Behavioral biologist Robert Sapolsky shows why causal determinism is key to understanding ourselves and how its acceptance can contribute to moral progress.

In October 2022, the journal Human Affairs published a symposium on Ray Tallis's defense of free will, Freedom: An Impossible Reality, with commentary from ten discussants and replies by Tallis. In his replies (open access, see here) Tallis begins by giving a useful summary of his book.

Here's the abstract describing my contribution, and a PDF of the full text is linked below:

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape.

Key words: free will; determinism; intentionality; materialism; naturalism; rationality.

Jailbreak.pdf

A 2021 talk by Tom Clark on pragmatic determinism given for the Keele University & Royal Society of Philosophy Lecture Series.

Freedom is perhaps the paramount value in the West, certainly in America, which was born in the quest for liberty. But how free are we? What matters most are political and economic freedoms – the wide permissible range of belief, speech, and action that characterize open societies. But people also care about perceived threats to their personal autonomy, to their being responsible originators of action who deserve credit for good deeds and – the obligatory downside – blame for bad.

A terrific debunking of contra-causal free will that explores the humanistic implications of naturalism, by attorney Robert Gulack, presented to the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, NJ. Among other things, we discover that Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were skeptics about free will.

"The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about...most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice."

Sam Harris’s Free Will is a remarkable little book, engagingly written and jargon-free, appealing to reason, not authority, and written with passion and moral seriousness.

Physicist Victor Stenger on free will at Skeptic Magazine (link is external).

Bruce N. Waller, Against Moral Responsibility, 2011, MIT Press/Bradford Book

Tom Clark's entry at NPR's 13.7 Culture and Cosmos, a blog set at the intersection of science and culture.

Four Views on Free Will is an excellent, engaging resource. Its contributors, all leading philosophers, stake out clearly defined positions that illuminate the traditional views on the free will problem and more recent permutations.

In Good and Real, computer scientist and independent scholar Gary Drescher mounts a mind-bending attack on problems that arise when common sense conflicts with the science-based view that we inhabit a purely physical, mechanistic, deterministic universe.

Radio debate with Andrew Cohen on Equal Time for Free Thought.

Although we live increasingly in an age of science, our notions of self and mind remain largely supernaturalistic. In The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy, psychology, and brain sciences at Duke University, takes the unpopular position that this is wrong.

What would it be like to conceive of ourselves and our moral systems as completely contained within the natural realm, the contingent products of Darwinian evolutionary processes? Is it possible to accept our status as complex animals, deterministically connected to the rest of nature, and still take seriously our ethical commitments? If we don’t have free will, and the individual is not seen as ultimately morally responsible for his or her actions, how do we carry on moral discourse and justify moral judgments. Bruce Waller takes on these important questions in this eminently readable and for the most part persuasive account of a naturalistic, non-objectivist morality.