Manuscript, 31 October 2007

The real challenge to free will and responsibility
Maureen Sie1 and Arno Wouters2
1

Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2Heyendaal Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Adina Roskies [1] argues that recent developments in the neurosciences do notchallenge our ideas of free will and personal responsibility. She limits her discussion,
however, to ‘libertarian free will’, and her argument focuses on the idea that we are ableto act differently from how we choose to act. She does not address the influential newcompatibilist views of free will and responsibility (see Box 1). These views, wecontend, are most significantly challenged by recent discoveries.
According to new compatibilists, it is crucial to our practice of personal
responsibility that we are ‘practically rational’ beings, able to act for reasons, i.e., tofigure out what should or should not be done and act accordingly [2]. It is this capacity
to act for reasons that matters when we blame or praise one another, not libertarian freewill. For example, I am held responsible if I steal something from a shop, but not if I
am a kleptomaniac, a three-year old child, or simply did not realize that the item I tookshould be paid for (thinking it was just a sample). The last case is not properly
described as ‘stealing’; the reason I took the item was that I thought it was free. In theother two cases my practical rationality was either impaired or not yet fully developed.
Thus new compatibilists connect personal responsibility with practical rationality. Itis exactly our common understanding of practical rationality that is challenged by ourgrowing understanding of how the brain works. Recent developments in the behavioral,cognitive, and neurosciences indicate that, more often than not, we act in an automaticand unaware fashion, making up reasons only as we go along [3]. We are not directly
aware of what drives our actions but infer reasons on the basis of a priori causal
theories, confabulating them if we cannot find reasonable explanations [4, 5]. So many
causal factors escape consciousness that confabulation seems the rule rather than theexception [6]. Even our moral judgments seem based on intuitions that are not, or are
only partially, accessible to introspection. The reasons we come up with to justify thesejudgments are post-hoc rationalizations that played no role in their generation [7].
It remains to be seen how best to interpret these findings. However, at the very least,
they make clear that we cannot take our practice of giving and asking for reasons at facevalue and hold on to the idea that we have a simple to observe capacity to act forreasons. Ironically, the belief that it is obvious and uncontroversial that we act forreasons (and clear what we mean by this phrase) was precisely what made the newcompatibilist views so popular in philosophy: the metaphysically problematic conceptof libertarian free will could be replaced with the unproblematic, mundane‘responsiveness to reasons’. In light of recent discoveries, 'responsiveness to reasons'proves an equivocal notion that needs thorough rethinking. This is the real challenge to
our common concept of free will and responsibility.

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Maureen Sie & Arno Wouters: The real challenge to free will and responsibility

Box 1. New Compatibilism

The relation between determinism and libertarian free-will is one of the oldest and mostfrequently discussed problems in philosophy. However, a dominant line of thought incontemporary philosophy has put aside the determinism issue. According to these newcompatibilists the existence of alternative possibilities is irrelevant to our judgments
about responsibility [8]. For example, if I witness a crime and do not warn the police
out of lack of interest or concern, the fact that I could not have warned them because—
unknown to me—my phone has been disconnected, is irrelevant. What we refer to when
we talk about 'free will' is that we stand in an authoritative relationship to what we do orleave undone: that we 'agree with’, 'accept’, or 'positively endorse' it [9]. We do not act
out of our own free will when this relation is frustrated, e.g. when we act out ofcompulsion, addiction, or 'only because' we had no other alternative. The details of thisview remain subject to controversy, but it is generally agreed that personal
responsibility depends on our ability to act on the basis of our deliberations (i.e. forreasons), rather then on the existence of alternative ways of acting.
References

1 Roskies, A. (2006) Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 10, 419-423
2 Fischer, J.M., and Ravizza, M. (1999) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral
Responsibility. Cambridge University Press
3 Bargh, J.A., and Chartrand, T.L. (1999) The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.
American Psychologist July 54, 462-479
4 Nisbett, R.E., and Wilson, T.D. (1977) Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal
Reports on Mental Processes. Psychological Review 84, 231-259
5 Wegner, D.M. (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press
6 Wilson, T.D. (2004) Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.
Belknap
7 Haidt, J. (2001) The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist
Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review 108, 814-834
8 Frankfurt, H. (1969) Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. Journal ofPhilosophy 66, 829-839
9 Frankfurt, H. (1971) Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Journal ofPhilosophy 68, 5-20

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