Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend.

In the same paragraph, Dennett writes that “a good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he is really good enough to DESERVE winning, will probably have plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage” (my emphasis). This is one step above believing that God invented poverty to punish sinners.

Does behavior genetics disprove free will? Not on its own—as a familiar theme, genes are about potentials and vulnerabilities, not inevitabilities, and the effects of most of these genes on behavior are relatively mild. Nonetheless, all these effects on behavior arise from genes you didn’t choose, interacting with a childhood you didn’t choose.[48]

This seamless stream shows why bad luck doesn’t get evened out, why it amplifies instead.

In his view, not only does it make no sense to hold us responsible for our actions; we also had no control over the formation of our beliefs about the rightness and consequences of that action or about the availability of alternatives. You can’t successfully believe something different from what you believe.[*]

You want to scream at how unfair life can be.[45]

An ACE score, a fetal adversity score, last chapter’s Ridiculously Lucky Childhood Experience score—they all tell the same thing. It takes a certain kind of audacity and indifference to look at findings like these and still insist that how readily someone does the harder things in life justifies blame, punishment, praise, or reward. Just ask those fetuses in the womb of a low-socioeconomic-status woman, already paying a neurobiological price.

I am put into a detached, professorial, eggheady sort of rage by the idea that you can assess someone’s behavior outside the context of what brought them to that moment of intent, that their history doesn’t matter. Or that even if a behavior seems determined, free will lurks wherever you’re not looking. And by the conclusion that righteous judgment of others is okay because while life is tough and we’re unfairly gifted or cursed with our attributes, what we freely choose to do with them is the measure of our worth. These stances have fueled profound amounts of undeserved pain and unearned entitlement.

With remarkable prescience about these ideas in 1874, the biologist Thomas Huxley wrote about the mechanistic nature of organisms, such that they “only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician.”[18]

But the whole point of emergence, the basis of its amazingness, is that those idiotically simple little building blocks that only know a few rules about interacting with their immediate neighbors remain precisely as idiotically simple when their building-block collective is outperforming urban planners with business cards.

Just to restate that irritatingly-familiar-by-now notion, we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.

Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never—that’s one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling—nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five. The Society for Neuroscience, the world’s premier professional organization for brain scientists, grew from five hundred founding members to twenty-five thousand in its first quarter century. In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, two different scientists have discovered the function in the brain of some gene and are already squabbling about who did it first. Unless the process of discovery in science grinds to a halt tonight at midnight, the vacuum of ignorance that we try to fill with a sense of agency will just keep shrinking. Which raises the question that motivates the second half of this book.[3]

Once you actually observe what people do, rather than listen to what they say, there’s no difference between theists and atheists in rates of blood donations, amount of tipping, or compliance with “honor system” payments; ditto for a lack of difference in being altruistic, forgiving, or evincing gratitude. Furthermore, there’s no difference in being aggressive or vengeful in experimental settings where subjects can retaliate against a norm violation (for example, by administering what they believe to be a shock to someone).[20]

Once you control for sex, age, socioeconomic status, marital status, and sociality, most of the differences between theists and atheists disappear.[22]

But as a more informative complication, while prosociality in religious people is boosted by religious primes, prosociality in atheists is boosted just as much by the right kinds of secular primes.

Thus, if you’re trying to decide who is more likely to run amok with antisocial behaviors, atheists will look bad if the question is “How much of your money would you give to charity for the poor?” But if the question is “How much of your money would you pay in higher taxes for more social services for the poor?” you’ll reach a different conclusion.[27]

Moreover, cross-nationally, lower average rates of religiosity in a country predict lower levels of corruption, more tolerance of racial and ethnic minorities, higher literacy rates, lower rates of overall crime and of homicide, and less frequent warfare.[29]

Even after controlling for factors like self-reporting or demographic correlates of religiosity, and after considering broader definitions of prosociality, religious people still come through as being more prosocial than atheists in some experimental as well as real-world settings. Which leads us to a really crucial point: religious prosociality is mostly about religious people being nice to people like themselves. It’s mostly in-group.

Thus, despite claims toward universal niceness, theistic niceness tends to be in-group. Moreover, this is particularly pronounced in religious groups characterized by fundamentalist belief and authoritarianism.[33]

We return to the broad question in this section: Does disbelief that one’s actions are judged by an omnipotent force degrade morality? Seemingly so. That is, as long as you are asking people to say how moral they are rather than to demonstrate it, or you prime them with religious cues rather than secular ones of equivalent symbolic power. And as long as “good acts” are individualistic rather than collective, and are directed at people who look like them. Skepticism about the existence of a moralizing god(s) doesn’t particularly generate immoral behavior; this is the case for underlying reasons that help explain why being skeptical about free will doesn’t either.

Moreover, classic studies of the people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust documented that these people who could not look the other way were disproportionately likely to be either highly religious or highly irreligious.[38]

Change occurring, accomplished with the same molecules that make for a learned Aplysia, all without invoking the sort of willful agency and freedom that we intuitively attribute change to. You learn about how experience changes the nervous system of an Aplysia, and as a result, your nervous system changes. We don’t choose to change, but it is abundantly possible for us to be changed, including for the better. Perhaps even by having read this chapter.

I feel crazy, embarrassed, trying to make the argument anchored in the last paragraph’s science and in chapter 4 that not only does someone not deserve to be blamed or punished for having seizures but it is equally unjust and scientifically unjustifiable to make someone’s life a living hell because they drove despite not having taken their meds. Even if they did that because they didn’t want those meds interfering with their getting a buzz when drinking. But this is what we must do, if we are to live the consequences of what science is teaching us—that the brain that led someone to drive without their meds is the end product of all the things beyond their control from one second, one minute, one millennium before. And likewise if your brain has been sculpted into one that makes you kind or smart or motivated.[13]

We now know that schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder with strong genetic components. A great demonstration of this is the fact that if someone has the disease, their identical twin, who shares all their genes, has a 50 percent chance of having it as well (versus the usual 1–2 percent risk in the general population). The genetics of schizophrenia, however, are not about a single gene that has gone awry (as compared with classic single-gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, or sickle cell anemia). Instead, it arises from an unlucky combination of the variants of an array of genes, many of which are related to neurotransmission and brain development.[*] However, the collection of genes does not cause schizophrenia but, instead, increases the risk for it. This is implicit in flipping the finding just mentioned on its head—if someone has the disease, their identical twin has a 50 percent chance of not having it. In a classic gene/environment interaction, getting the disease basically requires a combination of the genetic vulnerability plus a stressful environment. What sort of stress? During fetal life, disease risk many years later is raised by prenatal malnutrition (for example, the Dutch Hunger Winter famine of 1944 greatly boosted the incidence of schizophrenia among individuals who had been fetuses at that time), exposure to any of a number of viruses by way of maternal infection, placental bleeding, maternal diabetes, or infection with th...

Schizophrenia is a thought disorder of, as it’s termed, “aberrant salience.”[22]

(bringing to mind the quip of physicist Max Planck that “science progresses one funeral at a time”).

The bitterness still resonates forty-three years later from a brilliant piece of sociopolitical theater by Torrey, published in 1977 in Psychology Today. In “A Fantasy Trial about a Real Issue,” he imagined a trial of the psychoanalytic establishment for the harm done to mothers of people with schizophrenia. “No trial since Nuremberg has stirred so much public interest,” he facetiously reported about the supposed mass trial held in a stadium in DC. He noted the charges: “The accused did willfully and with forethought but no scientific evidence blame the parents of patients with schizophrenia . . . for their children’s condition thereby causing great anguish guilt pain and suffering.” Defendants included Fromm-Reichmann, Klein, Bateson, and Theodore Lidz, who claimed that parents of schizophrenics are “narcissistic” and “egocentric.” All were convicted and sentenced to spend ten years reading their own writings. He finished with an acidic flourish, “Relatives wept openly. Nobody had expected that harsh a sentence.” Eleanor Owen had a movingly different take on it. Despite the fury that drove the advocacy that ultimately helped move mountains, despite the shame and guilt heaped on people like her by ideologues preaching a judgmental pseudoreligion free of facts, she still says, “But there were no villains.”[*],[31]

So many fronts of advances: Kids who are having trouble learning to read and keep reversing letters aren’t lazy and unmotivated; instead, there are cortical malformations in their brains that cause dyslexia. Issues of free will and choice are irrelevant when it comes to any scientifically informed read of someone’s sexual orientation. Someone insists that, despite evidence from their genes, gonads, hormones, anatomy, and secondary sexual characteristics that they are the sex they were assigned at birth, that is not who they are, has never been from as far back as they can remember—and the neurobiology agrees with them.[35]

The long explorations in this chapter all show the same thing: we can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place. Conclusion We can do lots more of the same.

Yes, yes, there is so much to reform about the criminal justice system. Prisons are criminogenic, a training ground for revolving-door recidivism. Implicit bias makes a mockery of the notion of objective judges and juries. The system offers all the justice money can buy. All of this needs to be reformed, and the people in the trenches trying to do it—the Innocence Project, candidates for district attorney intent on change from within, lawyers helping underdogs pro bono—are amazing. I’ve now had the chance to work on around a dozen murder cases with public defenders, and they’re inspiring—underpaid, overworked, passing up the riches of the corporate world, losing most of their cases defending broken people who were usually already lost by the time they were second-trimester fetuses.

From day one, medical quarantine has generated controversy, a battle between the rights of the individual and the greater good. We certainly saw just how incendiary this could be during early COVID-19, with those jackass don’t-tell-me-what-to-do coronavirus parties, where super-spreaders killed droves of people by practicing unsafe exhalation.

Just as public health workers think about the social determinants of health, a public health–oriented quarantine model that replaces the criminal justice system requires attention to the social determinants of criminal behavior. In effect, it implies that while a criminal can be dangerous, the poverty, bias, systemic disadvantaging, and so on that produce criminals are more dangerous.[10]

But what about the cost, which must be ruinous? It is true that the annual cost of housing a prisoner in Norway is about three times that in the U.S. (roughly ninety thousand dollars versus thirty thousand). Nonetheless, if you really analyze things, the overall per-capita cost of containing crime in Norway is far less than in the U.S.: fewer prisoners, who are educated enough in prison so that most eventually return to the outside world as wage earners rather than as likely recidivists; huge savings from smaller police forces; fewer families disrupted and driven into poverty by the incarceration of the primary source of income; heck, even the well-off save money, with less need for expensive home security systems with CCTV and panic buttons.[*] But what about Smilansky’s motivational catastrophe, with folks lured into criminality in order to head off to a prison resort? The much lower recidivism rate shows that no amount of art on the walls and well-equipped kitchens can outweigh the incalculable value of freedom. Apparently, we need not fear turpitude and mayhem caused by funishment.[*],[12]

One sticky way to respond to that is to question whether acts of retribution, reframed as compassion for the bereaved, should be a “right” of victims or their families. An easier response is to point out the well-documented but not widely known fact that closure for victims or their families is mostly a myth. Law professor Susan Bandes of DePaul University finds that for many, the execution and the accompanying media coverage are retraumatizing, impeding their recovery.[*] A surprising number reach the point of actively opposing the execution. Social workers Marilyn Armour of the University of Texas and Mark Umbreit of the University of Minnesota studied family members of homicide victims in their two states, the former leading the way in executing prisoners, the latter having banned it more than a century ago. They found that from the perspectives of health, psychological well-being, and daily function, the Minnesotans fared significantly better than the Texans.[*] Moreover, a recent, first-of-its-kind national survey of victims of violent crime reported, by a wide margin, a preference that criminal justice focus on rehabilitation rather than retribution, and that expenditures be increased for crime prevention rather than incarceration.[34]

Perhaps when done with the writing, I should read this book. It will be hard. But we’ve done it before.

There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.