Free will and responsibility - a red herring

With recent publication of Robert Sapolsky's book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will there has been a major hoopla about weather we have libertarian free will or not?

And many of the philosopers and scientists think that we do not have libertarian free will  - which I agree with. So far so so good. But then the debate moves to - like what Robert Sapolsky seems to argue that - because individuals do not have libertarian free will - and thus our decisions are determined by our circumstance, they should not be held responsible. I think that is a red herring. Let me explain...

I think the connection of holding someone responsible for their decision depending on if they took that decision based on libertarian free will is a mistake. All members of our society have the same handicap that we do not have libertarian free will. We should simply accept that. The issue of holding someone responsible for their action should be based on the following:

• will the individual after having been found to be responsible for a bad decision or act, and punished for that, will change their behavior to not make the same bad decision or do the same bad act again.

• and even before being held responsible, does that individual themselves proclaims that they are capable of taking the responsibility for their decisions i.e. they claim to be a normal member of the society - what we call upstanding citizens.

And in fact we already partly practice this by way of insanity defense. For example, if a defendant or their advocate is able to prove insanity, they are processed in a different way already in our legal system.

BTW the reason we do not have libertarian free will is because we do not have a Laplace Daemon level knowledge of our own decision making process which is intrinsically deterministic. Secondly, while the machinery of the brain is deterministically busy making a decision, and being a single thread of consciousness, cannot also try to do the Laplace daemon like observation of the brain to see that in fact the decision was made deterministically. Also, in many cases we have to make relatively quick decisions in real time and have no time to waste to realize the deterministic nature of our decision making. But actually, if you stop and introspect your own decision making process (mindfulness of decision making) you will actually see the deterministic nature of your decision making was based on your memory, circumstance, desires, capabilities and social context you are in. Of course this is not the atomic level determinism that you will observer, but it will show you how the decision was made and why.

Free Will - how to think about it

Think of the free will as free-ish will or effective free will, and all issues around free will simply dissolve. If the decision originated inside our body/brain without external coercive influence, that is good enough. The pursuit of the theoretical idea of free will is like people needing the universe to have a purpose so that their life has a purpose. Why does it matter if the universe has a purpose or not for one to make and have a purpose in their own life. That should be good enough. Similarly, the worry about determinism related to free will is only significant, if one is actually a Laplace daemon. But we are clearly not Laplace daemons. Therefore the free will is effectively free and originates in our bodies (when no coercive forces are at play). Thus why worry if free will is not really free if the universe is deterministic or not. For all practical purposes, legal or otherwise what we call free will is effectively free. That is why I suggest to call free will i.e. free-ish will or effective free will or simply Effree will (spread the meme). But anyway that is semantic and we could just continue to use free will - and hold people responsible for their actions as long as we understand its nature as described above.

The notion of libertarian freewill is hidden in the gap between what a Laplace daemon may know vs. what is possible for us to know when we make decisions. We make moral decisions because there is an implicit coercive force on our decision making based on our knowledge of what society has taught us what is moral. Of course sociopaths ignore that coercion and moral pioneers think for themselves what is moral and make decisions accordingly (when people first realized that slavery was bad) even when the rest of the society thought it was OK. Heck it was there in holy books even. Lastly, we are always constrained by what is possible. I cannot free will myself to get admitted into Harvard PhD program. I am limited by my abilities, desires, life history, economic status, country I am in and physical laws. BTW we can think of these as implicit coercive forces that constrain our free will anyway. I cannot free will myself to dodge a bullet fired at me at a short range. I think discussions about free will being libertarian or not are much ado about nothing in the end. The real issue is, can we hold a competent person responsible for their action for pragmatic purposes.

A sampling of debates and discussions about free will:

Meta discussions: