Naturalism.org

Libertarian Tibor Machan, writing in the Desert Dispatch (and reprinted in Free Inquiry, Oct-Nov, 2005), inveighs against liberals, claiming that "Liberals tend to excuse all evil with stories about bad luck and disease and a bunch of other impersonal forces that make people do bad things." He goes on to say that "The basic philosophical thesis behind the liberal mentality...is the denial of free will." So according to Machan, by accepting that evil has causes, liberals deny free will, and in so doing deny the basis for moral judgments.

On June 5, 1998, the Boston Globe published columnist and libertarian George Will's piece "Prosecuting 'Crimes' of the Mind?" in which he takes government to task for trying to influence character development and personal behavior.  What caught my attention in this otherwise typical anti-regulation rant were the following paragraphs on free will.  Will is describing Richard Dooling's novel, "Brain Storm," which raise issues of free speech, political correctness, and, interestingly, the implications of neuroscience for the prospects of control (Will's text is indented):

The Ethics of Empiricism: Why We Should Oppose Christian "Science"

It’s pretty much inevitable that you will walk across a street at some point. How you cross it is determined by a number of factors, including your desire to cross it safely. Although it’s not inevitable that you will cross the street with your eyes open, it’s a good bet, given your desire not to be injured or killed.

Determinism holds that every thing and event is a natural and integral part of the interconnected universe. From the perspective of determinism, every event in nature is the result of (determined by) prior/coexisting events. Every event is a confluence of influences. While determinism regards humans as "one with" the unfolding matrix of the natural universe, supernaturalism and fatalism regard humans as existing outside of this system.

What is it that some people imagine they lose should their actions turn out to be a deterministic unfolding of conditions, not a "freely willed" choice? There is a sense that some sort of possibility is given up, that one’s power over the world is relinquished. Since things couldn’t have turned out otherwise, why make any effort to bring about a desired outcome? If we don’t have free will, why bother to act at all? This fatalistic response to not having free will is often suggested as a reason why we must have it, or at least must pretend to have it.