The philosophical debate on free will has a way of blowing people’s minds when they first encounter it. And fair enough: thinkers who deny the existence of free will insist that nobody ever meaningfully chooses what they do. Earlier this week, for example, walking past a cafe, I stopped to buy a coffee, and certainly it felt as if I could have chosen otherwise. Nobody forced me inside at gunpoint, and I’m not enslaved to an overpowering caffeine addiction. I just wanted coffee. But hold on: that desire, and the bodily movements involved in the purchase, were caused by events in my brain. And what caused them? Prior brain events, interacting with my environment. My brain itself, for that matter, is only the way it is because of my genes and upbringing, both of which resulted from the chance meeting of my parents – and so on, in an unbroken chain of causes, back to the big bang.
If our actions are “determined” in this way, the moral implications are dizzying. It becomes hard to see how to blame a Harold Shipman or Charles Manson – or a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump – for anything they do. If I’d been born with Shipman’s exact genes, and experienced his precise upbringing, I’d simply have been him; there’s no secret corner of my psyche where a ghostly “free will” lurks, capable of making better decisions. (I’m ignoring randomness in quantum physics here, in the interests of my sanity; you’ll have to take my word for it that few free-will theorists think it makes much difference.)
