The Biological Case Against Free Will

In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?

Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.

Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?

For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?

In Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky answers “Yes” in staggering detail. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, sees every human life as a seamless web of causation:

The intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before.… Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. There’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in the biological world but not of it.

No point in the sequence? To clinch this claim, Sapolsky provides a guided tour of the brain and nervous system in action: neurons and synapses, neurotransmitters and receptors, hormones and proteins, genetics and epigenetics, prefrontal cortex and amygdala, along with forays downward into quantum indeterminacy and upward into anthropology, law, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and the history of medicine. Whether or not you’re persuaded by Determined, it’s a marvelously rich book.

And so, in a very different way, is Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College, Dublin. While Sapolsky supplies dozens of discrete mini-lectures about how various substances, structures, systems, and social practices affect behavior and, in particular, decisions, Mitchell’s book tells a single overarching story of how human moral personality evolved: from the molecular origins of organic evolution through unicellular and multicellular creatures, worms, primitive vertebrates, lower mammals, primates, and us; first developing capacities to construct boundaries, self-regulate, and process information, then capacities to formulate goals, integrate information, and internalize meaning, until finally the faculty of free will evolves in humans into,

an open-ended ability for individuals to learn to create new goals further removed from the ultimate imperatives of survival, to plan over longer timeframes, to simulate the outcomes of possible actions and internally evaluate them before acting, to decouple cognition from action, and ultimately to inspect their own reasons and subject them to metacognitive scrutiny.

It is a masterly exposition, however far along the path to free will one follows him.

The disagreement between Sapolsky and Mitchell can be put succinctly. Mitchell shows how our reasoning power evolved over billions of years, through a sequence that was wholly accidental but profoundly logical, and that acting for reasons is our defining property and another name for free will. Sapolsky’s rejoinder is simple: Where do reasons come from? They come, he answers, from milliseconds before making our choice, and also from seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, and decades before that—from adolescence, childhood, and fetal life; from our genome, our ancestral culture, and our species history. At every point, experiences lay down traces in our brain that affect our present choices, and in measurable fashion—Sapolsky cites a tremendous array of studies from the behavioral sciences over the last several decades. It’s a rare intellectual confrontation: both sides deeply informed, fair-minded, incisively argued. My intuitions are with Sapolsky, but Mitchell makes a stronger case for free will than I would have thought possible.

Are we free, then? What hinges on this decision? Does the absence of free will imply passivity and paralysis? Once afflicted with the fatal skepticism, do we simply idle until the universe decides to set us in motion? And is everything we do thereafter predetermined—out of our hands, so that we are mere spectators of all our actions?

Hardly. Consider a historical example: Marx’s widely ridiculed prediction of the inevitability of socialism. Innumerable people have assumed he meant that socialism would arrive whether or not anyone ever lifted a finger to bring it about, so that we all might as well go fishing. But in fact, Marx thought several very specific things—the business cycle and its hardships; the culture of the factory, which brought workers together as never before; and universal education—would induce people to overthrow the existing social order and establish a more cooperative one. And he was right: Workers in England, France, Germany, and the United States tried unsuccessfully to overthrow capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The capitalists fought back successfully, but also grudgingly conceded a welfare state to blunt the impact of future crises. Where in all this drama is there any contradiction between inevitability and free choice? The workers chose freely to rebel, for reasons that compelled them. The capitalists reacted, for their own compelling reasons. Both acted as freely as anyone could and as inevitably as everyone must.

Well, then, will we run amok? Why would we? We will have exactly the same reasons for running amok whether or not we believe in free will, and exactly the same resources for resisting the temptation, if we are tempted. The contrary view—that every violent or voluptuous impulse will have its way with us—assumes that not having free will is equivalent to having no will at all; that because choices are caused, there are no choices.

Obviously, every person alive makes many choices every day. Some are wholly predictable; some are explicable after the fact; some, following on internal conflict, are murkier. All are caused by the mechanisms and processes Sapolsky describes in great detail, yet most of them are free, in the only sense that matters.

What is that sense? It is, simply, the absence of coercion. Even if all choices are caused, only some are coerced. Law, politics, and moral psychology have evolved an indispensable distinction between free and coerced. If a choleric temperament, a secularist education, and a bout of indigestion cause someone to throw a brick through a church window, we say he acted freely—i.e., without coercion. If he does so with a gun to his head, or in the throes of a schizophrenic episode, then he acted under coercion—i.e., not freely. Both acts were wholly caused; free will is nowhere in the picture. But only one of them carries moral and legal responsibility.

But why should it? If there is no free will and the disgruntled secularist’s action was entirely caused, how can we hold him responsible? We do it to make a common life possible. Drawing a line between free and coerced, responsible and excusable, is something every society does, and must do. Different epochs—and even societies within the same epoch—do it differently, depending on each society’s scientific knowledge and moral sensibility. These differences are inevitable: Because there is no immutable human nature, there is no escape from contingency.

Free-will skeptics and free-will believers meet, like Hector and Achilles, on the Plain of Punishment. Free will implies blame; blame licenses punishment; and a license to punish brings out the worst in human beings, Sapolsky claims. It is barbarous to punish someone for a deed he couldn’t help doing, and since that is true of all deeds, no punishment is fair. Mitchell tends to agree. Without free will, he asks, “how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment?” But we do have free will, he thinks. So praise and blame, judgment and punishment, are legitimate in principle.

Mitchell asks that we judge his case for free will without regard to the consequences of belief or skepticism, even though the consequence of skepticism, in his view, is that our moral and political worlds would crumble. Sapolsky devises a substitute for punishment that actually looks quite a bit like punishment, namely quarantine. If a judge and jury believe that an offender is likely to repeat his offense, they may prevent it by quarantining (otherwise known as imprisoning) him. But this is no more punitive than taking a car with faulty steering off the road; and, moreover, the offender is entitled to humane treatment and realistic job training, which produce, at least in Scandinavia, recidivism rates fully two-thirds lower than our brutal American corrections regime.

But are beliefs about free will really the point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A baby damaged by prenatal cocaine exposure who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.

And whether or not we have free will, isn’t punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely, the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of the values of a family or society. We are embodied beings: Values cannot only be preached; they must sometimes be enforced.

At a certain point, one may ask, what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life’s failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent,” he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere, Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely “a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics.” To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.

With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.

Notwithstanding Sapolsky’s hopes and Mitchell’s fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world—even the moral world—will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem. James himself, in “The Will to Believe,” written a dozen years after he defended free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” conceded that “free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” The moral and political worlds run—to the extent they run at all—on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.