It’s clear that in accepting that free will is an illusion there’s a serious question about moral responsibility, and hence culpability. Does it make moral sense to exact retributive justice if the criminal’s choice was as thoroughly determined as my choice to have strawberry jam instead of marmalade on my breakfast toast? Harris points out that criminals are either more or less damaged, or else lack those psychological structures that prevent most of us from acting criminally. Either way, it’s basically the luck of the draw, of the confluence of genetics and environment. You can’t blame a person for developing cancer, for that too is the result of genetics and environment.
So how to deal with criminal actions? Recognise that people can change: obesity is caused by genetic and environmental factors, but changes in behaviour may reduce it. Thus, rehabilitation should always be attempted. If that requires removing the criminal from society, then do so, for however long it takes. Also, subtle and not so subtle changes in social norms change people’s behaviour: they affect the choices people make. Example: the reduction in drinking and driving. All choices are made within a context of available choices, so we may reduce crime by making undesirable choices difficult or impossible. For example, you can’t choose to shoot someone if you don’t have a gun.
Harris knows we can’t avoid the illusion of free will, but we can treat each other more humanely using the knowledge that free will is an illusion. He doesn’t ask or answer the more profound question of why we have that illusion. I think it’s because the illusion of the self requires it. We can’t experience ourselves as agents without it. Yet experiencing ourselves as agents is vital to our survival. Without it, we would be incapable of acting. We would merely respond. But I’m not sure exactly what I mean by that.
An essay worth reading and rereading. It makes you think. Just what you will think depends of course on factors over which you have no control whatsoever. ****
(1) Update 2025-07-29: By the same logic, we cannot show that any given choice was determined. Harris should have stopped his discussion right there. But. . . Besides, the attempt to distinguish free from determined choice also fails on neurological grounds. Our sensory inputs are processed at different rates, yet we experience them as happening in the correct order (which includes simultaneity). "Experience" means "be aware of", which in turn means that conscious experience is constructed by the brain to conform to reality well enough to enable survival long enough, most of the time, to reproduce. That's how natural selection works.
The self that decides is as much a construct of the brain as all the rest of the simulation that we experience as reality. It seems to me that this fact makes the question of free will pointless. To put it another way, it's a non-question, since (as Harris admits) there is no way of distinguishing between free and determined choice. The abstract argument that the universe is determined, and therefore our choices are determined misses the point. For the universe is also, per quantum mechanics, fundamentally unpredictable. Worse, it is also fundamentally inexplicable, for to explicate the past requires definitive knowledge of all the factors that determine any give event. Per quantum mechanics, definitive knowledge is impossible. So of we can neither distinguish free from determined choice post facto, nor predict it ante facto, what's the point of trying to prove that choice is free or determined?
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