We exist in a universe that is a chain of causes and effects, with effects inevitably turning into causes for more effects, and so on. Humans are, like everything that has come before and that will follow, both a cause and an effect. As information enters consciousness, that that awareness should become a cause for effects like intention shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

That we are beings trapped in a web of causes and effects is an ultimate argument against free will. But we are proximate creatures. There are good reasons we cannot defend ourselves from criminal charges by arguing that we had no say in our conception or the Big Bang and are therefore ultimately not responsible for our actions. Free will is about what we do or don’t possess while we are alive, not whether we had any choice about entering the world in the first place.

There’s no intuitively obvious place to put the brackets around concepts like determinism and free will. But if we start assessing agency at the moment I “decided” to write this article or to accept a new job offer a few weeks ago, instead of the moment the universe started around 15 billion years ago or the night in 1968 my parents were feeling particularly amorous, the arguments for strict determinism blur quickly. I don’t have article-writing or job-offer genes, and saying that I suddenly felt like writing about free will because my blood sugar had spiked doesn’t really bring any clarity to the question either. Other people feel like going for a jog or take a trip to the mall to do a little shopping when they’re feeling energized. Why an article on free will in my case?

That our capacity for self-control diminishes when we are hungry or tired doesn’t weaken the case for agency either, even if it usually does come in the form of free won’t. The state of our blood chemistry at the critical moment certainly matters. How we react to low glucose levels or high levels of adrenaline provide evidence that self-control and highly conscious states require our body to be functioning in a particular optimal condition, but that’s a far cry from proof that blood chemistry determines our actions.

Our brain is a glucose consuming machine. It’s not in its interest to waste energy resisting a box of chocolates when it’s running low on the very fuel it needs to effectively exercise self-control. Restraint demands more brain work (willpower) than just going with the flow. If the box of chocolates will help you resist the pack of cigarettes, reaching for the chocolates can actually be a good choice even if it’s not the ideal one.

I, like Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and others, am a firm materialist. I have yet to hear anyone articulate how a force liberated from the laws of physics could even function. To say something like a soul is responsible for free will without offering any sort of description of what a soul is, where it came from, or how it acts upon our brain is just a cowardly evasion of the issues arising from consciousness. Arguing a soul rather than a biological entity is conscious merely moves the problem of consciousness and questions regarding free will to another realm. It doesn’t dispose of them.

If free will exists to any degree, it will have emerged as a property of a materialist universe. We need not default to some sort of ill-conceived dualism or deny we live within a universe governed by physical laws to make room for it. It could very well be that because each cause is itself the effect of another cause, it’s impossible to distinguish where intention begins and internal biological and outside environmental influences end.

Even free will skeptics like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky spend a great deal of time making ethical arguments about what we should do. Should implies can, which is very different than must. In the opening chapter of his book, The Moral Landscape, Harris states “I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want — and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible.” (Italics included in original)

If, in fact, Harris believes we have absolutely no control over what we do, let alone what we want, his argument regarding science’s ability to contribute substantively to moral issues — an argument with which I largely agree — isn’t merely dubious, it’s self-contradictory. Plants or animals that lack any capacity to develop informed intentions regarding how they are going to behave in the future are by definition amoral creatures incapable of giving any meaningful consideration to what they ought to do. In such a world, Harris’ “moral landscape” isn’t made up of peaks and valleys; it’s perfectly flat and featureless.

Robert Sapolsky, like Harris, has gone on record stating he doesn’t believe humans have anything like free will. Yet in the final chapter of his book, Behave, Sapolsky also can’t resist reaching ethical conclusions when it comes to how knowledge of our implicit biases should shape our actions. He writes, “revealing implicit biases indicates where to focus your monitoring to lessen their impact. This notion can be applied to all the realms of our behaviors being shaped by something implicit, subliminal, interoceptive, unconscious, subterranean — and where we then post-hoc rationalize our stance.” Sapolsky concludes, “For example, every judge should learn that judicial decisions are sensitive to how long it’s been since they ate.”

Sapolsky and Harris can’t have it both ways. While it’s true, judges tend to issue their harshest sentences just before lunch, you can’t tell a judge they should mitigate the effects of low blood sugar by having a glass of lemonade or a candy bar handy by no later than 11:00 AM in one breath and use the fact that low blood sugar leads to harsher sentences as proof people have no free will in the next. If a judge’s knowledge of his or her implicit bias can truly lead to choices that will minimize or eliminate the bias, isn’t acting on this knowledge an example of the moral exercise of free will? Is a judge with normal blood sugar in a better position to make wise rulings probabilistically speaking or isn’t she? Is a judge capable of intentionally regulating their blood sugar toward this end or not?

If by free will we mean absolute control over ourselves and our environment, then I agree, we don’t have it. But if by free will we mean something more subtle — the capacity to intentionally influence our world, even if only a little bit — then the answer is at worst a qualified maybe. People are complex creatures, prohibited from ever gaining an outside objective view of themselves. We are both cause and effect, both subject and object. As animals with a consciousness, we are both determined and intentional at once. Just how much our intention matters may be impossible to know, but it does matter.

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