Beyond Button Presses: The Neuroscience of Free and Morally Appraisable Actions

This paper addresses three questions: What are the types of action at issue in the free will and moral responsibility debate? Are the neuroscientists who make claims about free will and moral responsibility studying those types of action? If not, can the existing paradigm in the field be modified to study those types of action? Section one outlines some claims made by neuroscientists about the inefficacy of conscious intentions and the implications of this inefficacy for the existence of free will. Section two argues that, typically, the types of actions at issue in the philosophical literature require proximal or distal conscious decisions (or at least non-actively acquired intentions) and have the right kind of connection to reasons. Section three points out that neuroscientists are not studying this class of actions, as their studies focus on simple commanded actions (e.g., finger or wrist flex) and simple Buridan choices (e.g., push the left or right button). These types of actions do not require conscious control and do not have a connection to the participants' justificatory or motivational reasons for action beyond complying with the experimenter's instructions. Finally, section four then argues that neuroscience already has the resources to study the type of action relevant for free will and moral responsibility and outlines two experiments which focus on skilled actions and moral choices that could be run using the available technology. These kinds of experiments would better address the empirical question about whether conscious intentions and deliberation involving reasons ever play a role in the production of actions that are typically considered to be free and subject to moral evaluation.? Neuroscience of Free WillIn 1983, Benjamin Libet and his colleagues used neurological experimental methods to question an arguably key assumption of commonsense accounts of agency: do conscious intentions to act cause subsequent (overt) action? Libet and his colleagues found that when participants were asked to perform a series of either preplanned or spontaneous wrist flexes as they felt the intention to do so1 and report the timing of their awareness of their intention to flex, EEG readings showed brain preparation for the flexing, termed the readiness potential or RP, prior to the participants' awareness of their intention to flex (1983). Libet et al. took these findings to indicate that unconscious brain processes decide (form an intention) to flex, with conscious intentions to flex temporally later and inefficacious. They further generalized these results to all intentional actions, claiming that conscious intentions to A (where A is some overt action) never cause A-ing. Other theorists, such as Daniel Wegner (2002), have argued for similar contentions, using Libet et al. (1983) as support.Some psychologists and neuroscientists have coupled this claim about the inefficacy of conscious intentions with the further claim that free will exists only if conscious intentions at least sometimes cause our intentional actions. From these claims they argue that neuroscience supports the conclusion that free will does not exist, despite our intuitions to the contrary. For example, Libet himself has argued in some papers that empirical work suggests that there is no free will under the traditional view of free will, only 'free won't' (Libet 2005).2 Libet reaches this conclusion via the following route: Under a traditional view of free will, which Libet sometimes seems to suggest is an incompatibilist agentcausal or perhaps an incompatibilist event-causal view,3 a conscious intention to A should appear before or simultaneously with the RP for Aing; that is, the conscious intention should "command the brain to perform the intended act" (Libet 2005, 553). The fact that participants' reported consciousness of their intention to flex occurred a third of a second after the onset of the RP supports, according to Libet, the proposition that at least some actions that we intuitively take to be free actions are unconsciously initiated. …