Free Will: Part V

A Better Life Without Free Will

How Would Life Be Without Believing in Free Will

Those who believe in free will see it as a general guide to personal behavior; that one is free from internal and external constraints across situations for both self and others. They typically understand free will as one’s ability to freely choose one's own actions and determine their own outcomes. There is a belief that one can exert control over their actions regardless of previous experiences. In other words, our past experiences with our unique environment do not shape nor influence our behavior and decision-making. Because one believes in free will, there is an illusion that one can make better decisions and behave more virtuously. The premise is that if one is free to act and choose a course of action, then it is the only way that one is morally responsible for their own actions. Daniel Dennett, a student of the philosophy of the mind, wrote (2013) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, “free will is only worth having if it enables the individual to get what she or he wants.” In other words - free for all. No wonder we are surrounded by “bad behavior” everywhere.

We Do Not Have Free Will

We do not have free will. As noted in our previous essays, each of us is a product of our unique environmental history. That is, our genetics and our environment interact and are what shape our behavior and influence our genetic expression. Your behavior changes over time due to the evolving influence of your social and physical environment. You become what you surround yourself with. You are a product of your environment and learning history, those experiences allow you to choose, quite often through the process of self-talk, a course of action among the choices you face at a given time. Awareness of the determinants of your behavior gives you the ability to “freely choose.” If you do not like who you have become, you can change it! Being determined does not mean that you are doomed. You have the freedom to change by intentionally and gradually changing the context of your environment. You truly have more control over your own behavior than when you believed in free will. That is powerful.

John Staddon in his book Science in an Age of Unreason (2022) reminds us, “Facts can cause people to react emotionally.” He makes the distinction between facts and passion when one evaluates comments made or in discussions of scientific findings that may change our worldview. He concludes that unfortunately, “too often passion wins.” It seems that emotions and passion have been feeding the belief in free will. He educates us, “Science is about facts: discerning wishes, or what ought to be done, is a purview of other disciplines.” It is a social statistic that the subjective belief in free will is well entrenched and quite global. Accepting the scientific fact that we do not have free will and our behavior is really a product of our environment and learning history is made quite difficult since, at this moment, the social and environmental causes of behavior are not self-evident to most people who continue to believe that they are free to behave so one “can get what he or she wants.”

It is time that we take Skinner's (1981) principle of selection by consequences seriously: “A proper recognition of the selective action of the environment means a change in our conception of the origin of behavior which is possibly as extensive as that of the origin of the species. So long as we cling to the view that a person is an initiating doer, actor, or causer of behavior, we shall probably continue to neglect the conditions which must be changed if we are to solve our problems.” Explanatory inventions like free will, spirits, etc forestall further scientific analysis. If a culture freezes science, it robs itself of whatever technologies might have resulted.  Our culture can ill afford to do that with respect to the science of behavior.

Determinism Does Not Rule Out Moral Responsibility

Understanding the concept of free will and freedom has to address the problem of moral responsibility because free will is generally considered a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is usually seen as the condition under which an individual can be praised and blamed, rewarded and punished for their behavior. The Dutch philosopher and strong advocate for determinism, Spinoza (1632-1677), proposed in his Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise that all reward and punishment are natural consequences of our behavior. Even if everything is determined, actions have rewarding and punishing consequences, and these are the natural results of actions. Determinism does not eliminate reward and punishment. In philosophy, the natural order is the moral source from which natural laws derive their authority. It is the orderly system comprising the physical universe and functioning according to natural law as distinguished from human laws. Basically, they are the laws of the natural science of behavior. They are known as contingency-governed behavior. It is behavior that is directly and solely the result of reinforcement contingencies. It occurs without deliberation.

We learn and decide our future course of action, in part, based on being exposed to these natural laws of behavior. Just touching a hot stove is probably a one-time event because of the immediate negative and painful consequences. You learn it and pass it on to your children verbally as a warning and now it becomes a rule-following behavior for them. That is a form of verbal behavior in which a person states a rule and consequences, which alters the future probability of other behavior and hence becomes a discriminative stimulus for that other behavior. Many rule-governed behaviors become essential in our process of self-talk when we deliberately make decisions based on the choices we face. These are learned behaviors based on rules and consequences that are usually verbally explicit. In the socialization process, we learn these rules and use them as a guide for our behavior. 

Behavior Defines the Culture

The cumulative history of your developmental, educational, and social environment is what shapes and determines the rules one learns. A liquid society is one in which the prominent social environment is that of insecurity, uncertainty, unpredictability, the collapse of long-term thinking that reinforces individualism and becomes the dominant driver that evolves and shapes the culture (Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty - 2007). When a society becomes liquid, it loses its stability provided by the rules and consequences that shape and guide behavior. We become selfish, and focused on the “me,” while pro-social behavior diminishes in frequency (that is, engaging in behavior that benefits the culture becomes less dominant and less frequent; Pennypacker & Perez, 2022 Engineering the Upswing: A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture). We believe that many of those behavior problems we see around us are in part due to the misinterpretation and belief in free will. This belief has been gradually evolving and it seems to be more frequently demonstrated in the free for all behavior that is followed by infrequent and unpredictable negative consequences to tame it. We are now a loose and liquid culture.

We are in fact living an illusion when we believe in free will. We do not have free will, we have been living without free will all our lives, and the false belief in free will has evolved unguided to where we are - an increase in the frequency of bad behavior around us. By accepting determinism and that our behavior can be guided;  we can each reach our full potential, cooperate with each other, have effective conflict-resolution strategies, be prosocial, have an effective and functional representative government, not live in fear, and so on. It is crucial that we become and behave proactively in order to turn around our increasing frequency of bad behavior and a predictable catastrophic end. We can build a great society where, as John Lennon imagined. It is doable, but first, we have to drop free will.

In Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), he warned us:

" It is now widely recognized that great changes must be made in the American way of life. Not only can we not face the rest of the world while consuming and polluting as we do, we cannot for long face ourselves while acknowledging the violence and chaos in which we live. The choice is clear: either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behavior to create a social environment in which we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardizing the chances of those who follow us will be able to do the same.”

Let’s Create a Prosocial World

David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, in his book This View of Life (2020) wrote, “We are now in a position to provide an account of how the behaviors associated with goodness can triumph over the behaviors associated with evil - or vice-versa- depending upon environmental conditions.” He is the co-founder of Prosocial World (https://www.prosocial.world). One of their main goals is to promote prosocial behavior, or intent to benefit others. Prosocial behavior is a social behavior that benefits other people or society as a whole, such as helping, sharing, donating, cooperating, volunteering, being kind…engaging in behavior that benefits the culture. We need to start by evolving our own individual behavior by increasing the frequency of our prosocial behavior. The fact is that acting prosocially, like being kind to others, increases your well-being. It just feels good and it becomes a conditioned reinforcer. That is, the body tells you that you did a good deed because you feel good and you know it. It is also foreseen, that if there are enough people in the culture that engages in behaviors to benefit the culture, the cultural environment will improve because of the natural consequences associated with prosocial change. We will have a better place to live cooperatively while engaging in reciprocity and conflict resolution practices. We will have an impact on our physical environment too. Any cultural evolution driven by behavior starts with the individual acting prosocially, composing a small group of equals that will evolve into groups of groups and eventually evolving the culture to benefit the greater good.

Michael A. Slote is a philosopher and professor of ethics at the University of Miami. He has written extensively about ethics, morality, and a just society. He emphasizes that we should aim to develop a culture based on the ethics of care and empathy in his book…wait for it…The Ethics of Care and Empathy (2007). He demonstrates the connection between the philosophical issues in the practice of care, benevolence, and kindness with education, psychology, and criminal justice, as well as other disciplines where behavior is prominent. He argues that “we have an obligation to help others.” He is the founder of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy (http://cultureofempathy.com). Slote has argued in his essay Moral Responsibility without Free Will (published in Genetics and Criminal Behavior, 2001); "The idea of moral responsibility without free will is not a contradiction if the idea of a good society can substitute for the idea of free will in providing a basis for the punishments, penalties, incentives, and rewards that are the hallmark of moral and social accountability. Human beings, whether metaphysically free or not, can be placed in morally better or worse social conditions, and the laws instituted by a good or just society have or can have a legitimate authority over its members whatever the metaphysical status or their wills."

In our book Engineering the Upswing (2022), we proposed and laid the foundations for developing science-based behavior engineering practices to guide the evolution of our culture. David Wilson has given us a framework for guided cultural evolutionary implementation. He has also warned us that while cultural evolution is happening all the time, mostly driven by behavior, it has remained mostly unguided, the fact is that most of us are clueless about this unguided evolutionary process. If we let it continue as it is, we could end up with many unexpected consequences, some of which can be frightening such as the increasing frequency of violence and the rising sea levels secondary to our practices that contribute to global warming.

Intentional First Steps to Design Our Future

We are proposing that there is an urgent need to guide the evolution of our culture by initiating gradual change in a complex adaptive system. Culture is a complex and dynamic network of interaction. It is adaptive and driven by behavior within and between multiple groups. Being an adaptive system, the individual behavior and group collective behavior mutate and self-organize in response to the change-initiating micro event (change in the prevailing local contingencies.) Major changes in cultural practices (changes in the education system) start with the individual behavior within a small group (initially within a family), then to larger groups, and then to groups within groups. Wilson described this process as the multicellular society - that is, many individuals within groups creating larger groups that function together within groups of groups. It is human action that creates the multicellular community. The collective future is selected and reshaped through human behavior, social interactions, and the consequences thereof. Some practices are retained and some are selected out by consequences.

Effective and well-defined rules and consequences are essential for our society/culture to flourish and for us to reciprocate, trust, and live in harmony. The science of behavior has tools that are evidence-based and if implemented properly, will lead to gradual behavior change. It is an evolutionary process; we need to begin with the family and early childhood education. Behavior should be a major public health concern. We need to invest in creating a cultural environment that facilitates healthy and positive behavior, which includes saving the planet.

One of the first steps you can take is to increase the frequency of engaging in behavior that benefits the culture. Once you engage in behavior that benefits the culture, your behavior is positively reinforced by the natural consequence of a social reinforcer - it enhances well-being by feeling good (e.g., receiving social praise). This pairing of engaging in prosocial behavior and increasing one’s well-being is maintained by the conditioned reinforcer that is established.

Target Behavior that Promotes Well-Being:

• Very little that is positive is solitary - engage positively with others.

• Connections to other people and relationships are what give meaning and purpose in life.

• The presence of other people is the most effective remedy during difficult times and the most consistent source of positivity.

• Doing an act of kindness can produce a reliable increase in well-being.

• Behave kindly towards the physical environment - Mother Earth. 

Engaging in more frequent prosocial and collaborative behavior toward the common good will greatly increase the human capital of our culture. Just do it!

Looking forward to more sharing, and most importantly, your feedback!

Francisco I. Perez, PhD

Henry S. Pennypacker, PhD

Faris R. Kronfli, PhD

Our book Engineering the Upswing can be found at Amazon or at the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies bookstore - behavior.org