The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Humans have free will

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Life is full of decisions, big and small.  What to eat for breakfast, what to wear to work, who to ask for advice, where to send your kids to school.  But are any of these decisions truly our own? A growing movement of psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists believe that these decisions may feel like a tossup, but in reality are predetermined, merely the firing of neural pathways forged over time that lead to predictable conclusions. Despite how we feel, free will is an illusion. Supporters of this deterministic worldview argue that our choices are no more under our own control than our own biology. The myriad decisions we make over the course of our lives emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. But detractors of this worldview argue that free will and the modern understanding of our brains is not mutually exclusive.  They argue that free will exists on a higher order beyond our physical selves, and cannot be reduced to our mere biology. Much of human thought and action cannot be explained at the physical level, but that renders it no less real. Today we ask the question, do we make our choices, or do our choices make us? Arguing for the motion is Christian List, Professor of philosophy and decision theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, co-director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, and author of Why Free Will Exists. Arguing against the motion is Gregg Caruso, Professor of philosophy at SUNY Corning, Visiting Fellow at the New College of the Humanities, and author of Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. Christian List: “Free will is the capacity to choose and control our own actions, and common sense suggests that we humans have this capacity”. Gregg Caruso: “Who we are, and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control”. Sources: Big Think, Closer to Truth The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada’s largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/ Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Jacob Lewis Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Monk Debates on every episode. we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you,

the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Humans have free will. People have been looking in the wrong place for 2,000 years and more on this. They've been looking at physics, determinism, indeterminism physics. They should have been looking at biology. No one can determine your future events, given your past history. There's always the wild card. Free will is our capacity to see probable futures,

futures that seem like they're going to happen in time to take steps so that something else happens instead. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. While life is full of decisions big and small, what should I eat for breakfast? What do I wear to work? Who do I ask for advice? And where should I send my kids to school? But are any of these decisions truly our own? A growing movement of psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists believe these decisions may feel like a toss-up, but in reality, they're predetermined.

Merely the firing of neural pathways forged over time that lead to predictable conclusions. Despite what many believe, free will is an illusion. The myriad of decisions we make over the course of our lives emerge from background causes, many of which we are unaware of, and over which we exert little to know. conscious control. If you want to insist that today you decided to floss your teeth starting on your upper teeth rather than your lower teeth rather than the other way around, that that was an act of free will, whatever, I'll grant that one to you, that's where the free will is. In reality, I don't think there's any free will at all. But detractors of this deterministic worldview argue

that free will and a scientific understanding of how our brain works is not mutually exclusive. They argue that free will exists on a higher order or level beyond our physical selves and cannot be reduced to mere biological impulses. We are agents of our own futures, able to act in ways that transcend our physical environment and our biology. Today we ask the question, do we make our choices or do our choices make us? We do this all by having on this monk debate, a sustained examination of the motion, be it resolved, humans have free will. Arguing for the motion is Christian List. He's a professor of philosophy and decision theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He's also co-director of the Munich Center of Mathematical

Philosophy and author of the bestseller Why Free Will is Real. Arguing against the motion is Greg Caruso, professor of philosophy at SUNY Corning. visiting fellow at the new College of Humanities and co-author of Just Deserts, Debating Free Will. Christian, Greg, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hello. How you doing? Glad to be here. Really looking forward to today's debate.

This is both a perennial question that we're going to spend the next 40 minutes or so reflecting on, but it's also one that I think has greater kind of cultural urgency as the world feels its way, hopefully through what are the waning days of this global pandemic. I think the last 18 months of upheaval and isolation has all left us thinking bigger and broader questions about the nature of our society are how we construct ourselves as individuals, the extent to which our lives are predetermined by larger forces that are outside of our control or the extent to which we are autonomous agents of our own. future. So I think the ability to connect a broad macro debate on free will to some of these kind of bubbling cultural and kind of personal concerns that have surfaced over the last year

and a half is is going to be fascinating and I think helpful for all of us who have the opportunity to listen and learn from you in this episode. Our resolution today, simple to the point, be it resolved, humans have free will. Christian, you're arguing in favor of the motion. I'm going to put a couple minutes on our show clock and turn the program over to you to kick off this debate. Yes, free will is the capacity to choose and control our own actions. And common sense suggests that we humans have this capacity. And this belief is obviously quite central to our understanding of the human place in the

world, to our practices of assigning responsibility for our actions and so on. Now, if we define free will a bit more carefully, I think it requires three things. intentional agency, choice among alternative possibilities, and control over the resulting actions. Now, in recent years, free will has come under attack. Now, I think the scientifically motivated free will skepticism of this sort takes a fairly reductionistic perspective on human beings. But I want to suggest that it's important to note that the sciences are not limited to physics in the natural sciences alone. And my claim is that it's in the human and social sciences

that we find support for free will and its prerequisites. Now, I just want to give a quick analogy. If you think of organisms, institutions, or economic growth, if you look at the world solely through the lens of physics, those phenomena are just going to remain completely hidden from view. But we would not deny their reality. From the fact that such biological or social phenomena absent from physical descriptions,

it simply doesn't follow that they are unreal. They are higher level phenomena. They are products of physical processes, but they are not describable using the concepts and categories of the physical sciences alone. And basically, I want to argue that it's exactly the same with free will. It's the higher level phenomenon. It emerges from physical processes, but it's not describable using the concepts and categories of the physical sciences alone. But I believe that free will is well supported by the relevant scientific domains. And so to cut a long story short, that's why I believe humans have free will.

Thank you, Christian. Fascinating opening argument here, a lot of points that I'm looking forward to unpacking with you as this debate goes on. It's now time for us to hear the contrary argument, the case against why humans have free will. We're going to go to you, Greg, for that now. So same opportunity, a couple minutes off the top of our debate here to set out your key arguments against our motion today. Yeah, so I'm a free will skeptic, and as a skeptic, I maintain that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. And because of this, we're never morally responsible in a really particular but pervasive sense. So I define free will a little differently than Christian.

I define free will as the control and action that's required for basic desert moral responsibility. And then I deny that agents have this kind of free will and this kind of responsibility. That's not to say that there are not other conceptions of responsibility that could be made consistent with the denial of free will, nor is it to deny the existence of intentional agency or causal control or that our mental states are causally efficacious in causing our behaviors. So there's a lot I agree with with regard to Christian. Where we disagree is that I think it would be unfair and unjust to, hold agents morally responsible, and that's because I maintain that who we are and what we do is

ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. Now, for me, the factors that matter are not the kind of scientific considerations that Christian focuses on. So essentially, my argument maintains that whether determinism is true or indeterminism is true, we would lack free will. And this is because on my account, if determinism is true, it's incompatible with free will, because it's incompatible with agents being the appropriate source of their actions. Indeterminacy or indeterminacy at the level of a gentle action where Christian posits indeterminacy, I maintain it's also incompatible with free will because such indeterminacy is, well, it leaves agents unable to settle which outcome actually occurs.

And for me, that ability to settle which outcome occurs is required for it, for the kind of control and action that's needed for free will. Lastly, I think there's a secondary concern, a separate sort of independent argument against free will based on the pervasiveness of luck. So regardless of determinism or indeterminism, we also have to worry about the nature of luck. So by luck, I primarily want to focus on what I call

constitutive luck. Luck that makes us the kind of agents we are, that is the constitutive luck of the lottery of life, the genetic lottery, the, the fact that it's a matter of good or bad luck, whether you're born in a poverty or wealth or who your parents are, what society you're raised in. Those are factors beyond the control of agents and there are matters of luck. So I sort of present two distinct arguments against free will. I present one route that posits that whether we go with saying the universe is deterministic

or indeterministic, we would lack free will because free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and then a separate, secondary, sort of independent argument based on luck. And so to kind of rephrase my thesis, it's that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. And now we can say that those factors can include determinism, indeterminism, or luck. Each of those are factors beyond the control of the agent. And because of that, I maintain that it be unfair and unjust to hold agents more responsible in this very particular but important philosophical sense, i.e. the basic dessert sense. Thank you, Greg. Great opening statements from you both as debate shaping up nicely.

Now an opportunity for rebuttal. So, Christian, your chance here to react to what you've heard from Greg. Again, we're going to have lots of time to address each other's key arguments. So maybe you could just prioritize a little bit for us your objections to Greg. Which one or two points that Greg has made are you most keen on taking on? Well, I mean, perhaps first I'd like to flag some points of agreement between the two of us. And I think one big point of agreement is that both Greg and I are opposed to retributivist approaches to punishment. And we both think that unduly harsh forms of punishment that are often justified by

appealing to certain notions of responsibility are deeply problematic and that we need humane penal systems that don't focus on retribution. My defense of free will is actually fully compatible with advocating a very substantial, for instance, criminal justice reform. And when we think about the question of free will itself, then if my analysis is right, we basically need to go through a checklist to assess whether humans have free will. Namely, we need to figure out, are they intentional agents? Do they have a choice between multiple options ahead of them? And finally, do they have causal control over the resulting choices in the sense that their mental states, intentions,

are the difference making causes of the resulting actions. And here, my argument is simply that our explanatory practices in the relevant sciences of human behavior support an affirmative answer to all three questions. So we take all three boxes. That's what leads me to a positive answer to the overall question of free will. Okay. So I guess in return, I would say, say a couple of things here. So I do think there's a lot of agreement between us, but part of what

my disagreement with Christian is is that I think we're starting with two different sort of perspectives, both on how we're defining free will, but also what we think is the main threats to free will. So Christian's definition entails essentially two compatibilist conditions, intentional agency and causal control. Those are kind of traditional standard compatibilist conditions on free will, I don't take any issue with those two conditions. I just don't think that those conditions are sufficient for the kind of free will that I'm denying. The third condition that Christian posits alternative possibilities or genuine metaphysical alternative possibilities and an unconditional ability to do otherwise sense, that's a libertarian condition. And by building that

into his definition, it excludes compatibilism right from the beginning of the debate. The second thing I would say is this is perhaps a bit of a straw man that maybe Christian is attacking. There's Christian's main target is a kind of scientific argument for free-roll skepticism. And I will acknowledge that there are people out there that do present these kind of arguments. You know, the origin of this type of argument goes back to neuroscientific findings by people like Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wagner. And there are some scientific skeptics that run these kinds of. kind of arguments. But I'm in general agreement with Christian on these. I don't think they succeed. And I don't think there's any reason to buy into a kind of reductive account of the mind

that denies, let's say, that an agent's intentional states are part of the causal story. But I think there's a second more important route to free will skepticism that doesn't deny the causal efficacy of intentional states, but argues that whether that causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it doesn't achieve the level of control to count as free will in exactly the sense that I'm defining free will. Well, I want to come back and have some time in this debate to talk about the kind of social implications of your respective views on free will. And maybe just to intervene here as the moderator to try to assist both myself and the lay person listening to you both who is coming to a lot of these concepts kind of fresh. and probably like me is racing to keep up with you both. I think I am, but you can correct me if I'm wrong in my assumptions.

But to just help us kind of educate ourselves about the fundamentals, the foundations of this debate, I think it would be interesting, Christian, for the audience to hear you kind of describe the condition of free will. What is this in your view? Yes. So in short, free will is the capacity to, choose and control our own actions. So we can think of free will as a capacity. And more specifically,

I've suggested that we should think of it as a capacity that has three parts, the capacity for intentional agency, the capacity for making choices between alternative causes of action. And then finally, the capacity for causal control over the resulting actions that are taken. And I'll just give you a very trivial example. This morning when I had breakfast, I was able to choose between two different kinds of drink. I could have had either coffee or tea. Those were the two options in front of me. And it so happens that I chose tea rather than coffee.

I exercised my capacity for agency. in making that choice. And indeed, if you wanted to make sense of what I did, you have to view me, conceptualize me as an intentional agent. I had two different options in front of me. And finally, the intention that I formed, which was to drink tea, was the difference-making cause of my choice.

So had I intended to drink coffee instead, for instance, then I would have successfully chosen the coffee. So, I mean, these are, of course, very trivial examples. And in reality, we like to think that we are able to exercise our free will also when it comes to much more significant decisions, let's say, which career path to take or whether to get married or how to vote in a general election. But these are all instances where we exercise our intentional agency. We have different options in front of us. And at least in principle, we have some control over which option we choose in the sense that our intentional states are the difference makers over the resulting choices.

Very helpful to moving this debate forward. So, Greg, what did you have this morning? Coffee or tea? and why wasn't your choice a proof point for the existence of free? Well, as Christian has just articulated. Always coffee. Never tea. So, yeah, it was coffee.

And perhaps this is a good example, right? So I have certain preferences. I have certain likes and dislikes. I prefer coffee over tea. And so why would I choose the coffee? Well, I might choose the coffee for various kinds of intervieferes. psychological reasons. And they have to do with my preferences and my likes and my dislikes. But the argument against free will is to question whether or not those inner psychological states

are themselves within the ultimate control of the agent or whether they are, you know, outside the control of the agent. If determinism is true. And determinism just for those who are unaware, philosophers sort of think of it as the thesis that facts about the remote past in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail there's only one unique future. And so this is sort of a view that's emerged since the rise of, say, classical physics, Newtonian physics, that the world is deterministic.

One concern for free will is that, well, if determinism is true, then those inter-psychological states themselves would be, say, causally determined by anteceding conditions, maybe things like what my parents drank, that they drink coffee or tea, the kinds of, culture I'm raised in? Am I raised in a coffee culture or a tea culture? Maybe it has something to do with my habitual likes and dislikes for different types of tastes. And so the idea is that the inner psychological factors that made me choose the coffee have to do with a certain set of likes and preferences and desires, you might say. And then the argument is that those likes and preferences and desires are themselves the result of factors beyond my control.

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Christian, come back on those arguments that Greg just made here, and let's kind of keep using our coffee versus tea version. He's giving you the ability to exercise choice. You've decided one or the other. That's not in dispute here. What Greg is contesting here are the assumptions that the decisions that led to that choice are, in fact, centered and under your control and direction and don't come from previous antecedents, quantum physics, you name it, forces in effect outside of our control that,

in fact, have a greater decision in shaping that choice to the extent. where free will is really not as robust and as articulated as you would see it as a part of the human condition? Yes, I think our debate is partly, I guess, substantive and partly definitional. So, I mean, partly we are debating a substantive issue and partly we're debating the question of what is the best definition of free will we should use. So maybe I'll try to comment on both of these. Now, on the substantive point of the role of causal antecedents behind our choices,

I do, of course, agree with Greg that we have preferences and values in the background. But nonetheless, and perhaps this is a difference between us, I would argue that at the point of choice, that there nonetheless remains free will. And I'll again give a sort of very simple example to make this point. So take again choice between different beverages in a bar, let's say the alcoholic drink and the non-alcoholic drink. And it so happens that I don't drink alcohol at all.

And so very, very reliably and predictably, every time I enter a bar, I'm going to choose the non-alcoholic beverage over the alcoholic one. And people who know me well are also able to predict this quite reliably. So at first side, you know, this might look like a counter example to the idea that I have free will in this matter. But the claim that I'm making is that if we give the best decision theoretic description of the situation that we're looking at here, so I stand in front of a choice between different options, then even though one option is the strongly preferred one for me, and my preference then is also a difference-making cause for my choice of that. option over the other, that does not render the other option impossible or agentially inaccessible to me.

So I argued that the agential possibility of doing otherwise remains in place even if you quite systematically choose one option over the other and you have a sort of very good intentional reason-based explanation of why you do so. So the mere fact that there are these antecedent conditions does not undermine free will. Now, it seems to me, now I come to the definitional point, and it seems to me that Greg uses a more demanding definition than I do. From what he just said, it seems to me that he thinks free will would require some form of ultimate responsibility. So each time we identify a certain antecedent causal condition for maybe our prior mental state, our preference,

then we'd have to ask, well, can we attribute this to a previous choice? Maybe we can, but then the previous choice also had an antecedent causal condition, and then we asked the same question, and we very quickly hit a regress, and there comes a point where we're not able to attribute ultimate control to the agent for the entire chain of antecedent conditions. And I agree that if we're looking for such ultimate control, that's not something that we plausibly have. But I think that ultimate control is just far too demanding a condition for free will, but also far too demanding a condition for the sort of moral responsibility that is quite central to our common sense morality.

I mean, quite aside from issues of punishment, just to give a very simple example, again. I mean, suppose, Greg, you know, what would have happened if I had just failed to show up for this debate today, you know, without warning and without any good reason? I mean, you probably would have had reason. I mean, you're a very nice guy, so you would have been very forgiving, but you would have had reason to be a little bit upset with me, and you would have thought, you know, an apology is due for, you know, wasting your time and not showing up. And so, and I would argue, yes, it is absolutely right that you should blame me in this kind of case. And if we want to explain, you know, why this is so, it's precisely that in this instance,

you know, I would have exercised my choice. I would have been able to show up, but I didn't. And from the perspective of your day-to-day morality, it's perfectly appropriate then to hold me responsible for that failure to show up. Excellent. And that's exactly where I wanted to go next with you, Greg, is the kind of the implications for our lives and how we would order ourselves,

both individually in a society, in a scenario where we don't have the moral context, the moral heuristics of free will to show up and have this debate together. Is there an anarchical view to how society should work, if it was really honest in your view about the inability to substantively articulate individual free will? I mean, do you see us just as random atoms bouncing around off each other with little or few obligations or responsibilities based on the decisions we make because those decisions are all contextualized by loca of power and action that reside outside of ourselves.

Yeah, thanks. No, so this is an interesting, this is where the bulk of my most recent work has kind of been focused. So some people think if we adopt this skeptical perspective, it's going to lead to nihilism or despair, undermine meaning in life, or. we'd have to give up on morality or just like criminals run free. And so I'm what I call an optimistic skeptic. I'm optimistic about the practical implications of giving up the belief in free will.

And I actually argue that not only is it possible to live without the belief in free will in basic dessert, it's preferable. I would argue we'd be better off without. So for example, to go to Christian's example, if he didn't show him, yeah, didn't show him. up and didn't inform us and just, you know, ghosted us this morning. If I were to believe in free will, you know, you might justify certain types of reactive attitudes, as philosophers call them. That is like resentment or indignation of moral anger. The skeptic says, well, those types of reactive attitudes would be unjustified. But most other reactive attitudes are not predicated on the belief in free will. And so those would be preserved. So instead of, say, moral anger,

I could express disappointment or sadness. And that's consistent with the denial of free will. And I would argue that in many cases, the reactive attitudes that we would have to reject if we were to give up the belief in free will were suboptimal to begin with. Like moral anger was rather corrosive to our interpersonal relationships.

It's often counterproductive from the perspective of what we're attempting to achieve. So like if my daughter were to do something bad, bad at school. Instead of expressing moral anger, I might express disappointment. But the reason that you would want to express any sort of reaction is that we're trying to create better moral being. So as a parent, I would be, you know, focused on interacting with my daughter in a way that would lead to moral development, reconciliation when it comes to wrongdoing, and ultimately, you know, safety. We have a stake in individuals and how they behave.

My argument is you wouldn't have to reject morality. Axiological judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, would remain in place. I would argue that most of what we care about in our interpersonal lives and in our societal structures could be preserved. And the things that couldn't be preserved, like retributive punishment, certain types of criminal justice practices, I would argue we're counterproductive to begin with and we're better off out. So with that regard, I think actually

that the skeptic can argue that life without free will is not only possible but preferable. Excellent. This is a great way to kind of push towards our closing statements. So please, Christian, come back on what you've just heard. Can we have

a sense of mutual obligation and ethic of care, both individually and collectively as a society without your more robust, articulated definition of free will and its kind of centrality to who we are as individuals and as communities. Well, I mean, before making a sort of closing statement, I'd just like to comment on one aspect of what Greg just said.

It seems to me that a version of the notion of responsibility will still be at least implicitly retained in his way of thinking, even if he doesn't call it responsibility, and even if it's not tied to desert, and by the way, for me, responsibility is also not tied to desert. And to make that point, let me just come back again to my hypothetical example of not showing up for this debate and wasting your time this morning.

Now, if there's a... this has happened and Greg had then learned that, you know, indeed, I just made made the choice to, you know, go and have ice cream instead because that's what I spontaneously felt like. He would have good reasons, and again, I think very good reasons, to be a little bit upset with me and to expect some kind of apology from me. And indeed, I think an apology would be the appropriate response here. I mean, we don't need to. to think about retribution or anything super harsh, but I think an apology would be entirely appropriate.

On the other hand, if my failure to show up had been due to just some kind of catastrophic electricity blackout or something completely beyond my own agential control, so it was not a matter of my choice, but a matter of just some brute external intervention, then clearly no apology would be needed and Greg would not be personally disappointed in me nor would he then expect an apology

but he would just immediately see that this was just due to external circumstances. And I think that my notion of free will allows us to actually distinguish between those two cases. It allows us to explain. So does mine. Well, so, but then, I mean, it might be that at the end of the day, what you call responsibility and what I call responsibility are somewhat distinct notions. So what I call responsibility is actually, at least in part implicit in your own use of notions such as right and wrong as well.

And what you call responsibility, which is tied to notions such as desert or some kind of ultimate desert or ultimate responsibility, It's just a much more demanding thing, which I suggest is not needed for conventional morality. So, I think once again, we are sort of somewhere in between a substantive and a definitional disagreement here. I do think it's important to distinguish different notions of responsibility, and I'm not the only one to have done this. Philosophical literature has distinguished between attributability, answerability, accountability, different notions of responsibility, causal. responsibility. So when the tree falls on my car and destroys my car or when Katrina destroys, you know, New Orleans, we could say that it was causally responsible. Well, that's a kind of responsibility no one is debating. Answerability is the kind of responsibility I was talking about earlier where I could

ask my daughter why she made the choices she made. Can she improve her deliberations and her reasons moving forward? That is consistent with the rejection of free rule. So I'm denying a very specific kind of moral responsibility. So what I would say is that philosophers need to be really careful about how they define the kind of phenomena that we're seeking to reject or preserve. I'm very clear about the phenomena I reject and the phenomena I seek to preserve. And as a free will skeptic, I'm simply denying the kind of moral responsibility that we make agents truly deserving of these types of backward-looking blame and anger and resentment and indignation and whether you want to reject retributivism, but that's sometimes a backward-looking feature that people try to justify on the grounds of

dessert. Fascinating conversation. Let's, Christian, in your closing statement now, please, feel free to reflect on what you've just heard, but I'm going to ask you to begin the process, both of you of wrapping up this debate by leaving our audience with some of the key points, key insights that you want them to take away from this debate. Yeah, so maybe just one quick follow-up point on Greg's remarks just now. So I certainly do think that in the case of a certain morally wrong choices, having a certain kind of fitting attitude of moral disapproval and then expecting an apology is entirely appropriate.

And so in that sense, I do preserve a notion of desert. and don't drop the notion of dessert altogether. So that's perhaps something I should really clarify and it's also useful to see that there is a substantive point of disagreement between us and not just a definitional one. So just to close my own position, the idea of free will, I've argued, is supported by the sciences of human behavior.

And specifically, I suggested that this is so when we define free will as the capacity for agency choice and control over the resulting actions. I think that postulating this three-part capacity is simply explanatorily necessary in the human and social sciences. And denying free will, as I understand it, would be warranted only if this postulate weren't needed for explaining human behavior or if it was somehow incoherent. But I do think that it is explanatorily needed across the human and social sciences, and that it is also internally coherent. Now, I'm willing to concede that future science might still give us a radically different approach

to the explanation of human behavior and perhaps even vindicate some form of reductionism. If this were really the case, then I'd have to reassess my present conclusions. But I don't think that our best sciences of human behavior are currently heading in this reductionistic direction at all. And so therefore, my conclusion is very simple, just as we wouldn't deny the reality of organisms, ecosystems, and institutions just because fundamental physics doesn't refer to them. So we shouldn't deny the reality of agency choice and free will either.

Thank you so much, Christian. Masterful wrapping up. Greg, we're going to give you the last word in this fascinating debate today, be it resolved humans have free will please take us away yeah so thank you thank you both to Christian and and yourself from moderating this it's been it's been fun I would say a couple of things in response and and closing I mean one thing I agree with Christian on is that you know explanatory you know theorizing about human behavior you know probably does necessitate positing intentional agency and causal control I think

where Christian and I disagree is I don't think that those in themselves warrant this kind of theoretical concept that philosophers call for a will. I think that we could acknowledge agents as choice makers. I think philosophers can readily distinguish between an I-twitch and choosing to make myself a cup of coffee. We could acknowledge that the intentions and The goal-directed agency of the coffee maker is causally efficacious and then making the coffee. All of that could be acknowledged while still denying that agents have the kind of free will that would ground the kind of dessert that Christian just acknowledged. He is still trying to preserve. So what I want to say in closing is that for me, the real threats to free will are not reductionism or epi-feworthy.

phenomenals or concerns about whether agents, conscious wills are actually involved in their choice making. I'm willing to grant all that. What I'm suggesting is that the reasons and the motivational states and the intentions themselves that agents form that control and cause their behavior are themselves the result of factors beyond their control, whether those factors be again, determinism, indeterminism, or luck. And so once you start to look deeper into human behavior, I think that we can ultimately begin to see that individuals are embedded in social systems, that individuals and agency is holistic.

It's caused by a nexus of different factors and anteceding conditions having to do with background and upbringing and brain chemistry and genetics and how one was raised. and different experiences they've had in the past. And secondly, I would like to suggest that it's possible to abandon the belief in free will. And in part, I think by doing so, we can give up the notion of just desserts and we can look more clearly at the causes

and more deeply into the systems that shape individuals and their behavior. And in my view, this will allow us to adopt more humane and more effective practices and policies because we can see that the true causes for human behavior are often, especially when you look at things like criminal behavior or violence or violent crime, is often the result of systemic injustices within society. So it allows us to shift the focus away from individual responsibility more toward the causes of the behavior,

which I think more effectively allows us to achieve the outcomes we want. better societies, better moral character, reconciliation, safety. So in the end, I think that you have to look at individuals as byproducts of their circumstances and question whether or not they're truly deserving of the kinds of reactions and judgments and treatments we impose on them as deserved if who they are and what they do is ultimately the result of factors beyond their control. Thank you. Thank you, Greg. And thank you, Christian, for a mind-expanding debate. I felt like I've learned so much, and I want to go on and read more. So maybe just both of you, if you could leave us with some book suggestions. For someone who's just coming to this debate for the first time, Christian, I know you have an excellent book. Feel free to recommend it. Is there another book that you would direct me to words to try to wrap my mind around these issues? Well, I would of course use this opportunity to attention to my book,

why free will is real Harvard University Press 2019, in which I developed the case for real free will as an emergent phenomenon in much greater detail. But the contemporary literature is actually full of interesting free will. defenses, you know, going back, for instance, to the very influential work of Daniel Dennett. But Jenan Ismail has a book, Why Physics Makes Us, or how Physics Makes Us Free, that also makes the case for reconciling Free Will with a scientific worldview. So I'm by no means the only one pushing for reconciling free will with science. Excellent. We'll put links to your book in your bio for the show page for this debate on the monk debates website.

Greg, just finally, I'd love to hear your recommendation. Do you have a book that you would suggest for the kind of layperson to dig in more, maybe that takes your view, a more skeptical orientation towards free will? Sure. And I also recommend the books that Christian recommended. They're all really good books. I have two new books out, both out this year in 2021. I have a book with Daniel Dennett.

It's a debate format, and it's a really good book for people coming to the debate, I think, for the first time. It's called Just Desserts, Debating Free Will. And it consists of three exchanges that me and Dan Dennett had, where we sort of defend our competing views on free will and punishment and moral responsibility. My second book is rejecting retributivism, free will punishment. in criminal justice where I not only lay out in more detail my arguments against free will, but I also propose a completely developed novel alternative to how we should go about addressing criminal behavior and reform in the criminal justice system without the belief in free will

and without the belief in moral responsibility. Beyond those, there's a couple books I would just quickly suggest. One in particular by Dirk Pirabum, Living Without Free Will. It was very influential. on my thinking early on, and probably is the origin of many of us freeball skeptics today have sort of taken our leave from Dirk Pierboom. And another book that I would really recommend is by Bruce Waller called Against More Responsibility, which also defends a skeptical perspective against the kind of more responsibility that I reject. I think those two books are really two of the best.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Great suggestions. Great recommendations. we'll have those in your biographical notes for the show page for this episode of the Monk Debates. And on behalf of the Monk Debates community, again, really appreciate this fulsome debate. And no doubt will continue to be gripped by this question of free will. Does it exist or not for a long time to come?

But you've certainly stimulated us and moved this debate forward in meaningful and important ways. So again, thank you, gentlemen, for being part of the Monk Debates today. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having me, too. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Christian and Greg, for a far-ranging and far-wheeling debate on free will. I've learned so much. I hope you have too.

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