Moral Psychology: Free Will and Moral Responsibility

2.1: Seduced by Tradition

Gazzaniga’s essay provides a useful elementary overview of the ways in which physics has moved away from Laplace’s vision of determinism and how the sciences in general have moved to a more nuanced appreciation of the relationships between multiple explanatory levels—subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, organismic, personal, social. He quotes an apt observation by Philip Anderson (1972): “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.” Neuroscientists, he says, have been slow to appreciate the idea of emergence and often persist in trying to couch their interpretations in the language of what I have called greedy reductionism (Dennett, 1995, pp. 81–82) as contrasted with good reductionism (which amounts, in Gazzaniga’s terms, to no magic). I would add that an even greater foible of the neuroscientists is their uncritical reliance on the obsolete categories of prescientific traditions, what Wilfrid Sellars (1962) called the manifest image. In fact the point that emerges most forcefully for me from Gazzaniga’s essay is not what he intended to demonstrate, but nevertheless something he should be happy to have shown, because it is an important first step in clearing away the ancient presuppositions that make the free will issue so resistant to dissolution: The traditional ways of thinking about these phenomena —about decisions, about selves or minds, about conscious control —are relentlessly seductive. Even after we have glimpsed and appreciated better perspectives thanks to advances in science, we find ourselves being drawn back to the old habits of thought, trying to find, in our modern scientific picture of the brain, our dear old friends from long ago: the ego, the immortal soul, impervious to causal influence, wellspring of choices so free that even God could not predict them in advance. They aren’t there to be found, of course, and Gazzaniga does a good job of sketching what is in our brains instead of these items, but much more important, they 2.1 Seduced by Tradition Daniel C. Dennett 76 Daniel C. Dennett don’t have to be there for us to be agents with the sort of freedom that is a prerequisite for moral responsibility, for genuine authorship of our deeds and misdeeds. Many scientists are still succumbing to the temptation to assume—for it is never carefully argued for—that if these antiquated notions are illusory (if “free will is an illusion” as so many of them put it), then so is our moral agency. This theme in recent public pronouncements by leading scientists, especially neuroscientists, is deplorable, and Gazzaniga has attempted to expose the flaws in this thinking: “In what follows, while the goal will be to challenge the very concept of free will, the concept of personal responsibility remains untouched. The idea outlined below is that a mechanistic concept of how the mind works eliminates the need for the concept of free will.” Gazzaniga inadvertently shows, however, how nearly irresistible the categories are, by lapsing into them himself. Consider this, from his final summary: “The course of action taken appears to us as a matter of ‘choice,’ but the fact is, it is the result of a particular emergent mental state being selected by the complex interacting surrounding milieu.” That phrase, “but the fact is,” suggests that the “particular emergent mental state being selected” is not a choice, especially not a free choice, and Gazzaniga underlines this suggestion with his closing line: “Our interpreter then claims we freely made a choice.” The almost-invited inference is that our interpreter in the left hemisphere fools us, convinces us that we made a free choice when in fact we didn’t. This needs to be challenged. There are indeed times when we fool ourselves—when our interpreter fools us if you like—into thinking we are making a free choice when in fact we are being manipulated by some other agent, or when the “complex interacting surrounding milieu” is seriously deranged by delusion or other cognitive pathology. When, on the other hand, we have our wits about us, and are not massively misinformed or otherwise manipulated, then there is no important sense in which the outcome of all the interactions in the many levels or layers of “machinery” is not a free choice. That’s what a free choice is! It’s the undistorted, unhindered outcome of a cognitive/ conative/emotive process of exquisite subtlety, capable of canvassing the options with good judgment and then...