Hard Cases Make Bad Law

 (Robert Sapolsky’s book on free will was reviewed in The New Yorker. I quote from that review below.)

And vague and glittering generalities make poor grounds upon which to rest conclusions.

The steps of his reasoning are familiar: if everything is determined, there is no freedom; if there is no freedom, there is no moral responsibility. Science tells us that everything is indeed determined. Ergo, no freedom; ergo, no responsibility. Are we bound to agree?

Sapolsky again. What Daniel Dennett thought he did for consciousness, Sapolsky now claims to have done for “free will.” Which he basically defines this way:

Every now and then, it occurs to Sapolsky that the parties to the debate may be talking past each other, and he makes an effort, a little grudgingly, to clarify his terms. “What is free will?” he asks early in the book. “Groan, we have to start with that.” 

What follows is not a definition but a challenge. A man, Sapolsky invites us to imagine, “pulls the trigger of a gun.” That’s one description. Another is that “the muscles in his index finger contracted.” Why? “Because they were stimulated by a neuron,” which was in turn “stimulated by the neuron just upstream. . . . And so on.” Then he throws down the gauntlet: “Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

Reading that my mind obviously turned to current events, and so to Gaza and Israel. Does even Sapolsky really want to run his thought experiment through the slaughter of Israelis: children, women, elderly, all killed for no apparent reasons except anger and hatred. And probably the desire to kill. Are all of these factors illusions, and the only explanation the sum of their biological pasts (whatever the hell that means. And since his argument is supposed to be based in science, how do you begin to quantify such a sum?)?

I’m not leaving out the Israeli response, either. Except to say they at least pay lip service to the idea of a qualified response. Hamas seems interested only in slaughter and outrage, suffering death and calamity as a means to an end (especially when it’s someone else’s death and calamity, be they Israeli or Palestinian). Is that end determined by the sum of their biological pasts? Do they have that radically a different past (or is it individual pasts?) than the Israelis?

That way lies a return to eugenics, since this is supposed to scientific reasoning.

Consider these questions. How does my response to a student who has failed to meet a deadline change when I discover that she sprained her wrist the day before? How do I respond to a piece of fruit chucked at me when I discover that the chucker is two years old? How vehemently do I press for a tough prison sentence when I learn that the defendant was abused as a child? Is there a difference between someone jumping into a pool and being pushed in? Between falling in after he stepped on a banana peel and falling in because he was drunk? 

In each of these situations, we can ask whether the person in question had or lacked something called “free will.” But look back at the factors that seemed to undermine the exercise of free will: rotten luck, immaturity, circumstance, coercion, accident, and incapacity. When the terms on the obverse side of the contrast are so disparate, it’s hard to be confident that there really is a single thing called “free will” whose presence or absence we can meaningfully debate.

In other words, “It’s complicated.” But that’s not an out, because the question remains: what do we mean by “free will”? I accept it isn’t a “single thing,” but consider that neither is “love.” I love coffee; and my wife; and my daughter; and writing. But no single definition of “love” covers the uses I just made of the word in that sentence. Should we invent new words with more precise meanings for each phrase in my sentence, each object of the word “love”? Well, first, language doesn’t work that way (who would adopt the new words, and how would they use them?); second, cadence that precise in our usage of words? I say I love my daughter; but does that place you in my experience of my daughter? Only relationally, I’d argue. By which I mean analogously to your relationship with your child. The difference between a parent and a non-parent is one that simply can’t be bridged by language, or even more crudely by reducing human relationships to scientific terms. 

We do this all the time, in other words. If that gives philosophers fits, that’s their problem. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Sapolsky says “Groan, we have to start with that.” He means definition, and yes, we do. John Fowles wrote: “Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation.” Until we know, or try to grasp, in whole what we are talking about, all we see is desolation. In Sapolsky’s case, it’s the empty wasteland of an effort to reduce everything to terms he can understand. Dennett did pretty much the same thing with “consciousness,” as I recall. In neither case was it a fruitful enterprise.