What is your opinion on the apparent “growing chorus of academic philosophers” who argue that free will doesn’t exist?
Results of a 2020 PhilPapers Survey showed that 51.9% of academic philosophers believe in physicalism.
What Philosophers Believe: What Philosophers Believe: Results from the 2020 PhilPapers Survey - Daily Nous
Free Will Skepticism
In 2021, philosophy professors Daniel C. Dennet and Gregg D. Caruso published debatingfreewill.com and Caruso published the book Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice in the same year.
A review of the book on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews provides an insight:
Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: Challenging Retributive Justice.
Elizabeth Shaw, Derk Pereboom, and Gregg D. Caruso have compiled a volume that centralizes a question of great philosophical and practical importance – what is the relationship between skeptical views about free will and criminal punishment? It provides an excellent new resource for anyone who finds some variety of free will skepticism appealing (or troubling), and thus feels a looming threat to retributive justification for our modern criminal justice system.
…
While there are a variety of ways that we might understand the motivation for free will skepticism and its ultimate scope, the majority of contributors here accept something akin to Pereboom’s version. For those unfamiliar with the position, it is a relatively cautious variety of skepticism. According to Pereboom, the troubles for traditional success theories of free will and moral responsibility suggest that, at best, we have no good reason to think that we ever have the kind of freedom needed to make us morally responsible and deserving of praise and blame in the basic (non-consequentialist) sense. In other words, the assumption that we sometimes genuinely deserve backward-looking, retributive blame for our actions is unfounded. And, in light of the significant harms associated with this kind of blame and its attendant practices (perhaps foremost among them, punishment) we ought to take seriously the skeptical position that they are in fact never truly deserved.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: Challenging Retributive JusticeBook: Cambridge University Press, 2019
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/free-will-skepticism-in-law-and-society/3B87F746DF411A00EBE4C2AF7E270760
An excerpt from an article in the Guardian provides a further insight:
(2021) The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?
By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces (plus maybe a little quantum randomness). “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts (DebatingFreeWill.com), a collection of dialogues with his fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett, “it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.” Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.
For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified.
Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.” Indeed some psychological research, he points out, suggests that people believe in free will partly because they want to justify their appetite for retribution. “What seems to happen is that people come across an action they disapprove of; they have a high desire to blame or punish; so they attribute to the perpetrator the degree of control [over their own actions] that would be required to justify blaming them.”
Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.
I’ve been a defender of free will since 2006 through the Dutch critical blog Zielenknijper.com and I’ve followed the “free will abolishment movement” from up close.
There is a growing movement that believes that human behavior can be reduced to brain chemistry and that there is no free will or guilt. According to this movement, criminal law should ideally be replaced by preventive measures through psychiatric science.
Prominent professors in the Netherlands proposed to already replace the criminal prosecution for young adults (<21 years), stating that young criminals should not be punished and should instead be transferred to forensic psychiatry. The idea: “The criminals are not yet fully grown mentally and deserve psychiatric help.”
One of the primary goals of the movement is to replace retributive justice with (pharmaceutical money funded) forensic psychiatry. It has been going on for decades and some prominent professors are all-in to make it a reality and psychiatry has made progress in all these years. For the pharmaceutical industry it concerns a trillion USD growth potential.
Would it be good to replace criminal law with forensic psychiatry?
What would happen when people start to believe that there is no guilt, and that people are not responsible for crime, and that criminals instead should be submitted to psychiatric care?
It will effectuate something in human interaction.
Preventive psychiatric measures are by definition about prosecuting people on the basis of vague suspicions and not on the basis of facts. It will cause people to lose the basic dignity as a human being (the Presumption of innocence) before they have committed a crime, so that they will commit a crime faster.
When vague suspicion based prosecution becomes effective in society it will put some people at risk while they did not commit a crime. In a conflict situation, it is logical that the opposing party can concretize the requirement for preventive psychiatric measures by which the person affected has lost a reason to not commit a crime. The measure for a crime that he or she did not commit has been determined beforehand. The dignity as a human was already gone. (psychiatric disorders/treatments are highly stigmatizing)
Criminal behavior is a potential, so when people come to believe that it is caused by a brain disease that they themselves cannot be blamed for, they will commit a crime faster.
Why Free Will Skepticism Wins
The foundation of the free will skepticism movement is an attack on free will by denouncing it as an unjustified belief.
The people who make the decisions (legislators and people working in the criminal justice system) will ultimately have to make their decisions based on an evaluation of the validity of a belief in free will.
Why should the interests of a criminal be prioritized over the desires of victims for retribution or the need to set societal examples of good and bad behavior?
It will ultimately come down to abolishing a belief in free will.
When lawmakers are presented with the prospect of preventing crime, and when that idea is supported and promoted by the scientific community, it becomes difficult to argue against replacing the retributive justice system with forensic psychiatry.
Despite the financial interests of the legal profession, the pharmaceutical industry + psychiatry + the idea of the ability to prevent crime ultimately gains the upper hand. There is simply much more money involved for them and they can paint a picture of a better world.
When individuals are unable to defend free will, they will likely put their trust in the scientific community. This is a risk-free choice versus taking responsibility for defending free will which may explain why psychiatry has been winning so easily, while from the outlook, Free Will Skepticism may appear questionable.
At question:
Why would anyone in the criminal justice system want to defend free will?
Will people who work in the criminal justice system be able to hold on to a belief in free will? They have a much tougher time. They may not have a philosophical background and may merely be confronted with the reality of crime within the scope of their profession.
When you are a judge and are confronted with horrific crimes on a daily basis, at some point in time it may be logical that you wish for a mere chance to be able to prevent the crimes. The abolishing of a belief in free will may then seem worth the chance. A multi-trillion USD science+business is eager to take over responsibility and control.
A mere plausible philosophical consideration may have a hard time to defend free will at the moment that a hint of a chance of prevention presents itself as a choice.
No one can blame someone who chooses to abolish a belief in free will in favor of a replacement of the retributive justice system with preventative measures. On the contrary, holding on to a belief in free will on the basis of a philosophical consideration bears a heavy responsibility.
What is your opinion on the free will skepticism movement and the corresponding practical implications such as an abolishing of a belief in moral responsibility and the replacement of retributive Justice with forensic psychiatry?
