"I didn't do it...it was my brain what did it."

   


In a very real sense, we are all puppets. The combined effects of genes and environment determine all of our actions, so the determinist argument goes.  "I didn't do it, it was my brain!" the recent London rioters who burned down stores might neuroscientifically argue. 


Although it has been known even before Plato that the brain plays a central role in behaviour, this particular argument is rather novel. 


Let's us bring in Shakespeare who rails, in Lear, against the determinist argument: 


"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behaviour, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on." --William Shakespeare 


Do I have an opinion on this? I have sympathy for the  compatibilist view (the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas) and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent. Yes, I am a soft determinist. I do not hold the incompatibilist view (metaphysical free will)  which has never been coherently defined.  In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature (origin) of that motive is determined.
Compatibilists are sometimes accused (by Incompatibilists) of actually being Hard Determinists who are motivated by a lack of a coherent, moral belief system. 
And they (Compatibilists) are sometimes called "soft determinists" pejoratively (William James's term). James accused them of creating a "quagmire of evasion" by stealing the name of freedom to mask their underlying determinism. Immanuel Kant called it a "wretched subterfuge" and "word jugglery".


My view is that there is no free will if determinism is true, but also, that there is no free will if determinism is false. A salient element of the hard incompatibilist view is that the manner in which indeterminism is true (for instance, due to quantum indeterminacies). And this poses just as much of a threat to the presumption of free will as determinism would.


Here is a determinist argument:

1. Some person (qua agent), at some time, could have acted otherwise than she did.
2. Actions are events.
3. Every event has a cause.
4. If an event is caused, then it is causally determined.
5. If an event is an act that is causally determined, then the agent of the act could not have acted otherwise than in the way that she did.

It would be misleading to specify a strict definition of free will since there is probably no single concept of it. Yet a person who is a morally responsible agent is not merely a person who is able to do moral right or wrong. Beyond this, she is accountable for her morally significant conduct. Hence, she is, when fitting, an apt target of moral praise or blame, as well as reward or punishment. Free will is understood as a necessary condition of moral responsibility.
A standard characterization of determinism states that every event is causally necessitated by antecedent events.  if determinism is true, there are (causal) conditions for that person's actions located in the remote past, prior to her birth, that are sufficient for each of her actions.
Borrowing from the Argentine fabulist Borges, let us call this the Garden of Forking Paths model of control. Let us say, as the Garden of Forking Paths suggests, that when a person acts of her own free will, she could have acted otherwise.


Now consider the choice to pick up a cup of coffee as opposed to the event of one's heart beating or one's blood circulating. 


No living thing can be characterised as an automoton and none is an independent, radically free being


The decentred  interactions of the biological world exhibit neither 
mechanical activity nor a multitude of independent minds


The antimonies of the free will/determinism squabble are a futile waste of time.

So what is it free will or determinism? Well, I have an opinion, but like all opinions it is only a theory. My goodness this fence is very uncomfortable.


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