Free Will and Society I here present a loose collection of thoughts, on free will and society, for your

consideration. I start with what might be thought a continuum of cases. The rst two are science-ctional. Case 1: In the rst case, neuroscience has advanced to the point at which it is possible to control someones thoughtsand thereby his or her actionsin very detailed ways, by manipulating his or her brain. You volunteer for an experiment, in which the scientists are testing the latest technology. They equip your skull with whatever gizmos they need to control your thoughts remotely, and send you out to live your day. In the course of your day, you insult your best friends spouse, cheat on your taxes, and vote for a known crook. Now, as it turns out, these are things that you were very likely to have done, anyway, on your own. But, in the current circumstances, the neuroscientists were at the helm, orchestrating your thoughts and causing you to do what you do. Case 2: The second case, also science-ctional, uses different technology. In this case, you are not programmed by neuroscientists, but instead conditioned by the World State, as in Huxleys novel, Brave New World. You are, from conception, conditioned through a wide variety of means to take your place happily in a stratied society. Suppose you are a Beta. You play a secondary role, a role of lesser power and lesser responsibility, supporting the Alphas and the Alpha pluses. You are, as you were conditioned to be, so pleased to play this secondary role. You neednt make any of those hard decisions that the Alphas have to makewhich are surely beyond your pretty abilitiesor wear the uncomfortable clothing that the Alphas have to wear. You are content in in your place,

Pamela Hieronymi, 2012

and wouldnt have it any other way. (I am especially fond of the Betas, as I take them to be a type for a certain type of the feminine.) Case 3: The third case is like the second, except that there is no one at the helmno World State, no nation-state, no organization, no corporation, nothing that could be thought, even in a extended sense, to make decisions. Instead, the invisible hand of social and cultural forces shapes you and adapts your preferences so that you are, again, ever so pleased to take a secondary, supporting role. Case 4: In the fourth and nal case, the forces of society and culture are replaced by those of the physical sciences. Whatever it was that the neuroscientists were manipulating, in the rst case, is, presumably, a matter of electro-chemical goings-on, and, in this fourth case, we will assume that those electro-chemical states and events stand in the sort of law-like relations we have come to expect of macro-physical phenomena. We assume the electro-chemical events in the brain obey ordinary physical laws, linking past to future. So, instead of being directly controlled by the manipulation of neuroscientists, for their purposes, the events in your brain unfold as they are determined to do, by the blind and purposeless operation of nature. Whereas, in the rst case, the scientists determine your thought and action, in this case, earlier states of your brain do soearlier states that were, in turn, determined by earlier states, which were, in turn, determined by earlier states, reaching back long before you ever considered your present decision. Each of these four cases raises questions about human freedom and responsibility. They raise interestingly different, though interestingly related, questions. It seems pretty clear that, in the rst case, you are not free when you insult your friends spouse, cheat on your taxes, or vote for the crook. Even though these are the sort of thing

that you are likely to have done, your doing it, in this case, was not your own doing. And so it seems you are not responsible for your behavior. The responsibility instead accrues to the puppet-master neuroscientists. Some would say the same, in the nal case: if our doings are simply the unfolding of prior states of the physical world, if the brain events underlying our thoughts and behavior are themselves simply and inevitably generated by forces of nature, then we are neither free nor responsible. Others deny thisthat is, others take the very counter-intuitive position that, even if the brain events underlying our thoughts and actions are the inevitable out-workings of the physical world, we are nonetheless still free and responsible. I count myself a member of this latter camp. I will not here undertake the task of making it seem palatable. I will instead simply note that thinking that you are responsible in the nal case does not commit you to thinking you are responsible in the rst case, with the neuroscientists. It is one thing for what you do to have causes. It is another thing for what you do to be manipulated by another for his or her own purposes. In the latter case, responsibility is transferred to this other locus of agency. But I would like to focus on the middle two cases, which I nd fascinating. In the Brave New World case, there is another locus of agency, of sorts, to which responsibility might be transferredthe world statea decision-making body that controls your preferences and your decisions for its own explicit purposes. Brave New World is science-ctional, but decision-making bodiesgovernments, corporations, organizations that manipulate our preferences, choices, and behaviors for their own purposes are actual, not ctional. These bodies are surely responsible for their actions and their

outcomes, morally, and ought to be accountable for their actions and outcomes, legally and politically. And yet, something worth calling responsibility still accrues to the Betas. As a Beta, you still make choices for reasons; you still assess the worth of this or that and come to conclusions. It still seems apt for someone to confront you about your ready adoption of your secondary place, claiming that it shows a lack of self-respect, suggesting that it is unseemly of you to consistently value the needs, interests, and projects of the Alphas more than your own. You are accountable, answerable, for your on-going commitment to the status-quo. You would be in bad faith if, in response to the challenge, you simply said, Well, you see, these are the preferences that have been instilled in me. This is the way I have been made. That is all there is to it. You really should be talking to my Maker, if you think things should change. Your answer must instead take a very different form: you must say something like, No, it is not unseemly for me to take a secondary place; I am a Beta, after all, and it is appropriate for Betas to take a supporting role. It is beautiful and tting for us. And, in giving that answer, you would have engaged a kind of interaction that characterizes at least one aspect of responsible human agency. You are, in this way responsible for yourself, even though your self has been shaped by anothereven though we can admit that it is not your fault that you have the preferences you do, and that you could not have reasonably been expected to have resisted. The third case is trickier yet. You are, again, answerable, as in Brave New World. But, in the third case, you are not controlled by another agentthere is no organized decisionmaking body orchestrating your formation for its own purposes. And so there is no other agent to whom the remainder of responsibility might transfer. There is no congress, no

CEO, no board of directors, not even a dictator, monarch, or Pope. Rather, cultural and social forces emerge from the admittedly systematic interaction of the actions of many. The systematicity has its logicwe may well be able to say who benets from the cultural shaping, and how that benet feeds back into the system to perpetuate itself. But (I am stipulating) there is no one, no body, who can be said to represent anything like a collective, decision-making, institution. These systematic effects are not, strictly speaking, intended by anyone, individual or collective. And so, while we can shift moral, legal, and political responsibility to the World State, expecting it to clean up the mess it made, in this third case we lack an agent. And yet these cultural, social forces are not simply brute physical forces; our relation to them is not like our relation to disease or natural disasters. We have obligations of benecence, individual and collective, to clean up the messes made by natural disasters and to help those stricken by disease, insofar as we are able. In fact, we ought to expand our knowhow and advance in our technology to serve these goals, and, as we do, our obligations likewise expand, to meet our ability. But the cultural forces that have shaped us, unlike these natural forces, are, in some sense, our doingdoing of all of us who constitute the societyeven though these cultural forces are not our intentional doing. Because they are our doing, we are not simply discharging obligations of benecence when we address them. We are, instead, doing something like addressing our collective psychological baggage, whose weight is borne very unequally. What we lack, in addressing them, is not knowledge or technology, but rather understanding, insight, and will. Here ends my open-ended collection of thoughts.