, we know that Anderton acted on free will rather than something that was predestined. When Anderton was standing on the stage with Kaplan, he could easily keep his pistol concealed and not attack Kaplan. I feel as though the precog reports are always correct when combined, as the most likely outcomes are accounted for, but each one alone is more of a guess. Unlike Dick, I’m unable to see into alternate realities, and maybe that is why I’m struggling to fully grasp this short story on the level I would like. I’m very much looking forward to the discussion.
I think the message that the author was trying to convey in “The Minority Report” is that Anderton’s actions are absolutely constrained, even when there is semblance of free will. The existence of the minority report was supposed to exonerate Anderton, because it predicted that he would no longer murder after finding out that he would. However, at the end of the story, the order in which the different reports came in is revealed, and we learn that the final minority report states that Anderton would change his mind and end up killing Kaplan to protect the precrime system. This is exactly what ends up happening, thus showing that what Anderton thought were actions driven by free will were already predetermined.
I think Anderton’s final actions show that he was institutionalized to the point that he was willing to knowingly sacrifice his free will to protect the integrity of the system. I guess considering the background of Anderton his actions make sense, especially because he played a pivotal role in the implementation of the precrime system in society and thus had a personal and vested interest in keeping the system alive. However, I can’t help but wonder a possible alternative scenario where Anderton chooses to exercise his free will and sacrifices the system for his freedom by not murdering Kaplan. Maybe another interpretation of the story is that free will does exist, but Anderton was so institutionalized that he was fooled into believing that his fate was predetermined, resulting in him being manipulated into making certain choices.
At the end of “The Minority Report,” John Anderton is still very much constrained to his society’s determination of human will, just as he was at the beginning. The contrast of letting the readers think he “broke away” from constraint and then guiding him to kill Kaplan regardless is what solidifies that idea for me. I think that it creates an interesting commentary on prison systems– that people who are “predestined” to crime have no choice but to fall into crime, at that point believing it’s of their own free will. I think this story can be read in a few different ways as well, and that’s not the only commentary to rise out of it. But the section of the story in which Anderton believes he’s escaped with a new identity, only to later discover that the ones who helped him meant for him to be caught all along, makes me read into it as commentary on an inescapable system. Those who are targeted by the criminal justice system have no choice in whether they become part of it or not. Free will does not exist. In reality, we only believe that we have free will.