Free Will, Determinism, and Responsibility

For this session, we'll be reading and debating two papers on Determinism: P.F Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment", and Robert Sapolsky's "Life without Free Will"

Most of us operate with a "folk" concept of free will: the sense that when we choose, we could genuinely have done otherwise, and that we — not the prior causes acting on us — originate our actions, which earns us deserved praise and blame. Determinism threatens this by holding that prior causes (genes, upbringing, brain states) that predate our birth produce every choice, leaving no room for that kind of ultimate authorship. Indeterminism doesn't obviously rescue it either, since randomness fails to give us control.

In "Freedom and Resentment" (1962), Strawson argues that the debate rests on a mistaken framing. Instead of asking whether determinism holds, he points to our "reactive attitudes" — resentment, gratitude, indignation, forgiveness — that we direct at one another in ordinary life. These attitudes constitute how we treat each other as persons; they don't function as conclusions drawn from a metaphysical theory, so discovering that determinism holds cannot rationally dismantle them. Responsibility lives in this web of attitudes, not in any libertarian metaphysics — and stepping out of it entirely remains no real option for us.

Sapolsky's "Life Without Free Will" (a précis of Determined) takes the opposite path: he accepts determinism fully and concludes that the folk concept simply fails. Everything we do traces to biology and environment we never chose, so no one ever truly deserves blame or credit. The upshot, for him: we should dismantle retributive blame and punishment and rebuild our moral and legal systems around prevention and a public-health model — much as we stopped blaming people for epilepsy.