Free Will

The Times Science section has an article on free will that's much better than what you usually get from the popular press. A recent Economist article, by contrast, started with some observations about recent neuroscience, leapt to a conclusion about metaphysics, and then pondered whether the new freedom-less metaphysics didn't have sweeping consequences for liberalism, political freedom, etc.

As Julian explains this is all quite wrong. Political liberty, understood as the absence of coercion, has nothing in particular to do with radical metaphysical free will. What's more, there's less connection between the metaphysics of free will and the concept of responsibility than most people think. In most cases, it works perfectly well to think of whether and how to hold someone responsible for something as a pragmatic political decision. The kind of responsibility that may or may not be impacted by what we think about free will is something larger and more transcendent. Something like whether or not it makes sense for God to hold people responsible for their wrongdoing (by, e.g. sending them to hell) if God also created a predetermined universe (as, I think, orthodox Muslims are supposed to believe), which is tied up with all your traditional theological problems about theodicy and so forth. For the purposes of making profane decisions about governance, though, we can kind of ignore all that stuff.