We continue considering that Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne deny free will: find the entire series here.
Coyne writes:
Sam Harris noted in his book Free Will, all the attempts to harmonize the determinism of physics with a freedom of choice down to the claim that “a puppet is free so long as he loves his strings.”
So, the dog is free to roam…but only to the end of its chain. Of course, Harris’ statement is illogical as his point is that we are not free but that the freedom is illusory. After all, Sam Harris wrote an article titled, “Free Will (And Why You Still Don’t Have It)” into which we will look in another segment.
So if we don’t have free will, what can we do? One possibility is to give in to a despairing nihilism and just stop doing anything. But that’s impossible…
Well, if you did give into despairing nihilism (see Carpe Despero) it would be because you were determined to do so and if you abscond from it well, you were determined to do that as well.
But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can’t really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren’t freely chosen?
We should recognize that we already make some allowances for this problem by treating criminals differently if we think their crimes resulted from a reduction in their “choice” by factors like mental illness, diminished capacity, or brain tumors that cause aggression. But in truth those people don’t differ in responsibility from the “regular” criminal who shoots someone in a drug war; it’s just that the physical events behind their actions are less obvious.
But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you’ll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them. What is not justified is revenge or retribution — the idea of punishing criminals for making the “wrong choice.” And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior. This is rather odd. First, Jerry Coyne claims that we cannot “step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works” because “‘we’ are simply constructs of our brain” and that “We can’t impose a nebulous ‘will’ on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions.”
But now, apparently, environment can accomplish it as incarceration “makes it less likely you’ll behave badly in the future…and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them.” So, we cannot change ourselves but environment, other people aka society and/or the government can change us. How other meat computers can change our meat computers when we cannot change our own meat computer is something which does not compute.
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