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Evolved, Not Causa Sui: An Embodiment Critique of Freedom and Responsibility

I wish to highlight and challenge two of Banja’s (2015) conclusions—one general and one specific. In general, Banja sets out to reject the abstracted, analytic approaches to the free will debate in favor of his evolutionary approach. From this he draws the specific conclusion that we can be held personally responsible under an evolutionary account of freedom. However, Banja ignores the embodiment critique that focuses on the fact that we are the results of processes outside of our control. I show here that such a source-based approach stands up to his general methodological concern and yet renders unjustified claims of personal responsibility. Banja notes, quite rightly, that the standard, conceptual analysis technique of answering questions of libertarian free will is set up to fail. This disembodied, decontextualized approach will get us nowhere precisely because the humans who are supposed to possess free will are in fact embodied beings whose lives are determined by context and bioevolutionary processes. To ignore all of this is indeed a significant shortcoming for any libertarian account of freedom. But Banja’s critique also skewers the hard determinist, noting that determinists often focus on questions of whether the agent could have done otherwise in order to challenge freedom and responsibility. The abstracted nature of this approach is unhelpful because it asks us to imagine whether we could in fact have done otherwise under identical conditions—something that is not only impossible to replicate (and, perhaps, to imagine) but also completely out of touch with how people actually think about freedom and responsibility. Banja then proposes an evolutionary account of freedom that seemingly rejects the terms of the debate as they have been historically outlined. But the focus on whether agents could have chosen otherwise under identical conditions (or, “could have acted or chosen otherwise under identical conditions,” CHACO-UIC, as I borrow from Banja) is not the only relevant challenge to freedom and responsibility. In order for his project to succeed, Banja needs to answer to a different concern common to this debate. In a manner that Banja would decry, Galen Strawson systematically and analytically demonstrates that we are not the source of ourselves, that we are not free to choose to be the way we are, and that we are thereby not ultimately free or responsible for anything (Strawson 1986; 2002). While Banja might respond by rejecting this argument on methodological grounds, I next demonstrate that the source-based critique is rife with embodied themes, highly contextualized, and even well aligned with folk intuitions at crucial junctures, thus meeting Banja’s apparent criteria for appropriate argumentation. Although the conceptual analysis of freedom may be decontextualized and disembodied to a fault, the source-based approach stands up to contextual analysis. And although CHACO-UIC seems to bear little resemblance to what the folk actually care about when it comes to freedom and responsibility, the approach I point to here aligns quite well with commonsense intuitions and yet still undermines the very responsibility we pretheoretically imagine. I first demonstrate that a source-based account takes seriously the embodied, contextual features of our actual lives. The core of Strawson’s basic argument for the absence of ultimate responsibility runs as follows (Strawson 1994; 2002). When you act deliberately, you act because of the way you are. Thus, in order to be considered free and ultimately responsible and deserving, you must be ultimately responsible with regard to the way you are. However, you cannot be ultimately responsible with regard to the way you are, because you are not the source of yourself. Therefore, you cannot be free, responsible, and deserving. To see this, we can simply ask what an argument for such freedom and responsibility might look like. Human beings would have to be in some way causa sui. That would clearly contradict everything we know about the generation of human beings and would negate everything we observe about environmental and evolutionary effects. Thus, our lack of sourcehood challenges both freedom and responsibility. Banja’s account of freedom and responsibility focuses on choosing smartly instead of choosing freely, and on cognitive flexibility instead of ultimate responsibility. It thereby allows for external and hereditary influences to be part of the picture. But it is precisely these unavoidable factors of our embodied experience upon which source-based critiques draw. We are not self-caused; we are products of evolutionary processes. Evolutionary forces shape who we are, and thus we cannot be responsible for our cognitive flexibility or our ability to choose smartly. When asking what freedom gains by his account, Banja claims that the answer lies in our neural ability to critique and upgrade our responses. We are constantly adapting. Yet Strawson