There is No Such Thing as Free Will

In reading my recent blog post and Star Tribune opinion piece on the historical roots of the Charleston, South Carolina murders (those roots to be found in the Compromise of 1877);  and the culpability of psychologists for not giving the public a consensus view as to why people do what they do; one of my readers focused heavily on my statement that there is no such thing as free will.


This reader has been a public defender, and in that capacity cited the case of one of his defendants, a recidivist offender who found the life of a robber highly rewarding.  The professional robber detailed the advantages of his lifestyle: He can sleep as late as he wants to, live with whatever female is able to give him living accommodations and other favors, take his leave from each successive iteration of the latter when the topic of marriage or commitment arises, and enjoy the material benefits of his robbery until he is caught. When this robber is arrested, tried, and convicted, he is very willing to accept free room and board from the state as a surrogate for his women, doing his few years until released from prison to begin the cycle all over again.


My reader asks me what I would recommend the state do with such a repeat offender. My answer is as follows, two-fold in composition:


First, the state must follow existing laws for arrest, trial, and (assuming a verdict of guilty) incarceration.


Second, the state should take stock of certain psychological realities and understand that this professional robber is very likely at this point incorrigible. The explanation for this incorrigibility is as follows:


The person of note very likely is ill-educated and is almost certainly improperly educated. Given the description of his lifestyle and values, he very likely attended the public schools of the inner city or near suburbs; and seems definitely to have attended K-12 schools of the United States. This means that he has not received the knowledge-replete education imparted in the schools of the Scandinavian nations, Germany, South Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan. Public education in these nations is centralized at the national level, with uniform curriculum imparted throughout each nation, heavy on the liberal arts of natural science, mathematics, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts. Although academic tracking does occur in some of these nations, and rigorous college-entrance exams tend to forestall some in their quest for university matriculation, all students receive a substantive education at least through the equivalent of our middle school years--- possessing thereby a better education than that received by the typical high school graduate in the United States.


In the United States, education professors have ruined most teachers and administrators, almost all of whom they train. Education professors are the lowest status faculty members on college campuses, but in their trust has been placed the future teachers whom they intellectually abuse. These irresponsible trainers of our teachers tell students in departments, schools, and colleges of education that well-defined knowledge is not important, instead touting “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning” as central to the education of students in the public schools.


From such a program K-5 teachers emerge particularly woefully ill-trained, knowing little about natural science, mathematics, history, economics, literature, or the fine arts. In this context, “critical thinking” and “life-long learning” become excuses for doing very little: One cannot think critically in the absence of a strong knowledge base; and one cannot internalize an ethic of lifelong learning when one never learns much, taught as she or he is by a teacher who does not value or have much knowledge.


So almost all students in the United States graduate from high school and even college without possessing important knowledge sets; and also without much training in the industrial arts. After 13 years of schooling, students should know a great deal about natural science, mathematics, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; and also have training in such industrial and technological arts as computer technology, woodworking, plumbing, auto mechanics, landscaping, and heating/ conditioning. Instead, our students have little knowledge either in the liberal arts or the industrial/ technological arts.


The problem is particularly grave in schools at or close to the urban core, where I suspect our professional robber received his education. Urban school district administrators and teachers have never dedicated themselves fully to addressing the needs of students from impoverished families with frequent dysfunctionality, so they have been unable to impart much education to students from such circumstances, even education of the paltry nature derived from the misguided concepts of education professors. Inner city students tend either not to graduate at all or to claim a diploma that signifies little in the way of knowledge acquisition.


So our professional robber likely had little education and a dysfunctional family life. Under such circumstances, people take their satisfaction and seek their identities elsewhere: street crime, gang affiliation, and sexual promiscuity. These rewards, in behaviorist psychological terms, become the available positive reinforcements, surrogates for those that could under other circumstances be positive reinforcements grounded in knowledge and familial love. But when you ain’t got nothin’ goin’ on at school or at home, you take your satisfaction where you can and become inured to positively reinforced behaviors that have unfortunate consequences for society.


Under these circumstances, the behavior may not be correctable without an extremely well-designed and persistently delivered program of educational retraining, counseling in ethical behavior, and the rewards accrued when the person receives the positive reinforcements of accomplishment, praise, and material reward (as in remuneration under circumstances of employment) after terminating antisocial patterns of behavior and living instead according to socially desirable (and more morally satisfying) patterns of behavior.


The professional robber needs exhortations to do better, be more moral, act with more public conscience and consciousness--- but in the critical context of human praise and material benefit for doing better, acting morally, and acting with more public conscience and consciousness.


For the person has no free will simply to do better. The person must be positively reinforced (given rewards), negatively reinforced (be the beneficiary of terminated aversive consequences), or punished (receive the aversive consequences for undesired behavior). The person has a capacity for cognitively reasoned decision-making in the knowledge of behavioral consequences for exercising certain options; but has no actual free will in the absence of operant conditioning productive of better and more satisfying behavior.


Thus we have the irony that people are actually more in control of their destinies when they understand that they have no free will; rather, they have the cognitive capacity, given enough information about their lives and their potential to make decisions likely to give them certain expected rewards--- and that particular rewards lead to behaviors with more satisfying outcomes for both themselves and for society.


We therefore actually gain a certain enhanced control over our cognitive processes when we acknowledge that we have no free will.


As to our professional robber, he is unlikely--- given the current abilities of our system to redirect his pattern of behavior via a sophisticated and adroitly administered program of behavior modification--- to change his behavior. In the absence of such a program, the only alternative will be to keep recycling him through the judicial and penal systems as we await that day when we as human beings become more sophisticated in the knowledge of why we do what we do, ironically taking more cognitive control over our destinies when we acknowledge the abiding reality:


There is no such thing as free will.