Free Will is a Myth — But We Can Still Have Ethics and Hold People Accountable

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Copyright © 2013 by Heidi M. Ravven. This excerpt originally appeared in The Self Beyond Itself: And Alternative History of Ethics, The New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. 

Why are some people ethical and others unethical? How do people become ethical or unethical? Do people sometimes act in ethical ways and at other times act in quite unethical ways? How can that happen? Are there situations and times when people tend to act in ethical ways and other times when they tend to act unethically? How can we get people to be more ethical and more consistently ethical? How can we get ourselves to be better people and act more ethically more of the time? These are the questions I address in this book. Philosophers refer to these questions and related ones as the problem of “moral agency.” This book is about moral agency. I look at the problem of moral agency— how we become moral (and immoral) and why we act morally and immorally— from many different perspectives. I circle around it, exploring different ways of thinking and rethinking what our experience of being ethical is all about— especially where our ethical capacity comes from, how it develops, and finally how to strengthen it and put it to best use. One fairly popular idea among some scientists and philosophers looking to discover where our moral sense comes from is to search for an ethical module in the human brain. These brain scientists set out to discover and locate a special innate ethical capacity in the brain. They conjecture that some of us inherit a more effective ethical brain than others— that is, some of us are born with a strong moral brain capacity and others with a weak one. Other scientists and philosophers conjecture that perhaps some of us use and develop our ethical capacity better than others. These folks ask what certain people do to become better at being ethical than others. So some scientists and philosophers regard the variation as primarily between individuals because of an innate difference, while others chalk up the difference to how people are brought up. Still others raise the question of the effects upon moral agency of present context and situation, proposing that our moral capacity may be more about context and group behavior than about individuals.

The most common assumptions in the United States and the West more generally about the human moral capacity differ from the innate moral module view (nature) and also from the individual or social training view (nurture) just outlined. The view most prevalent among people all around us (and also nearly universally held by philosophers till very recently) is that we have free will. The free will view goes like this: we might have a brain that has certain biological tendencies toward good or bad, and we might have a biography replete with all kinds of terrible moral models and have suffered painful and harsh conditions and even abuse, and we might be in fairly coercive political and social situations and institutions, yet we all know what doing the right thing is, and we can and ought to do the right thing no matter what. We can rise above both our nature and our nurture and even our situation to be good people and choose to act ethically. This capacity to choose our actions— to rise above our genetic inheritance what ever it might be, above our upbringing no matter how terrible it was, and above our present situation despite its social pressures— is what we mean by “free will.” On this account, we are all capable of being good, and we are all equally capable of it because we are all human. Being human means that we can freely choose the good over the bad no matter what hand nature or nurture has dealt us. The choice is completely our own. Our actions have no other origin, no other ultimate causes, than ourselves as free agents. Even if we are somewhat shaped by our hardships, by our luck, or even by our brains, nevertheless we still have a sacrosanct core of free will that we can use to rise above all of that and be moral beings. We do moral acts for moral reasons, for no other reasons, and out of no other fully determining causes— such as brain modules, group pressures, or upbringing. And that is why we can be and ought to be held morally responsible for what we do and for what we fail to do. This free will story, about how and why we are moral and also at times fail to be moral, is everywhere around us. It probably seems and feels absolutely obvious and obviously true as you read my account of it here. But the evidence from the new brain sciences is amassing that the free will account of the nature and origin of our ethical capacity, of our moral agency, is in fact false, or at least highly unlikely; at best it may work that way in some rare  individuals, who are probably philosophers.