A few days ago I got a “pingback” from a site on the “Skeptic Society Magazine,” showing that someone had linked to my post that criticized ID advocate Michael Egnor’s video defense of libertarian free will. I went to the Skeptic Magazine site, and, as you’ll see, became puzzled. First of all, I’d never heard of the Skeptic Society. Here’s a bit from the Society about its mission and the magazine
Skeptic Society is an independent, secular online magazine dedicated to original ideas, free thought, and freedom of speech. We regularly publish articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, religion, book reviews, science, and technology. We welcome any material that is truly thought-provoking.
We are not affiliated with Skeptic Magazine or The Skeptics Society. This blog started as half joke and half serious notion about promoting scientific articles that are worth reading.
We don’t have membership, and we don’t discriminate no matter what political orientation you may have. If you have a valid point that is rational, we would love to hear about it.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to publish here.
And then I read the pinbacked article in that magazine, which you can also read by clicking below. As you can see, the piece says that it’s “written by Jenni Sidey”. (I’ve archived the article here).
This article is apparently the first in a four-part defense of Egnor’s talk and a critique of my piece I posted on my website. What struck me immediately, beyond its misleading arguments, was that it was written in the first person, as if it was produced by Egnor himself. I goes on and on using the first-person “I” in the response. Here are a couple of excerpts showing that:
University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.
. . .I offer four strong arguments to support that view:
- Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
- Denial of free will is self-refuting.
- Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
- Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.
Those are Egnor’s arguments, not “Jenni Sidey’s”. At any rate, the first part of “Sidey’s” four-part critique maintains that I don’t “walk my talk” when it comes to free will. “Sidey’s” accusation is that although I have argued that you can still have morality without libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will, that view makes me a hypocrite, for nobody can be held “morally responsible” unless you have free will. From “Sidey’s” piece (indented):
First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life. Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.
Apparently “Jenni Sidey” (you’ll see the reason for the quotes shortly) hasn’t read my own work on free will. I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible. That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.
You can also have a morality without determinism, for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad. In my view, you are “immoral” if you kill someone without a good reason like self-defense. That means you’re doing something that society deems not only bad but worthy of punishment, but you don’t have to have made a libertarian decision to kill or not to kill. And society enforces its “morality” through punishment and reward, both of which can change people’s behavior, whether they be the person at issue issue or onlookers.
Changed behavior is also perfectly compatible with determinism: if you’re rewarded for good behavior or punished for bad—or see someone else undergo these consequences—you will be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things. I’m sure that “Jenni Sidey” would agree that rewarding dogs for good behavior or punishing them for bad behavior will, in the future, change their behavior; and yet I don’t think that “Sidey”, being religious (see below), would say that dogs have free will.
I explain this again because “Sidey” attacks me for going after people who do bad things and praising people for doing good things, even though I deny free will. That, “Sidey” thinks, is me not “walking the talk.” “Jenni” gives an example:
In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.
But my chastising someone for hitting my car does not mean I’ve sneakily “affirmed free will ,” nor did I say it at the time. If you read my post, I say nothing about free will or morality. Instead, I talk about selfish and altruistic behaviors, though I could have used “immoral” in the way I construe above. It makes no difference, for what I call “selfish”, “altruistic” or “immoral” has nothing to do with libertarian free will. “Sidey” continues:
Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.
Note the “I” in the first sentence, which seems to come not from a “Jenni Sidey” but from Egnor himself. Once again, if I, Jerry, criticize or praise someone, that doesn’t mean I believe in libertarian free will. I may not have been able to do something other than criticize or praise, but merely deeming something good or bad is not a “choice” I made freely. I had no such choice. I am constituted so as to defend actions I think are salubrious and damn those that I deem harmful. I do not understand why “Sidey” doesn’t get this—it’s not rocket science.
Anyway, you have probably concluded that “Jenni Sidey” is none other than Michael Egnor himself, perhaps writing under a pseudonym. And you’d be partly right: all the words in that article do indeed come from Egnor, as I found out when I got a second pingback from the Discovery Institute site Mind Matters—this time to a piece identical to “Sidey’s” at the Skeptic Society Magazine site, but written by Egnor himself (click screenshot to read:
So yes, Egnor did write the talk at the Skeptic Society Magazine site. But who, then, is Jenni Sidey? Is she a pseudonym for Egnor himself, writing at Skeptic Society Magazine, or was the article stolen by Skeptic Magazine and given another title?
It turns out it’s the second possibility. First, there is no record on the Internet of a Jenni Sidey, though there is a Canadian astronaut named Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, but this is clearly not the person who wrote the Skeptic Magazine article—and several other articles in the magazine on unrelated topics, so it’s clear that the author is not a real person, much less the Canadian astronaut. But is it a pseudonym for Egnor?
I don’t think so. What seems to be the case is that Skeptic Society Magazine is simply plagiarizing articles from other places and changing the author to a nonexistent “Jenni Sidey.” That is outright plagiarism: attributing Egnor’s words to someone else (“written by Jenni Sidey”). That’s why I archived the article as well as the one below, because it’s proof that Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism.
You can see the plagiarism simply by Googling sentences from Jenni Sidey’s articles and seeing where they came from. Here’s another article that was plagiarized; it came from the site Artnews.com and you can read it by clicking on the link below:
Here are the first two paragraphs of Vollaard’s article:
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
And it’s easy to find that Lua Vollaard is a real person. But Jenni Sidey, on the Skeptic Society Magazine site, has plagiarized Vollaard’s piece, too. Click below to see the plagiarism, which I’ve archived here. Note that “Sidey” has changed the title of the article, but the content is the same:
“Sidey’s” first two paragarphs are identical to those of Vollaard’s piece. This is big-time plagiarism, attributing Vollaard’s words to someone else.
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
Note again the authorship: “written by Jenni Sidey.”
What can we conclude? First, that Egnor is not writing at a different place using a pseudonym. Second, that “Jenni Sidey” is a pseudonym—for someone who re-publishes articles stolen from other places, and attributing them to an author at Skeptic Society Magazine. (I haven’t checked “Jenni’s” other articles, but you can bet that they are also stolen from elsewhere and given Jenni’s name as an author.)
The upshot: Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism. Nowhere does it say that it’s republishing articles from other sites and giving them a new author. Real authors, like Egnor and Vollaard, should go after the magazine for stealing their words. Readers might want to investigate the website and see if other authors’ words are being stolen.
And of course this form of plagiarism is IMMORAL, whether or not you believe in libertarian free will. The magazine should first admit what it did, and then vanish.
I’m not sure how “pingbacks” work, but it seems strange to me that PCC(E) would get one–and not Michael Egnor. Or that he did get one but not respond to the plagiarism. Anyway, a fascinating piece, as is usual from our web host.
I got the Jenni Sidey pingback first, and started drafting a post after its weirdness struck me. The Egnor one came a day later. I don’t know how these things are timed, but it’s clear who wrote it and who stole it.
A pingback means another post or article gives a link to your post, and you get a notice when this happens. It’s the blog equivalent of you getting a notice that your paper or book was cited or listed in the references in a published paper.
Yes, I know that. What puzzles me is that I got Jenni Sidey’s pingback before I got Egnor’s since Egnor’s was presumably published first.
Any thoughts on the thinly veiled “Jenni Sidey” for Genocide? A rather odd pseudonym, no?
Good catch! I would say it was aimed at me, except Jenni Sidey has written several pieces on a variety of subjects that have no connection, even imaginary, to genocide.
Plagiarism is immoral, as you say. The brain of this writer—whosever brain it was—comprises neurons and synapses that were wired according to its genes and to the stimuli it received from its environment. These are the inputs that wire every brain. Sadly, this brain’s inputs generated an immoral output.
Without addressing the arguments themselves (no time), I found that article offensive in the extreme. It is an attempt at corrupting real scientific and philosophical discussion, and its plagiarism alone reveals that fact.
The “Skeptic Society” magazine acknowledges that even its title is a near-plagiarism of the Skeptics Society magazine’s. And I thought mainstream academic publishing was (partly) a racket. Caveat lector.
As a compatibilist I agree that, yes, there is “morality” under determinism, and I agree that, yes, we have “responsibility” for our actions, but don’t agree that we do not have “moral responsibility” under determinism.
It seems more straightforward to reject the idea that “moral responsibility” requires that our choices be un-caused, and so interpret it as simply the combination of “responsibility” (as defined by Jerry above) and “morality” (as defined by Jerry above).
If we’re happy to reject the idea that “morality” requires uncaused choosing, why not also reject the idea that “moral responsibility” requires uncaused choosing?
(Though as I’ve said before, the difference between myself and a hard-incompatibilist such as Jerry is largely semantics about how we interpret concepts.)
“Skeptic Society Magazine – for honest conversations”
I think all the Skeptic Society Magazine “authors” are AIs. This one called “Daniella Wilson”
https://dev.akhiles.co.uk/author/daniella/
just posted about a footballer and his girlfriend. The article is stolen from the celebrity tabloid site Hello!.
https://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/909615/lucia-loi-update-battle-health-condition/
Both were posted today. The SSM post includes the same typo “girld” (instead of “girls”) that’s in the original Hello! article. [Aside: I have now invoked Muphry’s Law…]
This one called “Jose Betancourt” reposted an article from The Atlantic that even includes “The Atlantic” as part of the title of the post. Again both were posted the same day (May 23).
https://dev.akhiles.co.uk/ode-to-miller-lite-the-atlantic/
All the site content is like this. They scrape and repost the accompanying photos from the original source as well. There are no ads on the site that I could see so IDK what the point is.
[Sadly I’m in moderation I guess for including two links 🙁 ]
One doesn’t need AI to scrape and repost.
And frankly, LLM output is much better than that dreck. Here’s a chat:
So here’s a ‘being’ that makes choices, and acknowledges its lack of free willies, contra (2) above.
And the LLM in ‘Reasoning’ mode shows that it ‘knows’ that it is making meaningful choices:
On an average day, I’m usually not that self-reflective. 🙂
And here’s the LLM’s non-waffly answer to the substantive question:
One doesn’t need AI to scrape and repost.
On an average day, I’m usually not that self-reflective. 🙂
And here’s the LLM’s non-waffly answer to the substantive question:
One doesn’t need AI to scrape and repost.
And frankly, LLM output is much better than that dreck. Here’s a chat:
So here’s a ‘being’ that makes choices, and acknowledges its lack of free willies, contra (2) above.
And the LLM in ‘Reasoning’ mode shows that it ‘knows’ that it is making meaningful choices:
On an average day, I’m usually not that self-reflective. 🙂
And here’s the LLM’s non-waffly answer to the substantive question — Why do humans say they have it:
Not half bad, eh?
[Oops, c 600 words. Maybe treat it as 2 posts? 🙂]
[Damn. The repeated section is my bad; not the LLM’s.]
Sorry, but you made a post that was too long. I’ll allow it, but I don’t count an overly long post as “two posts” because I am not stupid. But please keep the word count down in the future, thanks.
The problem I see here is the distinction between “self” and “causation”, as if the brain that makes decisions is something other than “you”. I would say it IS you.
Your definition of compatibilism as “free will means acting according to one’s reasons and character” is spot on as far as I am concerned. This contrasts with, say, someone acting totally out of character – e.g. exploding in rage due to a disease process such as a tumor stimulating the amygdala. In such cases the brain generates behavior, but the brain is diseased, which is different from behavior generated by a non-diseased brain. The law of course makes such distinctions.
What a weird site.
The website https://dev.akhiles.co.uk/ is a subdomain of https://akhiles.co.uk/.
The home page for the latter says: “Spearheading the Integration of AI and Content Creators in Digital Marketing”. The site is run by someone named Akhiles.
The subdomain “dev” looks to me like an AI project that Akhiles is working on that may not have been intended to be public. It certainly shouldn’t be public as it is obviously plagiarizing many authors.
As for as Egnor’s 4 “strong” arguments for free will: they seem to me to range from very weak to incoherent.
How bracing. I wonder if “Jenni” (Egnor in a dress “at home” maybe? -hehe) is actually attacking Sapolsky’s view of free will? (it is not an area of my particular interest). AFAIK his/her/zir’s criticisms don’t align with your view of free will.
Having enemies is part of life. You’re famous, kinda a big shot, you’re going to have your critics.
I’m not famous and even I have public enemies – most have been stupid or deranged and come from my opinions/column.
Don’t take it to heart – we love you here boss.
best,
D.A.
NYC
“for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad.”
I’m curious how this resists the slide into cultural relativism. We can define “society” more broadly to mean “humanity” or we can fall back on a presumably evidence-based standard from evolutionary psychology or elsewhere. We can critique various societal norms and assess how they contribute to well-being. But at the end of the day, we still face the questions of “Whose evidence? Whose rationality? Whose idea of flourishing? Whose society?”
If Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and the Iranian theocrats were to repopulate a post-apocalyptic world, the answers given and enforced would be far different from our liberal intuitions. Is it possible for the minority to be “moral” on these issues and the majority of human beings “immoral”? Wouldn’t that presume a knowledge of the “moral” that precedes the social? Will it matter if the powerful ones are “immoral”? Why should we care, in any case, about the “suffering” or “misery” of others at the hands of the powerful? I am not here advancing cosmic moral truth. I am asking why suffering, well-being, and broad human flourishing should matter more than power and the advance of the few.
I have read related posts here over the years with interest, but I have never been satisfied that the above questions are answered conclusively or convincingly. Much of the debate strikes me as intricate verbal constructions to justify what one already believes; it plays well for those within the same frame. That’s not an accusation or a condemnation, but it is evidence, I think, that you will have the ignorant, the indifferent, the disagreeable, the unconvinced, and the immoral with you always. The question of what to do with such people as defined by a given society is always the stumbling block upon which regimes topple into atrocities.
My disposition is not to seek certainty on such matters. That, of course, has its own failings. Then again, I have a firm sense of “atrocities,” but I do wonder why it isn’t shared and how it is that I apparently won the nature/nurture lottery that put me on the “moral” side of the question.
I do not have a universal standard of morality, which of couse differs among societies. When I use it myself, which I do not often do, I am referring too America. But you can still judge the different moral codes of societies, and say that some are likely better than others. For example, I would guess that Afghan society would be better if they thought it was okay for women to go to school. .As for why the suffering of others should matter; read Pinker. Or John Rawls.
But “asking why suffering, well-being, and broad human flourishing should matter more than power and the advance of the few” is asking for a cosmic moral truth; as indicated by the S-word. No?
Not really. It “should” matter because the great majority of us don’t want our heads bashed in, so we agree — at least in principle — to not bash our neighbour’s head in. There is no cosmic “should”, it is a matter of what we, as homo sapiens, desire and reasonably argue and decide we prefer.
Except that many groups of H. sapiens sapiens desire and reasonably argue and decide that they should bash in the heads of other such groups. Any universal pragmatic “shoulds” seem to require universal desires and preferences, which are not readily forthcoming. So ISTM the only universal “shoulds” can not be pragmatic, but are some sort of metaphysical cosmic morality.
Well, yes, perhaps any “universal shoulds” would have to be some sort of “metaphysical cosmic morality,” it’s just that there is precious little evidence or convincing rationale for there being any such thing. And those who profess to be informed about such a “metaphysical cosmic morality” disagree among themselves to a huge degree.
Re. “many groups of H. sapiens sapiens desire and reasonably argue and decide that they should bash in the heads of other such groups.” Well, I don’t know that they “reasonably argue and decide that they should” do so, but they certainly have done so traditionally due to a multitude of reasons. And of course, it is a reasonable thing to defend oneself against someone who seeks to bash in your head, but not reasonable to launch such an unprovoked attack.
No. I am asking why, within a given moral frame (tradition, practice, etc.), or in the competition between them, one value should take priority over another. You are treating any normative claim as automatically demanding universality. I am not.
It’s long been argued by some that modern liberalism is a secularized form of Christianity. It’s interesting to see where those remnants appear. Jared is closer to the mark with his pragmatic justification, but I wonder whether he doesn’t step toward a different type of universalism. (That is common within liberalism and from those who invoke evolutionary psychology.) In this mix of social-contract theory and evolutionary survival, I still don’t see the bridge between “is” and “ought.”
Jerry acknowledges a lack of universality, but his recommendation to read Rawls pulls the discussion back within a certain strain of the liberal tradition. Rawls has created an elaborate structure that stacks the deck in favor of modern liberal-egalitarian morality. His is a sophisticated form of question begging. That’s less a knock against Rawls than a realization that it is incredibly difficult to step outside of our traditions, especially as unrecognized assumptions that flow from a given tradition are often treated as neutral, self-evident, or rationally necessary.
Within a given ethical/moral frame, values do bump into each other and the conflicts get resolved (more or less well) by processes provided by the frame.
The devil is (sometimes literally) in the the competition between frames. Without sufficiently common resolution processes between those frames (not necessarily universal among all frames) then there can not be a consensual resolution. (The near-universal non-consensual process is to subjugate / banish / kill the Other.)
Pluralism is difficult; the more plural the more difficult.
“ You can also have a morality without determinism”. I think it should be “without free will.”
Yes, a mistake. I’ve fixed it, thanks.