The Free Will Objection
The Free Will Objection: Rethinking Choice and Responsibility
The most visceral objection to environmental theories of behavior is the free will objection: "But people choose their actions. They have free will. They could have done otherwise."
This article examines why this objection, though intuitive, may be scientifically unsound—and why abandoning the myth of pure rational choice doesn't eliminate responsibility but relocates it.
The Objection
The knowledge distillation model treats humans like machines. But humans aren't neural networks—they have consciousness, agency, and moral responsibility. People choose their actions, and they deserve to be held accountable for those choices.
This objection resonates because it aligns with our subjective experience. We feel like we choose. We feel the weight of decision. We experience what seems like deliberation.
But what if the feeling of choice is itself a product of the same system that generates the choice?
The Neuroscience of Decision
The Libet Experiments
Benjamin Libet's landmark experiments in the 1980s revealed something disturbing:
- Subjects were asked to make a simple choice—flex their wrist at any moment they chose
- Their brain activity was monitored via EEG
- The conscious awareness of "deciding" to move appeared several hundred milliseconds after the brain activity initiating the movement had begun
The brain had already "decided" before the subject experienced deciding. The feeling of choice appeared to be post-hoc—a narrative the brain constructed about a decision already made.
The Haynes Studies
John-Dylan Haynes extended this work using fMRI:
We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity... up to 10 seconds before it enters awareness. (Soon et al., 2008, Nature Neuroscience)
Ten seconds. An eternity in neural time. The "decision" was made—encoded in brain patterns—long before the subject experienced making it.
What does this suggest about the "choice" to commit a crime, express anger, or engage in any behavior?
Malcolm Gladwell and the Adaptive Unconscious
In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Malcolm Gladwell opens with psychologist John Gottman's "Love Lab":
Gottman can predict whether a marriage will last with 90 percent accuracy—after watching a couple for only fifteen minutes... He has discovered that there are patterns to our behavior, signatures and rhythms in the way we all have relationships... He's learned to read those patterns so well that he can take a fifteen-minute slice of a conversation and predict whether a couple will still be married fifteen years later.
This is the essence of the problem: Our behavior has patterns. Those patterns are readable, predictable, encoded in ways we don't consciously control. Gottman isn't reading the couple's decisions—he's reading the patterns their decisions flow through.
Gladwell introduces the concept of thin-slicing:
The adaptive unconscious... is a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. It's capable of... making very quick judgments based on very little information.
But here's what Gladwell doesn't fully confront: If our judgments are made by an "adaptive unconscious" that processes information below awareness, then what exactly is the "I" that supposedly "chooses"?
The Illusion of the Decider
The Narrative Self
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's split-brain research revealed that the left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter"—constantly generating explanations for behaviors it didn't initiate:
When the right hemisphere (controlling the left hand) was shown an instruction to pick up an object, and the patient's left hand picked it up, the left hemisphere (which handles language and hadn't seen the instruction) would immediately generate a plausible explanation: "I wanted to grab that."
The explanation was false. The left hemisphere had no access to why the action occurred. But it generated a confident narrative anyway.
This is what we may call "free will": the interpreter module generating post-hoc narratives about decisions made by processes it cannot access.
The Experience of Deliberation
When we experience deliberation—the sense of weighing options before choosing—what is actually occurring?
One hypothesis: Multiple neural systems generate candidate actions. These compete for expression. The competition feels like "deliberation." The winner gets expressed, and the interpreter module generates a narrative: "I weighed my options and chose X."
But the "I" that experienced choosing may not have been the system that determined the outcome.
The "But I've Changed" Objection
Even if behavior is initially learned environmentally, I can consciously override my patterns. I've worked on my anger / addiction / anxiety. I chose to change.
This is a sophisticated objection. But consider:
- What prompted the change? Usually an environmental event: a therapist (new model for observation), a crisis (environmental shock), a book or experience (new information input).
- What was the change process? Typically exposure to new patterns—therapy provides new behavioral models; recovery groups provide new social scripts; meditation provides new attentional patterns.
- What maintained the change? Usually continued environmental support: ongoing therapy, maintained social connections, restructured environment.
The "choice to change" is itself environmentally triggered, environmentally supported, and environmentally maintained. It's not a spontaneous act of will emerging from nowhere—it's the system responding to new inputs.
This doesn't diminish the achievement of change. It relocates credit from the mythical autonomous self to the real system of environmental interactions.
Relocating Responsibility
The Fear
People fear that abandoning free will eliminates responsibility. If no one truly "chooses," then:
- Criminals aren't "responsible" for crimes
- Achievement doesn't merit praise
- The moral fabric unravels
The Response
Responsibility doesn't disappear—it distributes.
Traditional Model:
- Individual commits harm → Individual is responsible → Punish individual
Environmental Model:
- Developmental environment shapes individual → Individual expresses learned patterns → Individual + environment share distributed responsibility
This doesn't mean "no one is responsible." It means more people (and systems) are responsible:
- The individual for their actions (they are still the proximate cause)
- The caregivers who provided behavioral models
- The institutions that shaped the environment
- The society that permitted the conditions
Responsibility expands rather than contracts.
The Implications
Under the distributed model:
For the individual: You are not solely to blame, but you are part of the causal chain. You are responsible for seeking new environments that can retrain your patterns, even if you're not responsible for the original training.
For society: We are responsible for the environments we create. If those environments produce harmful behavioral patterns, we share responsibility for the resulting harms. Investment in prevention becomes a moral imperative.
For intervention: Punishment addresses only one node in a distributed causal network. It may produce compliance through fear but doesn't retrain patterns. Effective intervention addresses multiple nodes: individual support, environmental restructuring, community development.
The Practical Test
Here's a practical way to evaluate the free will claim:
Prediction Test: If behavior is freely chosen, it should be fundamentally unpredictable. Genuine choice means the outcome isn't determined by prior causes.
But behavior is remarkably predictable:
- ACE scores predict adult outcomes with striking accuracy
- Attachment patterns in infancy predict adult relationship patterns
- Childhood environment predicts criminal behavior better than genetic markers
If behavior were truly "free," this predictability wouldn't exist. The fact that developmental environment predicts adult behavior demonstrates that behavior flows from causes, not from uncaused choice.
The Compatibilist Escape
Some argue for compatibilism: free will is compatible with determinism because "free will" just means "acting according to one's own desires without external coercion."
This definition is fine as far as it goes—but it abandons the folk concept of free will that underlies moral judgment:
- When we blame someone for "choosing" wrong, we typically mean they could have chosen otherwise
- Compatibilist free will doesn't give us that—it only says the person acted according to their desires
- But their desires were shaped by environment they didn't choose
Compatibilism may save the word "free will" but doesn't save the concept that underlies retributive punishment.
The Deeper Question
Perhaps the question isn't whether free will exists but whether the concept serves us:
Does believing in libertarian free will:
- Improve our ability to predict behavior? No—environmental models predict better
- Improve our ability to change behavior? No—environmental interventions work better than willpower
- Improve social outcomes? Unclear—it may justify punishment but not prevention
Does believing in environmental determination:
- Improve prediction? Yes
- Improve intervention? Yes—it suggests what levers to pull
- Improve social outcomes? Possibly—it motivates prevention over punishment
The question shifts from "Is free will true?" to "Is belief in free will useful?" And the answer appears to be: less useful than we assumed.
Conclusion
The free will objection is intuitive because we experience what feels like choice. But:
- Neuroscience suggests the experience of choice may be post-hoc narrative, not causal agency
- Behavioral predictability from developmental environment suggests behavior flows from causes, not uncaused choice
- The "choice to change" is itself environmentally triggered and supported
Abandoning libertarian free will doesn't eliminate responsibility—it distributes it across the causal network. This distribution suggests:
- Individual intervention alone is insufficient
- Environmental prevention is necessary
- Retributive punishment addresses only one node in a distributed causal system
We may not "choose" in the metaphysical sense that underlies moral judgment. But we can create environments that produce different behavioral patterns—and that is where our collective agency lies.
See Also
References
- Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown.
- Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529-539.
- Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J., & Haynes, J.-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11(5), 543-545.
- Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who's in charge? Free will and the science of the brain. Ecco.
- Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press.