Do You Have Free Will?
Writing a review is an exercise in free will. Not only can I tell you what I want about the book and whether I liked it or not, but I also get to choose how to begin. If I decide to start with a personal anecdote, that’s what you will get. And I have the ability—the freedom—to start in other ways instead. These facts may seem too obvious to mention. But they are denied by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology at Stanford whose new book, Determined, argues, “We have no free will at all.”
The challenge to the cherished notion of free will comes from what philosophers call “causal determinism.” This is the idea that everything that happens is the product of prior causes, stretching back into a past that was not up to us. We do not originate our choices ex nihilo; instead, they are determined by our history. As Sapolsky puts it, bluntly:
The intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.
The upshot, for him, is that “there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is
