There’s No Such Thing as Free Will, But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
This is the title of a recent article, by Stephen Cave, in the Atlantic that is worth reading. Let me lay out its basic premises and see if you agree. If you have read any of my books or this blog for very long, you would know that I am a staunch believer that libertarian free will (the ability to consciously do otherwise in any given situation) does not exist.
Cave starts off by saying that the belief in free will permeates modern society, from politics to welfare and crime and punishment.
Science on the other hand, reaches other conclusions. It's no longer a debate about nature vs nurture - hey, it's both - but a recognition that something underlies the causality of human behaviour and consciousness. Indeed, biology, neuroscience and social sciences have built up a more and more complete picture of humanity over the recent decades. Similarly to Sam Harris, Cave states:
The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.
What implications does this ever more pervasive view have? Well, as I pointed out in my own book, neuroscience and neurocriminology is being used in a whole lot more court cases than they ever were, and this creeping spplied skepticism is gaining momentum.
The meat of the article, then, is in assessing these ramifications of a growing acceptance of skepticism in the form of determinism. Cave continues:
This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?
Cave goes on to discuss research that looks at how people primed with deterministic literature have their outlooks change. In other words, does deterministic outlooks on life have a negative or positive effect on our dispositions? Cave reports:
When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”
There are a number of different pieces of research that seem to point towards such conclusions (such as employers finding people who believe in free will more capable and prompt in their jobs), though one does have to wonder whether the subjects are primed with fatalistic accounts of determinism rather than more nuanced and thoughtful treatises, such as one might find in the writings of Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso.
No doubt this is a challenge for determinists - the fatalistic psychological disposition that can emanate from a lack of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness can be problematic.
Of course, none of these studies says anything about the truth of free will or determinism, but what the ramifications of such a belief might be.
Roy Baumeister has found similar things:
- Students believing less strongly in free will were less likely to volunteer to help classmates.
- Those primed with simple statements like “Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion” were less likely to give money to the homeless or lend someone a phone.
- A weaker belief in free will is linked to more stress, less happiness, less commitment to relationships, less meaning in life, and potentially a lower academic performance, and people who are "less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another".
So some people, such as Israeli philosopher Saul Smilansky (who has written a book detailing as much), believe that we don't have free will, but that we should keep this truth secret because it is potentially dangerous to society. We come down to a consequentialist approach to life: believing that perpetuating a lie can bring about a greater good. Such determinism, or, rather, fatalism, can be used by people to justify all sorts (in theory).
And it is the undermining of praise and blame that is the troubling undercurrent, or so people like Smilansky claim. In this way, it is deemed beneficial to adhere to free will illusionism. When truth comes up against the good, the good must win.
[caption id="attachment_7236" align="aligncenter" width="550"]
![By Dean Hochman from Overland Park, Kansas, U.S. (arrows) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://wp.production.onlysky.media/jpearce/files/2016/02/morality.jpg)
By Dean Hochman from Overland Park, Kansas, U.S. (arrows) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]
Stephen Cave compares this approach with that of Sam Harris:
“We need our beliefs to track what is true,” Harris told me. Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things. But if we instead accept that “human behavior arises from neurophysiology,” he argued, then we can better understand what is really causing people to do bad things despite this threat of punishment—and how to stop them. “We need,” Harris told me, “to know what are the levers we can pull as a society to encourage people to be the best version of themselves they can be.”
According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.
Harris and Pereboom are of the opinion that deferring to blame is a negative and damaging consequence of human evolution. Harris uses the example of 9/11 - the retributive and vengeful reaction ended up being counter-productive. If we could have treated the human disaster like Hurricane Katrina, calmly and without hatred, focusing on rebuilding and preventing future disasters, then we would have been more effective.
Whereas the evidence from Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues suggests that social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life—Harris thinks that social benefits will result from seeing other people’s behavior in the very same light. From that vantage point, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better.
What’s more, Harris argues, as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate.
And this comes back to the confusion of fatalism with determinism. I have met this in my own discussions with others about free will. This is where the psychology trumps the philosophy.
Some, like Bruce Waller, seek to marry the best of both worlds, and Stephen Cave sees this as the potential for a future answer. We didn't build ourselves: the genes and environment into which we were born. Understanding how people get to do bad things, and why, is the route towards greater compassion and creating a society where we know how to embrace those variables that will help people to make better, more decent decisions.
For Waller:
Waller believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.
Without having read any Waller yet (he is on my reading list), it is hard to see how meaningfully different he is to, say, Harris and Pereboom.
This is an interesting article, and well worth a read, because it sums up what will be at the forefront of applied philosophy in the coming years.