Consequences of no Free Will - Personal

Earlier posts have addressed the question of whether we have free will, which we resoundingly answer in the negative. We have also looked at the societal consequences of life without free will. In this post we’ll look at the personal implications.

What does life look like without free will? The short answer: instead of guilt, blame, and pride we have compassion and gratitude.

When people talk about free will they mean that every sane human being has the ability to make logical and rational choices between good and evil, and that each of us consciously and freely chooses our every thought and deed.

The first consequence of the belief in free will is guilt: we blame anyone who has done something wrong, including ourselves (shame is self-directed blame). To feel justified in assigning guilt or blame, we must believe that a person is intentionally or premeditatedlybehaving in a wrongful manner.

Free Will = Guilt
Cartoon by Arthur Hancock

They are doing wrong on purpose; they could have behaved differently if they had wanted to. They should have known better. Similarly, the only way we can feel shame is if we feel we could have behaved differently than we did. Free will is the cornerstone of this reasoning. When we believe in free will we think that we are the conscious directors of our behavior.

As the cartoon above illustrates, the conscious control component of guilt is easily demonstrated by imagining how we treat animals as opposed to humans for committing the very same acts.

Imagine that someone rounds a corner and walks right into you. Naturally you feel fully justified in blaming them for their inconsiderate carelessness: You shout, “Watch where the hell you’re going!” You then notice that this thoughtless twerp is wearing dark glasses and carrying the white-tipped cane of the blind. Ouch!

Consequences of No Free Will - Society

What would it mean to live in a world without free will? We can divide the consequences into two main categories: the personal and the social. In this post I’ll address the social, and in a later one I’ll write about what this means for our personal lives (hint: it’s great news).

The first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they contemplate life without free will is crime. The thinking goes something like this: If we don’t freely choose our actions, then we aren’t responsible for what we do and thus we can’t be held accountable. Every criminal will be found “not guilty because of extenuating circumstances beyond his or her control.” Crime will explode and anarchy will reign.

A punitive justice system like the one operating in the United States is entirely based upon the belief in free will. When a person is found to be guilty, the thinking process for that decision goes like this:

1. You know the difference between right and wrong.


2. You have the power to freely choose between right and wrong.


3. You willfully chose wrong.


4. You are, therefore, guilty of willful wrongdoing.


5. You deserve to be punished.

At serial killer/necrophile/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial in Milwaukee, one of the prosecution’s arguments that the defendant was in his “right mind” - sane, aware of the difference between right and wrong, capable of rational choice, possessing free will - was that Mr. Dahmer had demonstrated prudent and rational thinking by using a condom when having sex with the corpses of his victims.