It seems like we have free will. Most of the time, we are the ones who choose what we eat, how we tie our shoes, and what articles we read.
However, Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky’s latest book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” has received a lot of media attention for claiming that science shows this is an illusion.
Sapolsky summarizes the latest scientific research relevant to determinism: the idea that we are causally “determined” to act as we do because of our history – and could not possibly act in any other way.
According to determinism, just as a falling rock is determined to fall due to gravity, your neurons are determined to fire in a certain way as a direct result of your environment, upbringing, hormones, genes, culture, and countless other factors. you have no control over. . And this is true no matter how “free” your choices seem to you.
Sapolsky also says that because our behavior is determined in this way, no one is morally responsible for what he or she does. He believes that while we can lock up murderers to protect others, they technically don’t deserve to be punished.
This is a rather radical position. It is worth asking why only 11% of philosophers agree with Sapolsky, compared to the 60% who think that being causally determined is compatible with having free will and being morally responsible.
Have these ‘compatibilists’ not understood the science? Or did Sapolsky not understand free will?
Is determinism incompatible with free will?
‘Free will’ and ‘responsibility’ can mean different things depending on how you approach them.
Many people view free will as the ability to choose between alternatives. Determinism may seem to threaten this, because if we are causally determined, we have no real choice between alternatives; we are merely making the choice we would always make.
But there are counterexamples to this way of thinking. For example, suppose that when you started reading this article, someone secretly locked your door for 10 seconds, preventing you from leaving the room during that time. However, you didn’t feel like leaving because you wanted to continue reading – so you stayed where you were. Was your choice free?
Many would argue that even if you don’t have the option to leave the room, it doesn’t make the choice to remain unfree. Therefore, the lack of alternatives is not what determines whether you have a lack of free will. What matters instead is how the decision was made.
The problem with Sapolsky’s arguments, as free will expert John Martin Fischer explains, is that he does not actually provide any argument as to why his view of free will is correct.
He simply defines free will as incompatible with determinism, assumes that this absolves humans of moral responsibility, and spends much of the book describing the many ways in which our behavior is determined. His arguments all come back to his definition of ‘free will’.
Compatibilists believe that people are agents. We live lives with ‘meaning’, have an understanding of right and wrong, and act for moral reasons. This is enough to suggest that most of us usually have some kind of freedom and are responsible for our actions (and deserve blame) – even if our behavior is ‘determined’.
Compatibilists would point out that being constrained by determinism is not the same as being tied to a chair by a rope. Not saving a drowning child because you were tied up is not the same as not saving a drowning child because you were “determined” not to care about him or her. The first is an apology. The latter is cause for condemnation.
Incompatibilists need to defend themselves better
Some readers sympathetic to Sapolsky may not be convinced. They might say that your decision to stay in the room, or ignore the child, was still caused by influences in your history over which you had no control – and therefore you were not really free to choose.
However, this does not prove that having alternatives or being ‘indeterminate’ is the only way we can count on having free will. Instead, it is assumed that this is the case. From the compatibilists’ point of view, this is a fraud.
Compatibilists and incompatibilists agree that, given that determinism is true, there is in some sense a lack of alternatives and could not be otherwise.
However, incompatibilists will say that’s why you don’t have free will, while compatibilists will say that you still have free will because that sense of ‘lack of alternatives’ doesn’t undermine free will – and free will is something completely different.
They say that as long as your actions come from you in some relevant way (even if “you” were “determined” by other things), you count as someone with free will. If you are tied to a rope, the decision not to save the drowning child does not come from you. But if you just don’t care about the child, then yes.
According to another analogy, if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around, one person can say that there are no auditory senses, so this is incompatible with the existence of sound. But another might say that even if there are no auditory senses present, this is still compatible with existing sound, because ‘sound’ is not about auditory perception – it is about vibrating atoms.
Both agree that nothing is heard, but disagree on which factors are relevant in determining the existence of ‘sound’ at all. Sapolsky must show why his assumptions about what counts as free will are relevant to moral responsibility. As philosopher Daniel Dennett once put it, we must ask ourselves what “varieties of free will” exist [are] worth wanting.”
Free will is not a scientific question
The point of this back and forth is not to show that compatibilists are right. It is to emphasize that there is a nuanced debate going on. Free will is a thorny issue. Showing that no one is responsible for what they do requires understanding and commitment to all positions offered. Sapolsky does not do this.
Sapolsky’s broader mistake seems to assume that his questions are purely scientific: answered by looking only at what science says. While science is relevant, we first need some idea of what free will is (which is a metaphysical question) and how it relates to moral responsibility (a normative question). This is something philosophers have wondered about for a long time.
Interdisciplinary work is valuable and scientists are welcome to contribute to age-old philosophical questions. But unless they first engage with existing arguments, rather than choosing a definition they like and attacking others for not meeting it, their claims will simply be muddled.
Adam Piovarchy, Research Associate, Institute for Ethics and Society, University of Notre Dame, Australia
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
