This topic has been covered ad nauseum on nearly every page on the internet. But it still generates so much good conversation that I will stir he pot again. 

Imagine you are walking down the street and come upon a woman lying on the ground crying. Suddenly you realize she has obviously been assaulted. You rush to her side, feeling an intense desire to help. The thing we would refer to as our “self” stands at the intersection of the lines of input and stimuli with decision and action. By all accounts you will tend to feel that you are the root cause of your own thoughts and actions. Personal choice has led you to either act or not to act. You seem to be acting on your own free will. However, as I hope to highlight this perspective cannot be held in light of what science tells us about the workings of the human brain.

At a conscious level we are aware of only a small portion of the information that our brains are processing at each moment. While we are continually aware of acute changes in our moods, thoughts, perceptions, behavior, etc. we are left completely unaware of the brain states that produce these changes. Yet nearly all of us maintain that we are the creators of our own patterns of thought and action. The physiologist Benjamin Libet has demonstrated that neural activity in the motor regions can be detected 350 milliseconds before the subject is aware that they have decided to move. (Libet, Gleason, Wright and Pearl, 1983). More recently fMRI data has been shown to convey that “conscious” decisions can be seen in neural activity 10 seconds before the subject is aware of them. (Soon, Brass, Heinze and Hayes, 2008) These findings make it difficult to maintain that one is the conscious author of their own actions.

No perspective which takes into account causality leaves room for freewill. Our internal dialog of thoughts, desires and moods simply pop into minds producing either action or stasis. The reasons for this are left unexplained from a purely subjective point of view.  Our belief in free will seems to spring out of our moment to moment ignorance of the causal chain which produces our thoughts and actions. The term “free will” merely describes the feeling of being the author of our own thoughts as they arise in consciousness. Take for instance a train of thoughts like, “I’m hungry. I think there is some cake in the fridge. Well cake isn’t very healthy, maybe cottage cheese would be better,” this example highlights the apparent choices one can make, and they seem freely made.  But looking deeper reveals that these thoughts simply arise free of our authorship and yet direct our actions nevertheless.

The alternative position to traditional free will is often known as Determinism, and is almost considered a bad word by most people. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has highlighted the confusion most people carry with regards to determinism. “They equate determinism with fatalism.” This confusion produces questions such as, “if determinism is true why should I do anything? Why not just wait and see what happens?” This line of questioning reveals that most people imagine that if our choices depend on prior causes that they do not matter. The fact that I am writing this paper is the result of a choice to do so, if I had not decided to write it, it would not get written. But my choice to do so was unquestionably the result of many causal factors, such as the desire to achieve a decent grade, social pressures and a desire to achieve a goal. Choice is as important as those who fancy free will state that it is. Some people imagine that if we acknowledge that we are not the author of our own thoughts and actions that, moral and political freedoms then become unimportant. But merely acknowledging the causal influences and the fact that we do not know what we will intend until the intention arises, does not lessen the value of personal freedom of individuals to do what they intend or not to do otherwise, regardless of the source of those intentions.

This issue is not purely philosophical and academic, meant to be a silly logical exercise. This belief in free will is the foundation of the religious notion of “sin” as well as the underlying commitment to retributive justice. Free will has been deemed by The Supreme Court a “universal and persistent” base for law in our country, also stating “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). It seems that any advancements in science which threaten the commonly held notions about free will draw into question the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior. It seems that the primary worry is that an honest discussion of the root causes of our behavior will erode moral responsibility. But does the acknowledgement of underlying causes for our behavior mean that we cannot be expected to take responsibility for our actions? Of course we wouldn't.

We can view human beings as forces of genetic and environmental influences and still not be prevented from talking about moral responsibility, it does however, cause problems for our practices of retributive punishment. Obviously there are people who possess the intent to harm and cannot be helped away from his intention. We need to protect society from them. It is clear from the scientific findings that the people who are the worst criminals we can imagine have some grouping of bad genetics, bad influences, bad ideas and bad circumstances. The role these have played in the bad choices they have made should seem obvious. The question then becomes, which of these ingredients can we hold them responsible for? The justice system (if is to be just) must reflect the understanding that any of us could easily have been dealt a very different hand in life, and given that different hand we could be in their place. It borders on immorality to not consider the level of blind chance which is involved in morality.

Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder. He was not in his right mind. We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual. Why not? Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime? And furthermore where do we draw the line in ascribing personal responsibility apart from the causal forces which author our thoughts and actions?