By Joshua Shepherd
Practical Ethics
Originally published on May 6, 2014
It is often asserted that emerging cognitive science – especially work in psychology (e.g., that associated with work on automaticity, along with work on the power of situations to drive behavior) and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., that associated with unconscious influences on decision-making) – threatens free will in some way or other. What is not always clear is how this work threatens free will. As a result, it is a matter of some controversy whether this work actually threatens free will, as opposed to simply appearing to threaten free will. And it is a matter of some controversy how big the purported threat might be. Could work in cognitive science convince us that there is no free will? Or simply that we have less free will? And if it is the latter, how much less, and how important is this for our practices of holding one another morally responsible for our behavior?
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