Who Can I Blame if There’s No Free Will?
Thoughts on blame and justice in a deterministic world
Who can I blame if there’s no free will?
Moral responsibility seems predicated on the idea that each of us can freely choose how to act — that we have free will.
But free will does not hold up against a deterministic understanding of physical reality or against an honest investigation into our own minds.
So, then, if there is no free will, how can we hold people responsible for their actions?
Two Yous
First, there are two “You”s:
The organism that you are — the physical body.
The conscious observer that you are — the mind.
Although, the second term is something of a tautology — consciousness is the property of observation, and you cannot have an unconscious observer. So it makes more sense to simply say that “you” are consciousness — or at least that you are the consciousness that your body (the other “you”) is producing.
Either way, this is not an argument for dualism — I’m starting from the assumption that consciousness (the mind) is a product of the brain, which is part of the body.
The point of making the distinction is simply to recognise that there are two things generally referred to when we use the term “you” (or “I”), and that we often make claims about reality and about moral responsibility without making that important distinction.
In fact, it is precisely because the second “you” is a product of the first “you” that the argument I’m about to put forward makes any sense.
Conscious Control
Second, when I say we have no free will I mean that the conscious observer that you are has no true control over the body that you are, and hence:
Consciousness has no control over reality.
This is a strong claim, and it’s not without its opponents.
But spend enough time paying very close attention to the stream of thoughts and words and ideas that burst into consciousness, and it becomes very apparent that you have absolutely no control over any of it.
You have no control over the emotions or intentions that arise, and you have no control over whether you will ultimately respond to those emotions and intentions, or whether you will set them aside.
You simply feel and observe the intention.
This doesn’t mean that these intentions aren’t the source of your behaviour.
It just means you have no control over them or whether they’ll lead to an action.
Yet, what you do as a result of those intentions is still something you’re doing — the organism you, not the consciousness it produces.
Hence it is not inconsistent to say that you don’t have free will but that you are responsible for your actions.
Where we run into problems is when we try to base our theory of moral responsibility on the idea that the conscious observer (the other “you”) is responsible because it has some level of control over anything.
It does not.
In truth, we don’t need any of that in order to get a system of moral responsibility off the ground.
All we need to claim is that intentions exist and that they have a direct effect on the actions of the organism in which they exist.
The point of the argument is to see that we can accept that it still makes sense to blame individuals for their actions even though they had no fundamental control over what they do — the organism that they are is still the cause of whatever happened.
Accidents
This is almost the same as arguing that “you” are the cause of an accident — you were not in control of what happened but you’re still the cause of it.
The difference is that we don’t assign any moral responsibility to people for accidents — even though they are still to blame — because they had no intention to do it.
This line of reasoning could lead us fall back into the idea that we’re only morally responsible because we have control over what we do with our intentions.
But we don’t choose to have the intentions, or to be prone to acting upon them.
It’s the perception of control over those actions and intentions that leads us to assign moral responsibility to them — it’s possible to have intentions and to act on those intentions without being held morally responsible.
We generally don’t hold kids responsible for the atrocities they commit on a daily basis because they don’t seem to know any better.
That doesn’t mean they’re not to blame — they were still the cause of whatever they did.
We just don’t expect the same level of accountability as we would from an adult because we assume — quite rightly — that they don’t have the education or training or mental capacity to make the kind of moral calculations we would expect from adults.
But in this sense, adults are no different to children.
Adults weren’t in control of whether they had the requisite experiences to remove or overcome certain intentions, and they weren’t in control of whether those experiences had the desired effect.
Morality is a Skill
Again, this doesn’t change where the blame goes — the organism that they are is still the cause of whatever happened
What changes is how we think about that blame and how we respond to it.
Morality is a skill.
Perhaps it’s just harder for some people to learn it than others, or they don’t get the right chances to learn it.
However we respond to behaviour that doesn’t meet our expectations for someone of a given age, it should be motivated by the desire to solve a psychological problem, not a moral problem.
Perhaps they needed a better education; or the right set of experiences; a better environment; a change in their diet; maybe a tumour needs to be cut out; maybe some complex interaction between genes and brain development led them to have a propensity for violent behaviour.
If it’s possible for some people to behave morally and for others to not, then there is some difference between those two groups of people that must be the reason.
If you’re not drawn to moralistic explanations — you don’t think simply in terms of good and bad or evil souls — then you have to believe there is some physical difference between those groups that could be changed with the right kind of intervention.
If responding aggressively or angrily or punishing someone is the most effective way to solve that problem, then so be it — it may work on some people.
But this seems at best a primitive evolutionary solution to a social problem, so it’s unlikely to be the most effective one.
Change
Importantly, accepting that we don’t have free will is not that same as accepting that we can’t change
You or I will be convinced or motivated or forced to change (or not) whether we think we’re choosing it or not.
If you agree with me, you had no control over what ultimately led you to agree.
If I managed to change your mind, then that’s more to my point — external influences will change what and how we think and we have no control over our exposure to those influences or whether they will have an effect.
If you feel the pangs of disagreement, you did not choose to feel them — my argument and my writing just wasn’t enough to change your mind, but I had no control over that either.
That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
My belief that such things can have an effect was not something I chose.
And having the persistence and patience to do so was also not something I chose.
Yet, I am still to blame for trying. I still wrote the thing. I’m still the cause of it being here.
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