All posts tagged: Free will

The Moral Decline of Elite Universities

The Moral Decline of Elite Universities

In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco. Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide. Graeme Wood: Harvard’s president should resign Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the confidence of …

Do You Have Free Will?

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 …

Theories of free will

Theories of free will

Contemporary theories of free will tend to fall into one of two general categories, namely, those that insist on and those that are skeptical about the reality of human freedom and moral responsibility. The former category includes libertarian and compatibilist accounts of free will, two general views that defend the reality of free will but disagree on its nature. The latter category includes a family of skeptical views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions in a way that would make them truly deserving of blame and praise for them [2]. The main dividing line between the two pro-free will positions, libertarianism and compatibilism, is best understood in terms of the traditional problem of free will and determinism. Determinism, as it is commonly understood, is roughly the thesis that every event or action, including human action, is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions and the laws of nature. The problem of free will and determinism therefore comes …