THE CITY

Winter 2015
PROBLEM #1: FREE WILL
The New Atheists are up front about our lack of free will. Sam
Harris states it explicitly: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are
simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge
from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we
exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we
have.” 2 (Ironically, the publisher of Harris’s book is Free Press.) Or
consider this example from the website of the Center for Naturalism.
From a naturalistic perspective . . . [h]uman beings act the
way they do because of the various influences that shape
them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or
environmental. We do not have the capacity to act outside
the causal connections that link us in every respect to the rest
of the world. This means we do not have what many people
think of as free will, being able to cause our behavior without
our being fully caused in turn. 3
Not being free has devastating implications for other important
areas of life. It impacts things as important as ethics. Consider the
following, again from the Center for Naturalism.
From a naturalistic perspective, behavior arises out of the
interaction between individuals and their environment, not
from a freely willing self. . . . Therefore individuals don’t
bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in
the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances
both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done
other than what they did. Nevertheless, we must still hold
individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and
sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within
the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how
people learn to act ethically. 4
The question is this: how can we hold anyone responsible if they
are not responsible for their actions and “couldn’t have done other
than what they did”? This seems hopelessly confused. Furthermore,
2
Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 5.
3
http://www.naturalism.org/worldview-naturalism/tenets-of-naturalism accessed
November 9, 2015.
4
Ibid.
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