Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We’d be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn’t freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be morally responsible for that choice. So why bother? In part because of the perceived ethical hazards I’ve mentioned, the same philosophers and scientists who are happy to reject God, an immaterial soul, and even absolute morality, cannot bring themselves to embrace free will. “Tell it like is” atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for example, insist that we have the kind of free will that would make us genuinely morally responsible for our actions. (Though it’s possible that Dawkins pulls back here…) One well known philosopher—the University of Haifa’s Saul Smilansky—though a free will skeptic himself, argues that we should not broadcast the truth of his position to the public at large. Why, you ask? Because, well… see here. It appears that philosophers, scientists, and most everyone else regard positions that deny free will much like the wife of the Bishop of Worcester regarded Darwinism: “My dear, let us hope it isn’t true! But if it is, let us pray it does not become widely known!” Until recently, however, there was no empirical support whatsoever for this pessimism about a widespread denial of free will. Then came the 2008 study by Volhs and Schooler in Psychological Science—a study that was pounced upon by the popular press. (See here for one example.) Briefly, the authors gave two groups tasks which featured opportunities to cheat, including one where they could pocket some extra money for doing so. The first group was given an excerpt from Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis which stated that scientists had denounced the notion of free will. The control group read another excerpt that did not refer to free will. The subjects in the first group were more likely to cheat on their tasks. The authors end their paper by asking: “Does the belief that forces outside the self determine behavior drain the motivation to resist the temptation to cheat, inducing a “why bother” mentality?…Or perhaps denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.” Does this mean that many of the fears about a world without free will are justified? I think the answer is no.

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