A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.
In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”
Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.
Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.
The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.
Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.
Free will works the same way. A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn’t prove that choice is an illusion.
The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has spent much of his career arguing against this type of thinking. In his recent book, “The Science of Free Will,” he claims that free will evolved because it was required to live in complex social systems. Culture works only if people can restrain themselves. They must follow rules when no one is watching. They must delay gratification. They must make plans. They must explain themselves. They must know that actions today bring consequences tomorrow.
Mr. Baumeister’s key move is to treat free will as a matter of degree. Some actions are freer than others. A man ordering dinner from a menu is freer than a man being robbed at gunpoint. A sober adult planning his career is freer than a drunk teenager in a parking lot at 2 a.m.
Mr. Baumeister is fond of the phrase “responsible autonomy.” A child lacks the capacity for it. So does a person in the grip of addiction, rage or delusion. A functioning adult is expected to have it. This is why we praise self-control and blame cruelty. It is why courts distinguish among accident, negligence and murder. It is why “I couldn’t help it” is sometimes an explanation and sometimes an excuse.
The determinists would have us drop these distinctions. But notice the asymmetry in their position. They rarely treat themselves as automatons. They also reserve agency for the educated reader, who is presumed to have the ability to redesign legal systems and reimagine institutions. Free will for me, but not for thee.
The deniers of free will haven’t improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it. The man who waits for his wife to fall asleep becomes harder to condemn, because somewhere in his past there is a reason. There is always a reason, but that isn’t the same as an excuse or justification.
Arguments against free will often carry a hidden moral assumption. If no one truly chooses his actions, then no one deserves blame. Criminals should be treated more leniently because they couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judgment is redirected away from the criminal and toward the person who chooses to condemn him.
Notice, though, the asymmetry. The determinist grants agency to himself and a handful of other anointed beings. They can choose to become more enlightened. They can exert agency to redesign the criminal-justice system, revise social norms and build more compassionate institutions. Criminals and everyone else, meanwhile, are reduced to billiard balls.
This is presented as humane, but it’s condescending. It strips people of agency in the name of compassion. And once a person is no longer regarded as capable of governing himself, it becomes easier to justify governing him without his consent. If people are merely carried along by forces they can’t understand or control, then perhaps their preferences need not be taken seriously either.
The scientific and philosophical arguments about determinism are worth considering. But they should be separated from the moral conclusions that are so often attached to them. Too many deniers of free will smuggle in an exception for themselves. The unenlightened masses are automatons. The enlightened few, though, are free enough to decide what to do with them.
A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “Free Will Is Undefeated.”
Even if it’s true that criminals lack free will, they deterministically respond to incentives. By punishing criminals, we affect the incentives that potential criminals face.
Plus, I want to punish killers and child molesters harshly. I can’t help it!
The new determinists have become a priestly class wishing their cultured forgiveness can be generalized by the insight of determinism, and that is what gets them in logistic trouble. We actually find them arguing that different outcomes are possible taking different paths, something akin to a - choice?
We are privileged to live in societies where agency can be discussed endlessly, so we can acknowledge that social conditions matter, but it so happens that the kind of societies motivated to accept arguments of impaired or trapped agency- in certain conditions - are exactly the ones that take it for granted that the majority can be held responsible and act accordingly.
In Scandinavia, my original base, I observe that the connected values of personal and social responsibility have been in play, and it is because of this that the treatment of criminals can appear mild and compassionate to other societies. Because the vast majority of people do not want even the mild treatment and are not incentivized by it. We also observe how that system responded when immigrant populations did not play by the rules and were unfazed by the mild treatment. Struggles ensued, practices had to change. When a sufficient amount of individuals did not act socially responsible, the whole system was threatened. Forgiveness was not the solution.
In a high functioning culture, there are both consequences to face and forgiveness to earn, and both have to be perceived as fair by the community at large. If you move away from that in one direction or the other, social tension and dysfunction will arise.
The determinists face the logical problem that it is best if most people remain persuaded that they can be held responsible. I think that we have to arrive at the conclusion that the determinist belief structure sucks as a guideline for social action. And if that is where it gets us, what good is the belief structure?