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Debate

Are We Free? Free Will in an Age of Neuroscience

None of us chose our genes, our upbringing or the brain we decide with – no one disputes that. Can we still act freely – and can anyone deserve blame or punishment for what they do?

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and his colleagues asked volunteers to flex their wrist whenever they felt the urge and to note on a fast-moving clock when they first became aware of it. A build-up of brain activity, the “readiness potential”, began several hundred milliseconds earlier – evidence, many concluded, that the brain decides before we do. In 2004 the brain researcher Wolf Singer wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that nobody can be anything other than what he is, and urged the courts to review their practice; that year he and Gerhard Roth were among the authors of a “Manifesto” on brain research, and Jürgen Habermas was one of many who objected. Since then Aaron Schurger, Jacobo Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene (2012) have argued that the readiness potential may reflect random neural fluctuations rather than a decision already taken. Yet the question has returned: in Determined (2023) the biologist Robert Sapolsky argues that there is no free will and that no one deserves blame or punishment, while the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell defends free will in Free Agents (2023) as a product of evolution. At stake are praise and blame, the criminal law and how we understand ourselves.

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Positions

Life without free will

Spinoza held that people think themselves free because they are conscious of their desires but ignorant of their causes; a stone set in motion, he wrote, would believe it moved of its own accord if it could think. Galen Strawson’s “Basic Argument” (1994) adds that to be truly responsible for what we do, we would have to be responsible for how we are – the cause of ourselves, which nothing can be, whether or not determinism is true. Derk Pereboom (Living Without Free Will, 2001) and Gregg Caruso conclude that no one deserves blame or punishment in the basic sense in which suffering would be just. Society is not left unprotected: as we may quarantine carriers of a disease who are not to blame for it, we may restrain dangerous offenders, but no more than safety requires; Caruso’s “public health–quarantine model” (2021) puts prevention and the social causes of crime first. Sapolsky traces every action back through brain, hormones, childhood, genes and culture – none of them chosen.

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Freedom within causation

Compatibilists hold that freedom means acting on one’s own motives without compulsion, not being exempt from causes. Chrysippus compared the agent to a cylinder that, once pushed, rolls according to its own shape; Hobbes defined liberty as the absence of external impediments, and for Hume it is “a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will”, which belongs to everyone “who is not a prisoner and in chains”. Frankfurt’s cases (1969) describe someone who decides on his own while a hidden intervener stands ready to make him act anyway: he could not have done otherwise and is still responsible. In 1971 Frankfurt located free will in our capacity to endorse or reject our own desires – the unwilling addict lacks it. Dennett argued that evolution has given us the varieties of free will “worth wanting”: the capacities to deliberate, foresee and respond to reasons; in Just Deserts (2021) he defended holding one another responsible against Caruso. In German, Peter Bieri’s Das Handwerk der Freiheit (2001) gave this view its classic form.

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Responsibility as a human practice

P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) starts not from determinism but from the attitudes that make up our dealings with one another – resentment, gratitude, indignation, love. We suspend them when someone acted by accident or under duress, and take an “objective” stance towards small children or the severely mentally ill. A general thesis about causation would not show that everyone is in such a condition, and giving up these attitudes altogether is not a real option for us: their framework, Strawson wrote, is “given with the fact of human society” and neither calls for nor permits an external justification. In a similar spirit Habermas (2004) argued against Singer and Roth that the perspective of participants who give one another reasons cannot be replaced by the observer’s perspective of brain research. Critics doubt that attitudes settle what people deserve: Gary Watson (1987) pointed to Robert Harris, a murderer whose cruelty provokes outrage – until one learns of the abuse he suffered as a child.

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Genuinely open alternatives

Libertarians – in the metaphysical, not the political sense – hold that freedom requires a genuinely open future and is incompatible with determinism. Kant took our actions, as appearances in nature, to be fully determined, yet held that as rational beings we must think of ourselves as free: because we know what we ought to do, we judge that we can – “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same”. Reid ascribed to agents an “active power” to cause their own actions; James called compatibilism – “soft determinism” – a “quagmire of evasion”, and Sartre held that we are “condemned to be free”. Peter van Inwagen’s “consequence argument” (1983) gives the view its modern form: if determinism is true, our acts follow from the laws of nature and the remote past, and neither is up to us. Robert Kane locates freedom in “self-forming actions” in which indeterminacy in the brain leaves a hard choice open; Timothy O’Connor defends agent causation, in which the person herself is the cause. Critics reply that indeterminism adds chance, not control.

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Agency as a biological capacity

Some neuroscientists answer the sceptics on their own ground. Libet-style experiments, they note, studied arbitrary movements with nothing at stake. Schurger and colleagues (2012) modelled the readiness potential as random neural noise accumulating to a threshold; Uri Maoz, Liad Mudrik and colleagues (2019) found it before arbitrary choices but not before deliberate decisions about donations; and a study from John-Dylan Haynes’s group in Berlin (2016) showed that people can still cancel a movement until about 200 milliseconds before it starts. Kevin Mitchell (Free Agents, 2023) argues that the question belongs to biology rather than physics: living things are agents acting on their own behalf, nervous systems evolved to model the world and select actions by what they mean for the organism, and since physics does not fix the future in every detail, it is the organism’s goals, beliefs and reasons that settle what it does. Freedom on this view is real but limited – and can be strengthened or undermined.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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