Can we save the world without free will?

Many articles on environmental topics are secular homilies, bristling with shoulds and shouldn’ts. Don’t use a gasoline-powered leaf blower . Buy an electric car instead of a gas-powered car. Eat organically grown food. Use less water. Put solar panels on your roof. Recycle your old stuff, and be sure to put it in the right bin. If you don’t behave right, we will all go to climate hell.

But what if we humans actually don’t have free will—the ability to act without constraints of circumstances, necessity, or fate? Is it possible to organize mass behavioral change in its absence? Those are the questions I’m asking myself as I read Robert Sapolsky’s new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will .

Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. You may know him as the author of the bestselling Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst , which summarizes what science has revealed about why people do what they do.

In Determined, Sapolsky takes on possibly the thorniest question in philosophy, psychology, and behavioral science: does free will exist? Having spent decades thinking about this question in the light of evidence from the relevant disciplines, Sapolsky has landed firmly in the “no” camp. And his book makes the case with thoroughness and style. I won’t try to reproduce the details of his argument here; if you’re not up for a slow walk through a 400-page tome, here’s an article that offers a good summary.

Sapolsky is a clear thinker and an accessible writer, and he’s ideally qualified to ruminate on the question of whether free will exists. Nevertheless, his argument against free will has to swim upstream. Most people, including many philosophers and psychologists, refuse to share his view. Even when their own evidence and reasoning take them to the verge of concluding there’s no free will, they typically stop short. “Nah,” they say, “there’s got to be free will somewhere, even if we can’t find actual evidence for it.” Religions and criminal justice systems are built on the assumption that we each have a little decider perched in a control room in our skull, capable of overriding hereditary, environmental, and social influences, and signaling our bodies to do the right thing. We choose our behavior, and we therefore deserve the rewards and punishments that society bestows as a result.

Indeed, if you want to make even mild-mannered people so angry that they shout at you, just start a conversation about free will over dinner and take Sapolsky’s position. In discussions with friends and colleagues about Determined, I’ve yet to find anyone who fully agrees with the book’s unwavering position. Maybe humanity’s widespread belief in free will is determined by tradition and social necessity—in which case Sapolsky’s dissent could be an example of free will in action. Ugh! This whole subject gets wickedly convoluted the more you think about it.

Sapolsky describes at length the difficulty in showing that a little decider is really there. Quantum indeterminacy, complexity theory, and chaos theory have been proposed as possible ports through which a decider can enter into our neurological machinery, but Sapolsky finds no escape hatch from determinacy in these abstruse fields. We do what we do because of where we come from, what’s happened to us, and our momentary brain chemistry.

Nevertheless, Sapolsky writes, “. . . my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.” Since the author has, in effect, given me (as a reader) an out, I prefer to remain agnostic on the question of whether there’s any free will at all in the absolute sense—if only to keep from alienating friends. Toward the end of this essay I’ll explain my agnosticism further. But I agree with Sapolsky that a great deal of what we do individually and as societies is determined, and that the hunt for biological or behavioral evidence for the source of intent—free will—is frustratingly difficult and complex.

Does Society as a Whole Have Free Will?

I’ve been inching toward the “no free will” view for the last decade or two, but by a different route than Sapolsky, and without the benefit of his immense knowledge of neuroscience. His argument is pitched mostly on the scale of the individual, via behavioral studies, genetics, and brain function. He would argue that your choice of whether to have cereal or eggs for breakfast this morning was determined by a long chain of constraints starting with biological evolution and ending with your momentary mix of neurotransmitters.

I’ve taken a societal-scale route, as I’ve tried to better understand why humans adopted agriculture, hierarchies of inequality, colonialism, and fossil-fueled industrialism. Many other writers, like me, see these as ultimately disastrous developments, and have tried to boil them down to one or more bad ideas that mistakenly caught on with certain people back along the way. In The Chalice and the Blade , Riane Eisler proposed that some folks living in the Near East thousands of years ago chose the idea of “power over,” or the “dominator model,” as opposed to the then-universal “power with,” or “partnership model.” The rest is bloody history. Similarly, Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael , attributed our species’ fateful shift toward animal domestication, and then agriculture and war, to the rise of “takers” over “leavers.” But why did these perilous ideas and behaviors take hold? Why there, why then? Presumably, these people’s free will led them astray.

No, in my view there was an inevitability to it all. Once this happened, that almost surely followed. Given our species’ linguistic and tool-making abilities, and a bit of help from a stabilized climate, it was certain that we humans would occupy more and more territory. Then, once tribes started bumping into each other and competing for choice foraging land, it was inevitable that, in some places at least, weapons would become more sophisticated and groups would get bigger and more hierarchical. Then the biggest groups with the best weapons would overtake the rest. Add capitalism (itself the result of a determined causal chain) and fossil fuels, and soon we have overpopulation, a massive toxic chemicals crisis , and climate change. It didn’t take “bad” people to do any of this. All it took was “good” people responding to necessity using the mindsets that past experience had given them.

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