How can free will exist

One day, after washing and drying my hair, I looked at my hairline in the mirror and it was thin enough that I could make out the curvature of my scalp beneath it. When I looked at it, the panic became sharp. My best friend had gone through a tough divorce and was remarrying. I was thrilled for him. As a bonus, the wedding would take place in New Orleans, where my friend lives. New Orleans is a miraculous place, and my favorite city to visit in America.

The notion of a trip there shone out of the fog and dreariness of this whole era of history. Tony Judt said that there is darkness in this world, and that darkness often triumphed—and liberated me to do the same. I always find it hard to list the books that have influenced me the most. Moreover, people who set as their job the task of judging what others do, and why, are not always reliable when turning the lens upon themselves.

Still, on that changing list there are a few mainstays. Having, at that time, read very little of Tony, I was left with the impression of an intellectual monk who eschewed the dictates of party or crowd.

It was my mistake. It was my loss. John Henry Ramirez is going to die. The state of Texas is going to kill him. The question that came before the Supreme Court this week is whether Dana Moore, his longtime pastor, will be able to lay hands on him as he dies.

Given the grand, even alarmed pronouncements about religious liberty made by the right-wing justices recently, you might think this would be an easy decision. When you go to the airport, you see two kinds of security rules. Some apply equally to everyone; no one can carry weapons through the TSA checkpoint. But other protocols divide passengers into categories according to how much of a threat the government thinks they pose.

If you submit to heightened scrutiny in advance, TSA PreCheck lets you go through security without taking off your shoes; a no-fly list keeps certain people off the plane entirely. Not everyone poses an equal threat. The same principle applies to limiting the spread of the coronavirus.

The number of COVID cases keeps growing, even though remarkably safe, effective vaccines are widely available, at least to adults. Many public agencies are responding by reimposing masking rules on everyone. But at this stage of the pandemic, tougher universal restrictions are not the solution to continuing viral spread.

While flying, vaccinated people should no longer carry the burden for unvaccinated people. The White House has rejected a nationwide vaccine mandate —a sweeping suggestion that the Biden administration could not easily enact if it wanted to—but a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take.

It will help limit the risk of transmission at destinations where unvaccinated people travel—and, by setting norms that restrict certain privileges to vaccinated people, will also help raise the stagnant vaccination rates that are keeping both the economy and society from fully recovering. A small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus.

The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying. Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all from the same village near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There are 16 of them, among them seven children, including a four-month-old infant and an elderly woman who can scarcely walk. Through a translator, Anwar says that the family has been in this forest, moving back and forth between Poland and Belarus, for two weeks.

They have eaten nothing for the previous two days. Her message was succinct, accurate, and easy to understand. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance. This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible?

And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it? In , two psychologists had a simple but brilliant idea: Instead of speculating about what might happen if people lost belief in their capacity to choose, they could run an experiment to find out.

Kathleen Vohs, then at the University of Utah, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of Pittsburgh, asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior.

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts.

Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic. Another pioneer of research into the psychology of free will, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, has extended these findings.

For example, he and colleagues found that students with a weaker belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate than were those whose belief in free will was stronger. Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships.

Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance. The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another.

In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side. Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.

Illusionism is a minority position among academic philosophers, most of whom still hope that the good and the true can be reconciled. But it represents an ancient strand of thought among intellectual elites. Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control. Belief in free will comes naturally to us. Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear.

Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his book, Free Will , set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. You just are some of the atoms in the universe, governed by the same predictable laws as all the rest. It was the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace, writing in , who most succinctly expressed the puzzle here: how can there be free will, in a universe where events just crank forwards like clockwork?

But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings.

Either way, something other than your own free will seems to be pulling your strings. B y far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces plus maybe a little quantum randomness.

Consider the case of Charles Whitman. He returned home, where he killed his wife in the same manner. Later that day, he took an assortment of weapons to the top of a high building on the campus of the University of Texas, where he began shooting randomly for about an hour and a half. Within hours of the massacre, the authorities discovered a note that Whitman had typed the night before. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man.

What seems clear is that it certainly could have done so — and that almost everyone, on hearing about it, undergoes some shift in their attitude towards him. But it does make his rampage start to seem less like the evil actions of an evil man, and more like the terrible symptom of a disorder, with Whitman among its victims.

The same is true for another wrongdoer famous in the free-will literature, the anonymous subject of the paper Right Orbitofrontal Tumor with Paedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign, a year-old schoolteacher who suddenly developed paedophilic urges and began seeking out child pornography, and was subsequently convicted of child molestation.

Soon afterwards, complaining of headaches, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour; when it was removed, his paedophilic urges vanished. A year later, they returned — as had his tumour, detected in another brain scan. Like Strawson, he has received email abuse from people disturbed by the implications. You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public.

And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat. You can feel the urge to kill someone but resist it, or even seek psychiatric help. You can take responsibility for the state of your personality. But this is not the escape clause it might seem. None of this requires us to believe that the worst atrocities are any less appalling than we previously thought.

And the disagreement can be fraught, partly because free will denial belongs to a wider trend that drives some philosophers spare — the tendency for those trained in the hard sciences to make sweeping pronouncements about debates that have raged in philosophy for years, as if all those dull-witted scholars were just waiting for the physicists and neuroscientists to show up.

To those who find the case against free will persuasive, compatibilism seems outrageous at first glance. In all of these scenarios, to be sure, your actions belonged to an unbroken chain of causes, stretching back to the dawn of time. But who cares? The banana-chooser in one of them was clearly more free than in the others.

Consider hypnosis. A doctrinaire free will sceptic might feel obliged to argue that a person hypnotised into making a particular purchase is no less free than someone who thinks about it, in the usual manner, before reaching for their credit card.