Week 8-Post 1: Free Will and Determinism

 Source: https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=1f78bd7a-d127-477d-be59-6f4df1bc0ff9%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=78576465&db=pwh

from EBSCOhost

Free Will and the Anders Breivik Trial: by Lucas, Sarah

• On the first day of his trial Anders Breivik admitted to planting a bomb that killed 8 people outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in Oslo (July 22nd, 2011). Then shooting and killing 69 people hours later at a summer camp (on Utoya Island). Since there was no question of whether he was guilty or not, the focus of the Oslo court was figuring out whether he was sane at the time of the attacks. 2 psychiatric examinations on Breivik happened. One concluded that he was schizophrenic and criminally insane before and after the attack, but another concluded that he suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder but is sane. Breiviks mental state during the attacks is of interest to the court because its needed to determine his criminal responsibility in the crime.(to see whether he is made to suffer for his crime)

• Breivik told the court that he would carry out his actions again if he was given the chance so the court already knows that he needs to be seperated from society

• if found sane during the attack: sent to prison. if found not sane: sent to psychiatric ward built for him

• getting revenge for crimes appeals to our moral intuitions. if someone intentionally harms other: they should suffer the consequences. Revenge was an idea present after Breivik's killing spree, in newspapers survivors quoted stuff about looking forward to breivik recieving his punishment. also shown in the title surrounded by the name of everyone killed by breivik.

• humans posess free will, each individual is at liberty to act as they choose
• does not flow from a materialistic (non-supernatural) understanding of the world. difficult to make a case for the existence of free will without resorting to the supernatural
• a way to analyze free will is through libertarianism. 
• looking at breivik from free will idea he is responsible for his actions but if he were to be not sane then that seems to take away some of that repsonsibility for what he did

• determinism states that every human act is the consequence of the far past.
• because determinists see human behavior as fully determined by the laws of nature, they reject the idea of free will
• in accord with cognitive neuroscience
• behavior is a product of the brain, the structure and function of which are determined by factors outside of our control (genes and stuff).
• sam harris offers a way to think about determinism: if you had been born with anders breivik's genes, grown up the same way, dealt the same life experience, and woke up on that july 22nd morning with his same brain. you would have commited his crimes bc after all, you wouldve been him.
• if we look at breiviks as determinists he appears a victim of his undesirable brain

• experiments in neuroscience support the conclusion that the physical states of the brain determine our behavior
• the physiologist Benjamin Libet used EEG (electroencephalography) to measure the time lag between brain activity and executing a physical movement. Volunteers wearing scalp electroder were asked to do simple motor activities like flexing  a finger. Libet found that significant brain activity was detected 300 miliseconds before the volunteer registered the intention to make a movement
• evidence that the brain makes the decision to move before we become consious of our intention to move

• libertarians believe that there is a physical part of the brain that acts independently and does not follow the natural laws of physics (a religious perosn may call it a soul)- ties into free will
• this non-determined part of the brain endows humans with free will
• the questioning of this idea was captured in a Dilbert cartoon

• stephen hawking and leonard mlodinow are also people puzzled by how it is possible for our behavior to be determined by the chemistry of our brains while at the same time being considered as free will. They wrote in The Grand Design "It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion"

• we assume that we exert differing levels of control over different types of preferences. but some preferences (whether ot not you like seafood) are just apart of who we are.

• Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen are psychologists who have written an influential paper on the implications of neuroscience for the law. The illustrate our powerlessness over our intentions using a thought experiment they call the "Boys from Brazil problem". Imagine that Nazi fugitives living in South America after the war decide to bring Adolf Hitler back to life by raising a geneticall identical child. Using some DNA they create a genetic clone child version of Hitler. They replicate the same life experiences Hitler had. For example, Hitlers dad died when he was a child so the Nazis also killed the clones surrogate father at the same exact age. But suppose that when this clone ages, he gets involved in a crime and is brought to court. should he be held responsible? does the fact that the nazis designed him to be violent take away the clones responsibility for his violent acts. but how different is this clone from me, you or Breivik? we are all the product of forces outside our control. These psychologists identify that whether these forces are deliberate of natural is not relevent to the question of moral responsibility.

• As neuroscience increasingly illuminates the mechanical processes behind human behavior, more and more people will develop moral intuitions that are at odds with out current social practices.
• in a world organized according to our new moral intuitions, we would still have compulsory detention for criminals.
• a Stanford neuroscientist puts it like "Whereas you do not ponder whether to forgive a car that, because of problems with its brakes, has injured someone, you nevertheless protect society from it."