Free Will is Real. Stop Pretending It’s an Illusion
By: Will Mcconnell
Tags: Neuroscience, Sam Harris, Free Will, Philosophy, Criminal Justice Reform

When I stumbled across Sam Harris’ book “Free Will” 2 years ago at a local bookstore, I was excited to read it. The cover, featuring the titular letters suspended from marionette strings, looked elegant and provocative. At the time, I was a run-of-the-mill educated devotee of the physical sciences. The idea that free will was an illusion had always been intuitive to me. How could I freely do anything if I’m really just a bundle of atoms and electric fields? It was also less than 100 pages, and I’m always looking to pad my Goodreads.

I read the book and it resonated with me. The argument inside is this: First, the world is deterministic. This means that we can never do anything other than what we did. You eating a bowl of cereal, going for a run and taking a shower this morning were physical inevitabilities of the microphysical universe we are made of. Second, this self-evidently means that we do not have free will. You didn’t freely do something if you couldn’t have done otherwise. There is no quantum lifeline, either, unless you claim that the brain somehow influences the result of quantum indeterministic events. Otherwise, it’s more or less the same issue: the physics decides, and we don’t.

This argument is called incompatibilism. It’s the intuitive idea that in a deterministic world, there just isn’t any room for free will. In the past, the standard response to incompatibilists by lay philosophers was some variation of libertarianism. Libertarians, on the issue of free will, simply deny that the world is deterministic. In a religious context, this is a natural leap from the existence of a God. Elsewhere, people were satisfied with the fuzzy idea that there is something special about humans that may defy physics in some way. Cartesian dualism — and in particular, that there is some “special sauce” in us that gives us free will — is still a prevalent perspective.

But libertarianism is losing traction, and people like myself are the case in point: teach a kid for 18 years about the atoms and evolution and the laws of physics and he will probably come to scoff at the crackpots talking about deities and “special sauces.”

My story is unremarkable. Determinism is displacing other mystical views about the world around us, just as atheism or agnosticism has been replacing religious views at an accelerated pace in the last 20 years. Books like Sam Harris’ presage the belief they will engender— free will is an illusion.

What happens when people stop believing in free will? Behavioral scientists have studied this question in a variety of contexts. One study had test subjects read a passage describing the absurdity of free will in the face of biology. Then, on a mathematical assessment with built-in cheating options, they found that test subjects cheated at higher rates than control subjects. Other studies have identified a more telling result of losing confidence in the reality of free will — losing confidence in the notion of moral responsibility itself, irrespective of the gain made from cheating it. In one experiment, researchers found that subjects primed with deterministic statements were less apt to enforce the study rules than others.

Declining faith in free will becomes a social problem as well. Barack Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, that American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.” Our institutions depend on it being real. Criminals cannot start absolving themselves of responsibility for lack of free will. Or take fiscal policies. Figuring out what a successful capitalist deserves, or somebody who works 40 hours a week in retail, or a person with a disability, is hard enough today. Figuring out if it’s fair to reward the kids whose parents paid for nannies and piano lessons and private schools over kids whose parents couldn’t is hard enough today. A society that’s lost a grip on free will cannot credibly answer these questions. Over time, what sort of disillusionment will be bred by systems built around a notion of responsibility that nobody can justify?

I’m not eager to find out. And while we’re probably not walking into a nihilist dystopia anytime soon, it’s not hard to see where anti-free will sentiment could go wrong.

Fortunately, none of this should happen. Philosophers disagree about most things but are surprisingly unanimous on free will. Only 12% of philosophers surveyed in 2008 about free will answered “free will is not real.” Of the 88% that did not, about 70% of them instead subscribed to a view called compatibilism.

Compatibilism’s fiercest proponent is philosopher Daniel Dennett. His brand of compatibilism denies the incompatibilist’s view that action was committed freely only if the agent could have done otherwise. What’s important, as far as that particular component of freedom, is not that an agent could have done otherwise in the circumstances exactly as they were but rather that they could have done otherwise in marginally different circumstances. This squares with our intuitive understanding of freedom. Alice acts freely when she decides to speed on the freeway, because we know that on other days, in similar circumstances, she has demonstrated the ability to not speed. Of course, in a deterministic world, given the precise circumstances of the day exactly as they were down to the atom, she could not have done otherwise than speed. But this is not what’s important to say that she acted freely.

It is hard to shake the feeling that Dennett is just changing the goalposts. But if he does seem to be talking about a different kind of freedom, it’s not merely because he wants to. Against the lone intuitively appealing idea that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise in an absolute sense, Dennett claims that every other intuition of ours suggests freedom is something easier to obtain. Alice freely chose to speed, I freely chose to write this article, and every day billions of us freely make decisions. These are truths that we understand. Moreover, we can reason about the conditions for acting freely. One is that you could have done otherwise in similar circumstances — if I am forced at gunpoint to rob a bank, I could not really have done otherwise, otherwise, I would be shot. Another is that you have to have certain mental faculties. A 6-year-old did not freely choose to smash his parents’ wine collection because he is 6 and could not understand the consequences of shaking the wine fridge. A schizophrenic is not freely choosing to flee from imaginary strangers.

Who is redefining free will, then? The philosopher who looks at our intuitions about freedoms and works out the cases where someone is acting freely and the cases where someone is not, or the physicist who claims that the absence of a single conceptual ingredient, as suggested by physics, negates the existence of free will outright?

Or consider the notion of marriage. In the not too distant past, we thought that marriage required a special ingredient — two, in fact: a man and a woman. It seemed an inviolable tenet of marriage that these two ingredients are present. Indeed, most of our ancestors would have probably held the intuitive view that marriage between two men simply does not exist. Then we matured as a civilization and came to see that marriage can also occur between two men, or two women, or two people who identify outside the man and woman labels. Who is wrong, then? The person who acknowledges that our previous understanding of marriage was imprecise, or the priest who looks at a marriage between two men and says, “the ingredient of a woman is missing! this marriage is an illusion!”

Dennett and many other compatibilists insist that free will is real even though in the past the circumstances were such that we could assume the principle of strict could have done otherwise was a necessary ingredient, and we have now discovered that that ingredient is missing. It is the incompatibilists, stubbornly clinging to the idea that free will is an illusion because it lacks the ingredient of “strictly could have done otherwise” who are missing the point.

Recognizing that free will is real in the sense of Dennett’s compatibilist position or another is the first step. Articulating where it exists and where it breaks down is as important. In the compatibilist spirit, Dennett is the scientist’s philosopher. He works closely with cutting-edge neuroscientists and social scientists to unpack the forces that influence our actions, from neural structures to social circumstances. The point is not to further the naturalist cause of reducing the world to physics and laws. It’s to better understand the addict’s brain to understand to what extent we should believe him when he says he had an unavoidable urge to steal alcohol from the convenience store. It’s to better understand when the prefrontal cortex is developed enough to start treating kids like adults for things like military service, the drinking age, consensual sex and juvenile crime. It’s using science not to tear down basic social norms but to validate some and reevaluate others.

These questions are relevant already. To pick a topical example, we are in the midst of a critical reevaluation of policing and criminal justice. At stake are the relationships between police and racism, but also basic questions of what justice means. Progressives are pushing for less retributive systems, arguing against punishing the mentally ill and substance-abusing in part because it is unfair to hold them accountable for the diseases they are afflicted with. Crime is also consistently linked to poverty and troubled upbringing, and new understanding is constantly raising questions about the fairness of punishing people pushed to the brink by years of inadequate wages, housing discrimination, police brutality, underfunded educational opportunities and traumatic childhoods. The idea that everyone is free and wholly responsible for their actions is obviously wrongfooted; so too is the idea, easiest to embrace when you already have internalized the free will is an illusion myth in some form, that everything amounts to circumstance. Fair criminal justice systems, but also tax policies, welfare policies, and other systems that speak of who “earned” what hinge on finding common ground on the question of responsibility and freedom.

Continuing to call free will an illusion will only waylay efforts to resolve these disputes. Conveniently, the thing that is practical is also true: free will is real.