Rob Henderson completely messes up when discussing free will

Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as  “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.

Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, as you can tell from the title of his Substack post below.  But his thesis is not only wrong, but a dog’s breakfast of a meal.  For one thing, he never defines free will.  And he makes a ton of statements about it that are simply full of holes.  I could write a substantive essay about how Henderson’s short piece is misguided, but it doesn’t deserve that. So what I’ll do is put his statements in bold, indented type, and put my responses in plain text flush left. Truly, I don’t understand why this guy doesn’t understand.

Let me start by saying that, as always, I conceive of free will as “contracausal” or “I could have done otherwise” free will, explained as the ability of a person in a given situation, with all the molecules of the universe poised at the moment of decision/action, to have done more than one thing. It does appear that Henderson has that notion, too, but he doesn’t say so.

And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.

Click the headline to read:

Here we go. Strap yourselves in, as it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

No determinist I know pretends that these two situations are equal. They’re “equal” only in that a man breaks his wife’s nose when she’s asleep. In one case it’s an accident, in the other a deliberate act. Although we may not be able to find out which is which, no determinist I know thinks that the situations are equivalent in how they should be dealt with. If we could find a way to distinguish them, then of course the abusive man should be punished.

Here Henderson paints a misleading view of what determinism is, and what the consequences of various actions are in light of determinism.  A man who breaks his wife’s nose may be likely to abuse her further, or abuse someone else, and for that reason alone should be punished. This sanction does not apply to an accidental blow, which does not come from malice and isn’t likely to recur.

More confusion:

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Well, we are spectators in our own lives, in that we know not the wellsprings from whence our thoughts and actions derive.  But no determinist is trying to blur the consequences of disparate actions, arising in different ways, that have similar consequences. The rest Henderson gets right, but the bit about determinists “blurring” the causes of actions is dead wrong.  And Henderson still hasn’t given us a cause of an action that does not ultimately rest on material objects like neurons. Does he believe in “ghostly” free will? Does he think that at a given instant, we can make more than one choice? He doesn’t tell us.

The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has spent much of his career arguing against this type of thinking. In his recent book, “The Science of Free Will,” he claims that free will evolved because it was required to live in complex social systems. Culture works only if people can restrain themselves. They must follow rules when no one is watching. They must delay gratification. They must make plans. They must explain themselves. They must know that actions today bring consequences tomorrow.

Mr. Baumeister’s key move is to treat free will as a matter of degree. Some actions are freer than others. A man ordering dinner from a menu is freer than a man being robbed at gunpoint. A sober adult planning his career is freer than a drunk teenager in a parking lot at 2 a.m.

If free will “evolved”, then it must be material, for only material things are subject to biological evolution. Does Henderson mean that the feeling that we have free will evolved? I’m willing to believe that, but the existence of something immaterial affecting thoughts and “decisions”, which is what contracausal free demands, cannot have evolved.

As for degrees of freedom, that won’t wash, either. The man robbed at gunpoint is determined by his genes and environment to hand over his wallet, for he’s evolved to not want to die.  And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics.  Coerced action seems less free, but still involves determinism, just as with the man who chooses a burger rather than salmon (that would be me).

But hold on folks, for here comes the “luxury belief” part:

The determinists would have us drop these distinctions. But notice the asymmetry in their position. They rarely treat themselves as automatons. They also reserve agency for the educated reader, who is presumed to have the ability to redesign legal systems and reimagine institutions. Free will for me, but not for thee.

The deniers of free will haven’t improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it. The man who waits for his wife to fall asleep becomes harder to condemn, because somewhere in his past there is a reason. There is always a reason, but that isn’t the same as an excuse or justification.

Whaaaaat??? From what I know of Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the paragons of determinism, they do indeed see themselves as automatons. Sam Harris has even used the image of a puppet to represent a determinist, with genes and environment pulling the strings. Wherever Henderson got his idea that the “elite” determinists think they have free will while others don’t, it’s a blockheaded and palpably wrong idea.

Now why, you might ask, do the “elite” embrace free will for themselves but tell others that they don’t have free will? Apparently because all of us elitists want to parade their virtue by arguing that criminals should be treated more leniently—a consequence that Henderson sees as inevitably following from belief in determinism:

Arguments against free will often carry a hidden moral assumption. If no one truly chooses his actions, then no one deserves blame. Criminals should be treated more leniently because they couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judgment is redirected away from the criminal and toward the person who chooses to condemn him.

Notice, though, the asymmetry. The determinist grants agency to himself and a handful of other anointed beings. They can choose to become more enlightened. They can exert agency to redesign the criminal-justice system, revise social norms and build more compassionate institutions. Criminals and everyone else, meanwhile, are reduced to billiard balls.

This is presented as humane, but it’s condescending. It strips people of agency in the name of compassion. And once a person is no longer regarded as capable of governing himself, it becomes easier to justify governing him without his consent. If people are merely carried along by forces they can’t understand or control, then perhaps their preferences need not be taken seriously either.

The scientific and philosophical arguments about determinism are worth considering. But they should be separated from the moral conclusions that are so often attached to them. Too many deniers of free will smuggle in an exception for themselves. The unenlightened masses are automatons. The enlightened few, though, are free enough to decide what to do with them.

As I’ve said many times, and I believe Sam and Robert would agree, yes, people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up.  You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want. (Note that the elites seem to be denigrated for designing a more humane justice system, which does follow from accepting determinsim, but also that Henderson thinks we reduce criminals to “billiard balls.” What happened to all the other non-elites who aren’t criminals?)

Determinists don’t strip people of free will in the name of compassion; they strip people of free will because what is what, as far as we know, the databsuggest. Compassion may indeed follow from realizing that nobody makes a free-will choice to do good or ill, but again I emphasize that this doesn’t mean that criminals should be free from punishment or treatment. And of course we have to take people’s preferences seriously, because those preferences are coded in their genes and neurons, put there by their inheritance or their environment (environment, of course, can change people’s preferences and their apparent “choices.” And it is disrespectful to ignore their preferences: “No Sam, you don’t want the steak; you want the sirloin. I know!”

This is all an attempt by Henderson, I think, to shoehorn free will as a “luxury belief”, a belief entertained by the “enlightened few” who are able to follow a scientific conclusion to its social consequences. But you don’t have to be “enlightened” to ponder the idea and, I hope, to realize that there is no such thing as contracausal free will. (There is of course “compatiblist free will”, but that is a semantic trick described by Sam Harris as the idea that “a puppet loves his strings.”)

And how, pray tell, does the rejection of free will promulgated by the elites “inflict costs in the lower classes”? And how does it stamp us as “elites”?

I swear, this is one of the most misguided and erroneous things I’ve read on free will. I suppose that because “luxury beliefs” are Henderson’s leitmotif, and apparently his Big Contribution to social discourse, he has to grab free will with his tentacles and drag that “luxury belief” into the Tent of Philosophy.

Why did I waste a couple of hours reading this stuff and trying to show its problems? Because I had no choice, of course.