In defense of free will and punishment

We punish people because they are free enough to deserve punishment

Written by Bo Winegard

Few concepts are as crucial to ordinary humans and social practices as free will. Everything from criminal punishment to a sense of purpose seems importantly to depend on it. The thought of being a biological machine deluded by feelings of freedom but in fact wholly determined by impersonal forces, by inescapable chains of causes and effects, is troubling and undermines essential norms and institutions. Without hyperbole, one might contend that free will stands between us and nihilism.

However, according to several prominent public intellectuals (and many less prominent philosophers), entrusting free will with this paramount responsibility is a mistake. We might just as well wear a magic talisman to protect ourselves from disease. For free will, like magic, does not exist—it is an illusion born from superstition and sustained by a stubborn refusal to accept the findings of modern science.

Some go even further. Not only is free will an illusion, but so too is moral responsibility. For moral responsibility cannot survive without free will. If we eliminate one, we inevitably eliminate the other. Nor do the dominos stop there. All social practices supported by the idea of moral responsibility such as blame and praise and punishment should be scrutinized and possibly abolished—or at least radically transformed. After all, holding a person morally responsible for a crime, according to these skeptics, is as misguided as holding a witch responsible for a plague or bad crops. Neither witches nor free will exist. And painful as this might be, we, the heirs of the Enlightenment, should accept reality and discard comforting delusions.

Thus, the free will debate, unlike esoteric debates about, say, Plato’s epistemology, is not merely academic, though it can be quite arcane. Rather, it is a vital and consequential debate with many real-world implications. Errors and confusions about free will do not just affect other academics, they affect ordinary people and may lead to advocacy of pernicious “soft on crime” policies and unnecessary existential angst. All of which makes it important to correct muddled thinking and to push back against popular books which espouse the end of moral blame and punishment as we know them.  

Free will exists. But it is not elevated, abstruse, or metaphysical. It is practical—a part of our embedded everyday activities. Like other concepts that befuddle philosophers such as love or fiction or friendship, ordinary people discuss it with reasonable success and even lucidity, though without the philosopher’s concern for consistency. Similar considerations apply to other concepts related to free will such as moral responsibility, blame, praise, and punishment. These are all practical concepts connected to vital social practices. They are no more contingent upon the truths of speculative metaphysics than is garbage collection or lawn maintenance.

FREE WILL

With more than some justice, one might say that philosophy has done to free will what H. L. Menken quipped theology did to God: It has tried to explain the unknowable in terms not worth knowing. Philosophy books about free will are often filled with impenetrable jargon and puzzling thought experiments that not only perplex curious citizens but also other learned scholars. Nevertheless, some jargon is unavoidable. I will keep this to a minimum, but no modern discussion of free will and punishment can (or should) avoid it altogether.

The first task in any discussion about free will is conceptual clarity, which is not easy. For free will, like other fuzzy terms, e.g., “religion” or “self” or “politics,” is broad with indistinct borders of meaning. (Is Scientology a religion? Is the stomach a part of the self? Is boycotting a brand a part of politics?) This is not unusual. Few interesting ideas have simple, univocal definitions. Sometimes disagreements about meaning lead to loud and unproductive debates. And we should reject the Socratic goal of discovering an essential definition, a definition without exceptions or ambiguities. But some conceptual house cleaning is necessary.

The Stanford encyclopedia entry on free will contends that free will “has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant control over one’s actions.” The nature of this control is what divides the philosophers and other intellectuals who argue about the topic. Four broad ideas about (or conceptions of) free will have come to dominate the debate: Libertarianism, hard determinism, hard incompatibilism, and compatibilism.

Libertarianism: Libertarianism is the position that free will and determinism are not compatible with each other. If determinism is true, then free will cannot exist. But determinism is false, and free will exists.

Hard determinism: Hard determinism is the position that free will and determinism are not compatible with each other. If determinism is true, then free cannot exist. Determinism is true, and therefore free will does not exist.

Hard incompatibilism: Hard incompatibilism is the position that free will is incoherent and even if determinism were false, free will could not exist.

Compatibilism: Compatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are compatible. Even if determinism is true, free will can exist.

The idea of libertarian free will is that free will must come from an originating act of self—an act that is not determined by preceding causes of any kind. The human agent—the source of this causeless act—therefore must dwell in a kind of metaphysical sanctuary, isolated from the world’s inexorable chains of causes and effects. Perhaps this agent is a soul. Or perhaps it is a transcendental self. But whatever it is, it is unique. And it introduces a form of real randomness in the universe since it is unpredictable not just in practice, but also in principle. In other words, this is not the ersatz randomness of a coin flip; this is the real thing—and entities that possess free will are thus literally and not merely figuratively unpredictable. The universe is open. Determinism is false.

If the skeptics of free will directed their attacks solely at libertarian free will, leaving compatibilism intact, they would be performing a valuable public service. For libertarian free will not only does not exist, it is utterly incoherent. Many philosophers have eagerly made this point, but few with the panache of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“This causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, an eloquent and often polemical philosopher who pilloried the notion of (libertarian) free will.

What is more, even if libertarian free will were coherent, it would be undesirable, granting free will only in the way a mischievous genie grants wishes that go badly wrong in popular parables for children. Libertarian free will leads to absurd and unappealing consequences. For example, it suggests that two sequences of thoughts that are exactly the same could end in different behaviors. It thus suggests that thought and behavior are random. But randomness is not freedom. It is chaos.

Consider a concrete example.

Suppose that Thomas, being late for work, is anxiously waiting at a crosswalk, eager to get to the other side. He has a thought, “No risk, no reward.” He becomes excited and darts out into the road. For the determinist, this presents no problem. A thought arrived. It caused his behavior. And he crossed the road. But for a libertarian, this very same thought, “No risk, no reward” could have been followed not by an energetic attempt to cross the road, but by a trepidatious wobble of the knees and another thought, “Yes, but curiosity killed the cat.” Same situation. Same thoughts. Then an unpredictable eruption of chance from the universe—a sudden and uncaused wave of panic.

In this conception of free will, our thoughts and behaviors are in principle unpredictable even to ourselves! They arise ex nihilo from the darkness like spontaneous flashes of light. They may satisfy a need for mystery because they seem almost magical, but they are not a desirable source of freedom.

Libertarian free will is a metaphysical monster invented by philosophers to be hunted and slain by philosophers. A cynic might even contend that its very purpose is to keep philosophers employed by giving them something to refute.

And after having ridiculed libertarian free will, I come to the confession that it’s not a wholly mistaken reconstruction of (some) everyday intuitions about free will. Consider the following conversation between an ordinary person and a determinist philosopher:

Person: I am free to choose whether I drink coffee in the morning.

Philosopher: Actually, no. Your desire for coffee was caused by some combination of genes and environment. There is no “you” that created this desire.

Person: Ok. But even if that is true, I still can decide whether I drink it this morning or not. My intention is my choice.

Philosopher: Well, no. Your intention was also caused by something. You may think you choose your thoughts. But, in fact, your thoughts are caused by underlying neural activity. It would be more accurate to say that your thoughts choose you. Or your brain chooses your thoughts.

Person: Well even if that is true, and I’m not sure I follow it, I can decide not to carry out my intention. Maybe a thought comes to me, “I should drink coffee,” but I can choose not to drink the coffee.

Philosopher: But the counteracting intention, the intention or decision not to follow your original intention, was also caused by something.

Person: Yeah, it was caused by me. I chose it. I could have drunk the coffee, but I chose not to. That’s freedom.

And so on. What this conversation—and I have had many similar conversations—seems to illustrate is that ordinary people (often called “the folk”—a term I will use hereafter) reject determinism and also reject the free will that is supposedly compatible with determinism. In other words, the folk are natural incompatibilists who embrace libertarian free will—the free will of the uncaused cause and the metaphysical agent beyond the laws of the material world. In fact, not only do the folk endorse libertarian free will, but they also deplore compatibilism as a wretched subterfuge. If determinism is true, if the self is created by impersonal forces, if all thoughts are preceded by physical causes, then free will is an illusion that no amount of fancy rhetoric or inscrutable argot can save.

But such speculation from the armchair about what other people might or might not think is philosophical guesswork. And it is no substitute for systematic evidence.

Some philosophers and psychologists have attempted to test and systematize the beliefs of the folk. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results have been mixed, with some scholars claiming that the folk are incompatibilist libertarians and others claiming that they are compatibilists. (Almost everybody accepts that most people believe in free will.) This contradictory pattern of data has, of course, provoked considerable debate of its own with scholars designing increasingly elaborate experiments to reveal the true nature of folk intuitions and contending that other experiments confused participants into providing misleading responses.

A simple though perhaps counterintuitive way to reconcile these apparently conflicting results is to posit that the folk are both libertarians and compatibilists. For the folk, unlike professional philosophers, are not terribly worried about contradictions. Philosophers, at least good philosophers, are like eagle-eyed editors irritated by grammatical errors that average readers happily ignore. Contradictions irk them. And perhaps because of this, they believe that the folk must have coherent and consistent views about free will. They can’t possibly believe two contradictory conceptions of free will at the same time. That would be like an atheist who believes in God. A nihilist who believes in objective morality. A vegan who believes in factory farming. Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

Ordinary people are not as sensitive to contradictions as philosophers because their beliefs are tools for guiding their behavior, for satisfying psychological desires, and for allaying anxieties, and tools do not logically contradict each other. If they work, they work. The same tool that predicts behavior (e.g., determinism) might not quiet nagging existential doubts (e.g., free will). Furthermore, the folk do not often reflect on the whole network of their beliefs to determine if it is consistent. While watching a baseball game, they may say a silent prayer to help their favorite team; but while reading an article about a deadly tornado, they may think that God is unmoved by human cares and concerns. While falling in love, they may believe in soul mates; but while reflecting on life more soberly, they may think that romantic relationships are largely accidents of proximity. And on and on.

William James, a champion of pragmatism, which sees ideas less as abstractions and more as guides to behavior.

Philosophers are not wrong to demand more logical consistency from philosophical writings than from ordinary discourse, for philosophy requires an analytical refinement of everyday assumptions and conceptions. And it requires coherence and consistency; otherwise, it would devolve into a tedious game of verbal Calvinball. But philosophers should engage in a form of charitable reconstruction, preserving ordinary concepts when possible—and only advocating elimination after other options have been exhausted. Consider “love” for example.

The folk conception of love is decorated with all kinds of implausible metaphysical ornaments. It might be beautiful—but it is also empirically indefensible. It is pre-scientific and makes no reference to brain chemicals or adaptive mechanisms. Yet this does not mean that we should abolish the concept of love from our mature understanding of the world. And it does not mean that young romantics are deluded about their passions, that they should suppress their “illusory” feelings, or that they should cease writing treacly love poetry.

This is the mistake that hard determinists and hard incompatibilists make. Believing that ordinary ideas about free will are fatally contaminated by metaphysical hokum, they advocate eradication. But in their haste to rid the world of nonsense, they rid it of everything recognizably human. They engage in crude “nothing but” reductionism in which the blood is drained from the warm world of lived experience, leaving only a corpse of abstractions, of causes and effects, matter in motion, atoms in the void, where humans are described dismissively as “machines” and “robot vehicles.”

They also embrace an unnecessary and misleading kind of determinism, which I shall call dictatorial determinism, instead of a more reasonable, realistic kind of determinism, which I shall call democratic determinism. Here, for example, is the public intellectual Sam Harris mocking compatibilist free will: “Compatibilism effectively means: ‘A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.’”

The reason this metaphor provokes an angry desire to dismiss compatibilism is that humans (and other agents) evolved to resent and resist manipulation. Humans who could be easily manipulated were low-fitness suckers exploited by others. And this is what dictatorial determinism conjures: an image of the self as a hapless victim of manipulation and coercion, a prisoner to the Stalinesque laws of the universe. If that were compatibilist free will, then Kant would be right; it would wretched subterfuge.

But it is not.

The marionette image, a favorite not only of Sam Harris but of many who argue about free will, is thus deceptive, suggesting, as it does, a world of dictatorial determinism. Causality in the real world is much more democratic. There are many kinds of causal processes, from billiard balls colliding against each other to musicians playing Beethoven’s fifth together. The “nothing but” reductionist is tempted to argue that the latter example is a convenient fiction, an invention of human consciousness, and that ultimately an orchestra can be reduced to physics, at least in principle. But I have yet to encounter a good reason to accept this radical claim. And it is difficult even to imagine a theoretical reduction of an orchestra to physics that would explain the things we care about when we watch a concert performance: The pace of the conductor, the precision of the players, the sublimity of the score.

The causes that determine human behaviors are not usually coercive or manipulative—which is precisely why ordinary people can understand the difference between a free choice and a coerced choice. When a person says, “She did it of her own free will,” most people do not think about a metaphysical theory of free will. They think (if only implicitly), “She chose to do this because she wanted to. Nobody coerced her.” Conversely, when a person says, “He did not apologize of his own free will, but rather because his wife forced him to,” people think (if only implicitly), “He did not want to apologize and was not inclined to do so.”

Determinism does not vitiate this conception of free will, which is the only free will worth preserving. It is a type of control, of autonomy and liberty, not a causeless cause, a transcendental self, or some other metaphysical chimera. It is, as David Hume wrote:

"…a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will…If we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains.”

David Hume, one of the greatest philosophers and a compatibilist.

Free-will skeptics are right to ridicule libertarian free will. It is a conceptual abomination, a grotesque caricature of real freedom. But they are wrong to eliminate free will altogether because there are perfectly serviceable alternatives to libertarian free will. And the goal of philosophy should be to reconstruct and refine everyday concepts and activities, not to eliminate them. This is true for free will and other cognate concepts, but it is even more true for crucial social practices such as praise, blame, and punishment.

ENDING BARBARISM?

Many of the philosophers and public intellectuals who reject free will also reject retributive punishment but accept the need for traditional forms of praise and blame and other non-retributive punishments for deterrence or sequestration. But some not only reject free will, they also reject blame, praise, and any form of punishment, which they view as vestiges of a primitive past whose extinction should be encouraged. For just as we now condemn many of our ancestor’s barbaric practices, e.g., witch burning, so our descendants will condemn many of our supposedly enlightened practices, e.g., mass incarceration.  

For example, in his book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky, the famous neuroendocrinologist and free-will skeptic, argues that “…blame and punishment are without any ethical justification.” Greg Caruso, a thoughtful philosopher and advocate of the quarantine model of criminal justice, contends that, “free-will skepticism maintains that criminals are not morally responsible for their actions in the basic-desert sense.” And Sam Harris, somewhat less cavalier than Sapolsky, notes that, “Assuming that violent criminals have such freedom, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims themselves.”

Robert Sapolsky, a prominent public intellectual who advocates for determinism and against free will and punishment.

These attacks on ordinary human moral and criminal-justice practices, especially the more ambitious (one might say, reckless) attacks such as those forwarded in Sapolsky’s book, are full of confusions and an insufficient appreciation of natural and cultural selection’s ability to solve pressing social challenges. Praise and blame, punishment and reward are not metaphysically motivated activities, though they may be justified with appeals to metaphysical agents and entities. They are embedded, everyday activities that result from the interplay of evolved mental mechanisms and evolved cultural ideas and practices. They have a logic, but it’s often a hidden logic, a logic that requires thoughtful reconstruction, not hasty dismissal.

In Sapolsky’s Determined such a dismissal is indeed hasty—and thorough. Rejecting, even mocking, our most basic emotions with a kind of elevated pity, he writes:

“And we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done; ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells. This is where the science has brought us as well.”

A Darwinian’s first reaction to this passage might be: If hate is sad and futile, then why did it evolve? Why is hate such a common color in the palette of human emotions? A good question—although it might have reasonable answers. Indeed, Sapolsky offers at least one: Hating other people for their behavior is a stubborn superstition. It may once have been useful, in the larval stage of civilization, as it were. But the West long ago went through the Enlightenment, breaking from its cocoon of ignorance and replacing juvenile credulity with mature skepticism. The practices of our benighted past simply cannot survive modern scrutiny. After all, we used to break humans on the wheel, dunk them to death in water, burn them to death on piles of wood. We used to revel in public executions. Throw food at men and women in pillories. And surely that is sad.

What strikes me about Sapolsky’s passage is how polemical and intellectually unconvincing it is. Its rhetorical strategy is to compare other people (whom we might hate) to deadly natural phenomena, e.g., storms and earthquakes, as if the targets of our potential hate were not normal humans, but symbols of fate from fiction like Chigurh from No Country or Michael Myers from Halloween, stalking victims with the implacable unreason of a shark. We do not hate storms or earthquakes or viruses because our hate, our moral condemnations, our punishments would be pointless. Storms do not care about going to prison. Earthquakes do not care about being ostracized. And viruses do not care about being reprimanded. But humans do—or at least most humans do. Therefore, it is not absurd to hate another person for burning down your house, for stealing your savings, or for murdering your sister.

Anton Chigurh, from No Country for Old Men—a killer who resembles the grim reaper more than an ordinary person.

Modern moral practices (and the minds that engage in them) make subtle distinctions among inanimate objects (and natural phenomena), insensitive agents, pain-sensitive agents, scold-sensitive agents, and morally sensitive agents. We do not blame, praise, inflict pain upon, scold, imprison, or execute inanimate objects or natural phenomena. But we do try to control or manipulate them when we can. For example, we might plant a tower of trees in front of house to manipulate the wind. Or we might build a dam to store water and control flooding.

Our reaction to entities in the world is based on our ability to control them in various ways. Thus, we make practical and important distinctions between viruses and humans.

On the other hand, we blame, praise, punish, imprison, and execute morally sensitive agents. These distinctions are not based on sophisticated metaphysical assumptions; rather, they are based on thousands of years of cultural evolution. And when inspected with intellectually sympathy, they reveal an underlying logic that is quite defensible.

We generally do not blame things that do not care about blame and cannot respond to moral incentives. Similarly, we do not inflict pain upon things that do not care about or learn from pain. Punishment is often costly, and at minimum, it requires some time and energy. Therefore, punishing trees or lightning would be a misallocation of effort.

We inflict pain and scold but do not generally (and genuinely) blame scold-sensitive agents such as pigs or dogs, though we may sometimes blame dogs since they seem responsive to at least some kinds of provocations of guilt. And last, we blame morally sensitive agents because they are not only deterred (and manipulated) by punishment, but also by threats to sully their moral reputations. In fact, since moral reputations are crucially important for humans, potential damage to their reputation might be more effective at deterring crime and other misbehavior than potential punishment (such as fines or imprisonment).

Eradicating moral responsibility while moving toward a quarantine model in which criminal offenders are treated as “victims” of an infectious malady means eradicating the most effective, humane, and inexpensive way of generating prosocial behavior and deterring crime. It is also impossible, at least into the foreseeable future, since our moral emotions—disgust, anger, resentment, and so on—are as natural and insuppressible as our propensity to fall in love. One might as well try to compel humans to see a movie not as a moving image but as a series of 24 frames of film (i.e., 24 still photographs) per second.

This is not to assert that our practices are perfect or that we never blame or punish gratuitously. Just as people can fall in love vainly with celebrities and fictional characters, people can also blame oak trees for car crashes or stormy seas for boat accidents. This may be futile—the blame will not affect the oak tree or the stormy sea. But it is not inexplicable. Useful heuristics such as blame and punish morally sensitive agents if they cause you or your loved ones harm may overshoot their proper target, leading to blame for inanimate objects that cause harm. That moral blame is sometimes misguided, however, does not mean that the system is fatally flawed. The visual system is vulnerable to myriad illusions (errors)—but these do not illustrate that vision is unreliable or irrational.

More complex and difficult cases of blame also abound. Should we blame a violent sociopath for his behavior? What if he is utterly impervious to reputational concerns? Should we punish him? And if so, with what justification? I’ll turn to these interesting cases in a moment.

A free-will skeptic might grant that there is indeed a kind of logic to our everyday moral practices and to our criminal justice system. But ultimately these moral practices are still dependent upon free will, upon the ability to do otherwise, and libertarian free will, the only free will that allows for real choices, is an illusion. Thus, we can no longer justify these practices. They are to us what a religious ritual is to an atheist. We may respect their value to our ancestors; but we can longer believe in or endorse them.

Here, an analogy might be useful.

Imagine a tribe called the Gamura. The Gamura believe that the reason people must eat is that food contains spiritual energy called Looma which is vital for powering the soul and without which the soul would perish, killing the material body. When parents teach their young to eat, they say, “You must eat to get more Looma. That is why we eat.”

However, a few froward and naturally skeptical members of the tribe, after thinking carefully about the idea of Looma, become persuaded that it does not exist—it is a superstition passed from ignorant ancestors and accepted uncritically generation after generation. One particularly enthusiastic skeptic, bold after years of disbelief, declares, “My friends. We have discovered that Looma does not exist. It is make-believe. Nonsense. Nothing. And therefore, since Looma does not exist and does not power the soul, we do not need to eat.” The other skeptics agree, arguing that eating is based on a profound metaphysical mistake.

The error is easy to spot. The skeptics are right that Looma (libertarian free will) does not exist, but they are wrong that eating (moral responsibility) is based on a mistake—for the idea of Looma is not what caused the Gamura to eat. Natural predispositions took care of that. The idea of Looma arose merely to explain nutrition to people who were ignorant of the intricacies of biological and digestive processes such as anabolism and catabolism. And just as Looma is not necessary to recommend eating, libertarian free will is not necessary to recommend maintaining moral responsibility and punishment.

But what about cases in which the person we wish to blame or punish is clearly impervious to moral judgment? What if the person is a callous and mentally deranged sociopath like John Wayne Gacy? Perhaps the quarantine model is appropriate for these people since they lack anything resembling free will, are insensitive to threats of punishment, and are incapable of self-improvement. They are, as it were, wild, dangerous animals who need to be contained, but they should not be punished.

This inevitably raises the topic of the most controversial function of punishment: Retribution. Even those skeptics of free will who defend essential features of modern criminal justice systems, e.g., prisons and other punishments, often reject retributive punishment, finding the idea of punishing for revenge, even if a “sublimated” form of revenge, abhorrent and believing that true desert (or deservingness) is inconsistent with an absence of free will. No free will, no ultimate moral responsibility; therefore, no deservingness.

The desire for retribution almost certainly evolved because it deterred potential cheaters, exploiters, and free loaders. People enjoy punishing (or watching the punishment) of those who violate important social norms, which is likely why stories about punishment and revenge, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Tarantino’s Kill Bill have long exhilarated audiences. Such enjoyment can, like other pleasures, lead to excess and a kind of depraved lust for grisly torture or public humiliation. But when integrated into a modern criminal justice system, refined and pacified by the moderating influence of civilization, retribution can be a profoundly meaningful experience not just the for the immediate victims of a transgression, but for the entire community. As Gottfried Leibniz wrote of retributive punishment:

“…Hobbes and some others do not admit this punitive justice, which properly speaking is avenging justice…. but it always has some foundation in that fitness of things which gives satisfaction not only to the injured but also to the wise who see it; even as a beautiful piece of music, or again a good piece of architecture, satisfies cultivated minds.”

Retributive punishment may thus be like an aesthetic experience, a satisfaction that does not require a consequentialist justification. An opponent of retribution might answer that unlike an aesthetic experience, retribution causes pain and suffering; therefore, it requires a more persuasive rationale, especially if we accept that the callous sociopath did not choose his own traits or tendencies and is not ultimately responsible for his nature. My first instinct is to contend that most people (including me) do not care if a cold-hearted killer, say, Ted Bundy chose his own nature in some metaphysical realm before being born. (The idea of choosing one’s own self is absurd, of course.) Evil people exist. Evil people deserve to suffer if they harm innocent others. And their suffering, if caused by a responsible and moderate system of punishment, satisfies our legitimate longing for justice.

But consequentialist arguments are also available for the retributivist. The threat of retributive punishment deters potential criminals, which is undoubtably an important function of the criminal justice system. Therefore, even though a callous sociopath might be impervious to threats of punishment, his being punished might (1) deter other people who are morally sensitive agents; and (2) provide a meaningful form of justice for a community. The point, of course, is not that we should indulge an undisciplined lust for retaliation. Rather it is that retributive punishment, when practiced judiciously, provides a necessary satisfaction of the desire for justice. Libertarian free will is simply irrelevant.

CONCLUSION

Some prominent intellectuals have argued against free will and retributive punishment. Of these, Robert Sapolsky is perhaps the most famous and the most polemical. His Determined is an excellent example of scientific hubris, of “nothing but” reductionism and dictatorial determinism. Again and again, he writes (and contends in interviews) that humans are just meaningless biological machines, determined wholly by forces outside of their control:

“Maybe you’re deflated by the realization that part of your success in life is due to the fact that your face has appealing features. Or that your praiseworthy self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a fetus. That someone loves you because of, say, how their oxytocin receptors work. That you are the other machines don’t have meaning.”

Like many other intellectuals who embrace a crude form of scientism, he consistently compares modern beliefs and practices to superstitions and barbarisms, contrasting the darkness of our ancestral past with the promise of a scientifically enlightened future:

“The theme of the second half of this book is this: We’ve done it before. Over and over, in various domains, we’ve shown that we can subtract out a belief that actions are freely, willfully chosen, as we’ve become more knowledgeable, more reflective, more modern. And the roof has not caved in; society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan and that mothers of people with schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child.”

But humans are not meaningless machines; they are flesh and blood agents in a world replete with meaning—with sounds and colors, pains and pleasures, tragedies and triumphs. And the world is a dangerous place, threatened always by violence and disorder. Our forebears were ignorant of many things we take for granted. They were ignorant of evolution. They were ignorant of the brain. And they were ignorant of doctrines of determinism. But unlike some hyper-educated and affluent modern academics, they were not ignorant of evil and of the precariousness of life. They created and bequeathed various ideas and norms about morality and punishment because those ideas and norms helped them to survive. They were not always right, obviously. But we reject their “superstitions” at our peril.

Instead of railing against the everyday practices of ordinary people, intellectuals should seek to understand them. And instead of replacing the warm world of experience with a bloodless world of scientific abstractions, intellectuals should seek to understand the relation between the two. From a quiet, comfortable office, its windows opened to a cool breeze, we may think human behaviors and beliefs are absurd and that we are ultimately the playthings of forces beyond our control. But as soon as our spouse tells us to rake the yard or our dog leaves a pile of excrement on the floor, our elevated reflections on fate and determinism disappear, and we become participants again in a world untroubled by philosophy.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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