Name: 【TEDx】The dark side of free will | Gregg Caruso | TEDxChemungRiver
Uploaded: 2016-10-01T23:57:15.000Z
Duration: 10 min 12 s
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Adverbs of manner

I have been thinking a lot lately about the following question:

The second conditional

what would happen if we came to disbelieve in free will?

What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships,

For example, would giving up the belief in free will have dire consequences

Or would it rather have a humanizing effect

freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will?

is that the belief in free will rather than being a good thing

actually has a dark side and that we'd be better off without it.

Many people fear that life without free will lead to nihilism,

there'd be no reason to go on, or that it would undermine morality.

Or that we will just let criminals run free

since there'd be no moral responsibility.

But I would like to paint a different picture for you today.

It begins with the idea of free will skepticism.

So I am a free will skeptic. I deny the existence of free will.

Free will skeptics maintain that who we are, what we do,

is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control,

we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense

that is the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame.

Historically, there have been a number of philosophical and scientific arguments

and I've promoted these arguments in my own work,

but I'm not here today to try to convince you that you lack free will.

I'm actually interested in a slightly different question:

what would happen if we came to accept this perspective?

What would happen, practically speaking, if we came to disbelieve in free will?

Would it be, on the whole, a good thing or a bad thing?

I am optimistic about the prospects of life without free will.

is not only possible but that it's preferable.

and sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example,

like those based on the model of retribution or just deserts

preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified.

I will say a little bit more about these in a moment.

I maintain that life without free will may actually be good for our well being,

since it could tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger,

that's corrosive to our relationships and to our social policies.

So to better understand the dark side of free will,

some recent empirical work in moral political physiology.

What this work has done has actually shown

that there is a number of interesting and potentially troubling correlations

and people's other moral religious and political beliefs.

In particular, what they found is that free will beliefs are correlated

with higher levels of religiosity, punitiveness,

and a number of conservative beliefs in attitude,

such as just world belief and right wing authoritarianism.

I am only going to focus on two of these today,

that is the connection between the belief in free will and punitiveness,

and that between the belief in free will and what's called just world belief.

What this research has shown is that where believe in free will is strong,

that is people are more likely to call for harsher forms of punishment

And this makes sense: if you think people possess free will,

then you believe they justly deserve to be praised and blamed for their actions.

if they engage in an immoral act, you want to see them get their just deserts, right?

It's very close to a notion of retribution:

you want to inflict harm on them for the harm they've inflicted on others.

But the downside of this is, again, you can create a moral anger

that's destructive to our relationships with others and to our social policies.

belief in free will is relatively strong in the United States.

In fact, it's built right into the mythology

of the rugged individual, the self-made man, the causa Sui,

the person that can pull themselves up from the bootstraps

and overcome all of their life circumstances.

But because we are so committed to this belief,

we are also a relatively punitive society.

the United States makes up about 5% of the world's population,

yet it incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners.

I will say that again because it's a rather startling statistic:

we make up a relatively small sliver of the world's population, about 5%,

but we house and imprison 25% of the world's prisoners.

I don't think it's controversial to say our criminal justice system is broken.

It is not working, not making us safer, it's not reducing crime,

it's, by no means, achieving our desired social goals,

and it is not reducing the rate of recidivism, that is repeat crime.

But just perhaps, if we adopt the skeptical perspective,

we might be able to adopt more effective, and more humane policies.

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【TEDx】The dark side of free will | Gregg Caruso | TEDxChemungRiver

perspective

approach

sense

people