7 The neuroscience of free will
Can neuroscience, and the other sciences of the mind, shed light on
one of the oldest and most difficult of all philosophical problems, the
problem of free will and moral responsibility?
1
Some scientists
believe it can. In their popular writings, these scientists often express
the opinion that the sciences of the mind have shown that free will –
and therefore moral responsibility – is an illusion. They argue,
roughly, as follows: the sciences of the mind demonstrate that our
thoughts, intentions, and (therefore) our actions are the product of
deterministic processes, in the following sense: given the initial
conditions (say, our genetic endowment at birth and the environment
into which we were born), we had to act as we did. But if we were
determined to act as we did, then we were not free, or morally
responsible. Richard Dawkins, the great evolutionary biologist, has
recently compared our practices of praising, blaming and punishing
to Basil Fawlty’s behavior in flogging his car for breaking down, in
the TV series Fawlty Towers:
Doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system
make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether
diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to
be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s
physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings
to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make
as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
(Dawkins 2006)
Of all the claims made by scientists, this is the one that
probably annoys philosophers the most. Not because they regard it as
wrong – most do, but some actually agree with the claim – but
because it is made in apparent ignorance of literally thousands of

Quantum mechanics is the science of subatomic particles, and is the
foundation of modern physics. It is the most fundamental theory we
possess for describing the physical world. Popular misconceptions to
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223
the contrary, the theory is well understood and well confirmed.
However, it is highly controversial just what the world described by
quantum mechanics is like, in the most basic sense. Quantum
mechanics uses probabilistic rather than deterministic equations to
describe the behavior of sub-atomic particles. On the so-called
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, these equations
capture the nature of physical reality: the equations are probabilistic
because the world is fundamentally indeterministic. This inter-
pretation is the dominant one; rival interpretations attempt to save
determinism by postulating hidden variables or limits on observa-
tion. It is therefore controversial whether the universe is entirely
deterministic. However, it is far from obvious that contemporary
physics can come to the aid of the incompatibilist who wants to
preserve free will.
First, even if the universe is indeterministic at a sub-atomic
level, it may be that these indeterminacies get washed out at the
macroscopic level. The behavior of everything we can observe with
the naked eye, or even with ordinary microscopes, seems determi-
nistic and predictable: sub-atomic indeterminacy may simply be
washed out. In that case, sub-atomic indeterminacy can be ignored:
the world is deterministic for almost all practical purposes. Suppose,
second, that that’s not the case; that sub-atomic indeterminacy can
affect the behavior of complex macroscopic objects such as human
beings. How will that help? If I am not free, despite the fact that I can
do what I want when I want, how does the fact that sometimes – due

know whereof they speak. That is not, however, to say that the
sciences of the mind may not have a bearing on free will and moral
responsibility.
The rest of this chapter will consider two topics. First, I shall
examine a global challenge to our free will and moral responsibility.
Some neuroscientists have argued that we are not free, not because
our actions are determined, but because we do not consciously cause
our behavior. Having seen off this threat, I shall examine some of the
ways in which our growing knowledge about the mind will help us to
distinguish between individuals. Rather than neuroscience showing
that no one is ever responsible, I shall argue, attention to its dis-
coveries will help us to see who is responsible, and who is not.
consciousness and freedom
Some recent results in neuroscience and in psychology have been
seen, by some thinkers, to present us with a fresh challenge to
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225
freedom, independent of determinism. These results allegedly show
that we do not consciously cause our intentions, decisions or volit-
ions, and therefore our actions. If this is true, many believe, we do
not act freely. As Robert Kane, one of the leaders of the recent revival
of libertarianism puts it, ‘‘If conscious willing is illusory or epiphe-
nomenalism is true, all accounts of free will go down, compatibilist
and incompatibilist’’ (Kane 2005).
In what follows, I will outline the threat, in the two forms in
which it comes; I will also briefly sketch some of the ways in which
philosophers have responded to it. These responses are designed to
show that the experimental evidence does not, in fact, establish the
claim that we do not consciously cause our actions. I shall then
develop a response of my own. My response differs from the existing

Libet’s experiment has widely been seen as an empirical
demonstration that there is no such thing as free will (Spence 1996;
Pockett 2004). Libet has shown, the argument goes, that conscious-
ness of the decision to act or of the volition comes too late to be
causally effective. Consciousness is informed of the decision; it does
not make it. But the agent, the target of ascriptions of praise and
blame, is, if not identical to consciousness, at least more properly
identified with consciousness than with the subpersonal mechan-
isms that are, as a matter of fact, causally effective in action. It turns
out that we do not make our decisions; they are made for us. But if
we cannot control what we decide to do, then we cannot be
responsible for our decisions (Zhu 2004).
3
Philosophers and cognitive scientists have not been slow to
find fault with Libet’s claims. For instance, Flanagan (1996a) argues
that it is consistent with Libet’s results that we consciously initiate
important or ‘‘big picture’’ decisions, merely leaving the details of the
implementation of these decisions to subpersonal processes. Thus,
having – consciously – decided to comply with Libet’s instructions to
flick their wrist when they felt like it, his subjects might have
delegated the details to the unconscious mechanisms which Libet’s
experiment tracks. If that’s right, then our big picture decision might
after all be made consciously. As Richard Double (2004) has recently
put it, this picture leaves plenty of space for a distal cause (compa-
tibilist) or distal influence (libertarian) view of moral responsibility.
Alfred Mele (2007) shows that it is reasonable to doubt whether
Libet is right in identifying the subjective reports with the intention
who decides when i decide?
227
or the decision to flick, rather than with an urge or a desire to flick.

will; the actual causal mechanisms of behavior. The eponymous
‘‘illusion of conscious will’’ arises when we mistake the first for the
second; when we take our experience of causation to be a direct
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readout of the reality. In fact, our experience is a belated and unre-
liable record of action; it is neither itself a causal force, nor is it a
direct reflection of the actual causal forces.
Wegner argues that, far from being the cause of our actions,
the phenomenal will is itself caused by the mechanisms that
actually produce actions. The real causal springs of our actions
are subpersonal – and therefore unconscious – mechanisms. These
mechanisms produce the action, but they also produce a mental
preview of the action. So long as certain conditions are satisfied,
agents take this mental preview to be the real cause of the action. As
Wegner (2002: 64) puts it, ‘‘People experience conscious will when
they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action.’’ We
fall victim to this illusion when three conditions are satisfied: the
mental preview of action occurs at the right time (prior to the action,
but close to the moment of its initiation), the preview is consistent
with the action and the agent is unaware of other potential causes of
the action. Wegner calls these three conditions of the experience of
conscious will the priority, consistency and exclusivity principles.
Since his account explains why we think that our preview of
the action causes it, Wegner calls it the theory of apparent mental
causation.
In defence of his claim that conscious will is an illusion,
Wegner offers us evidence that conscious will is subject to a double
dissociation: its presence is not an infallible guide to our agency, and
its absence is not an infallible guide to our passivity. Consider the

the confederate caused an action in this situation, the subject would
over-attribute it to themselves if they were primed in accordance
with the priority principle. The feeling of conscious will can be
produced by priority and consistency in the absence of exclusivity,
and in the absence of genuine agency.
Philosophers have responded to Wegner’s claims in ways that
are closely analogous to the manner in which they have responded to
Libet: they have denied that Wegner has shown that consciousness
does not play a direct role in action. They have pointed out that the
demonstration of a double dissociation does not show anything about
the normal case. Consider perception: sometimes people fail to see
an object in front of them – because of a more or less spectacular
dysfunction in their visual system, or because it is disguised – and
sometimes they claim to see what is not there (as in many visual
illusions). Perception, too, is subject to a double dissociation. But it
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230
does not follow that our impression that our percepts are caused by
objects in the world is generally false (Nahmias 2002; Metzinger
2004; Bayne 2006).
How strong are these responses to Libet and to Wegner? I shall
not attempt to evaluate them in any detail. For what it’s worth,
I suspect they are (at minimum) successful in pointing out severe
problems in their arguments and experimental designs. Neither has
demonstrated, anywhere near conclusively, that consciousness does
not initiate action or make decisions. However, though these phi-
losophers have won this battle, I suspect they will lose the war:
consciousness does not, in fact, play the kind of role in action that
Libet and Wegner believe to be required in order for us to be morally
responsible. We should therefore get on with assessing whether, and

kilometres to the Ontario home of his parents-in-law, where he
stabbed them both. He then drove to the police station, where he told
police that he thought he had killed someone. Only then, apparently,
did he notice that his hands had been badly injured. Parks was
charged with the murder of his mother-in-law, and the attempted
murder of his father-in-law. He was acquitted, on the grounds that he
had performed the act while sleep-walking. The court found, and on
appeal the Canadian Supreme Court agreed, that he had committed
the act in a state of automatism (Broughton et al. 1994). Now, I think
it is clear that the best explanation of the widely shared intuition
that Parks was not responsible for his actions is that he was not
conscious of what he was doing (Levy and Bayne 2004).
4
Why con-
sciousness should matter is not clear; that it matters seems obvious.
It seems, therefore, that agents can be responsible for their
actions only if they were conscious of them. But why is consciousness
necessary for moral responsibility? Libet and Wegner seem to think
that demonstrating that consciousness lags behind decision-making
shows that agents do not genuinely control their actions. It is for this
reason that they are supposed not to be morally responsible for them.
Conscious control is, as Wegner (2004) puts it, an illusion, but if we do
not control our actions, we cannot be responsible for them. Libet
argues that we ought not to hold agents responsible for actions per-
formed ‘‘without the possibility of conscious control’’ (Libet 1999: 52).
But if consciousness lags behind decision-making, none of our actions
is consciously controlled. We should all be excused, just as we cur-
renlty excuse those who suffer from automatism.
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last microsecond, thereby altering its course. Call this, the alleged
requirement that we able to exercise such an active causal power in
decision-making, the decision constraint. Libet and Wegner seem
committed to denying that the decision constraint is ever satisfied,
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233
while most of the philosophical responses to them seem aimed at
showing that it might be satisfied after all. I suggest that this is wasted
effort. The decision constraint is highly unlikely to be satisfied. And
that’s a good thing. We dont’t want an active causal power, capable of
playing the kind of role that Libet and Wegner aim to show con-
sciousness cannot play. The exercise of any such an active causal
power, conscious or not, would not increase our freedom. Instead, it
would likely reduce it.
Consider what decision-making would be like if we possessed
such an active causal power. Suppose, for the sake of concreteness,
that you are faced with some momentous choice: for instance,
whether or not to accept a job in another city. There are many rea-
sons in favor of your accepting the job (new and exciting challenges;
better pay; more recognition, and so on) and many reasons against
(your friends and family would be far away; the work raises moral
qualms in you; you worry that you may have too little autonomy,
and so on). Given the importance of the choice, you deliberate
carefully before you make up your mind. This deliberation is, of
course, carried out consciously: that is, you are aware that you are
deliberating, and the considerations for and against accepting the job
occupy your mind.
But look closer; what role might consciousness, as an active
power, actually play? Let’s approach this question by thinking about
the process of decision-making. There are, it seems, two ways we

steps to increase the weight that family has in his decision-making
(including, for instance, turning down a job offer that will take him
far away from them). But (at least typically) this isn’t weighting at all,
but instead an indirect way of weighing. If the man wants to give a
greater weight to family in his decision-making for reasons – because,
for instance, he thinks that he will be happier if he makes more time
for family, or because he thinks that it is morally wrong to spend so
little time with them – than he is engaged in indirect weighing. He
attempts to discern how much weight family should have for him,
given what he believes and desires, and given what his values and
goals really are. He is like the addict who desires to consume their
drug but wants to be rid of the desire because it does not reflect their
values. Properly weighting reasons, in the sense at issue here, is not
indirect weighing: it is not trying to give greater weight to a reason in
the light of the weight of other reasons. Instead, weighting a reason is
assigning a weight to a consideration for no reason at all.
The power to weight reasons, to reiterate, is the power to assign
them a weight which is at variance with the weight they would have
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