Gregg D. Caruso

How to live well without free will

Most people not only believe in free will, but assume that if we didn’t have it, society would fall apart. They fear that life without free will would have dire consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law. Gregg Caruso challenges these assumptions and argues that belief in free will, rather than being a good thing, actually has a dark side and we would be better off without it. He has developed an ethically defensible and practically workable account of how we can flourish and live well without belief in free will. He maintains that we should be optimistic about the practical implications of free will skepticism—the view that doubts or denies that agents have the kind of free will needed to make the harm of blame and punishment and the benefit of praise and reward deserved and fundamentally so. Since this view combines skepticism about free will with optimism about its practical implications, he calls his view "optimistic skepticism."

The thesis of optimistic skepticism maintains that life without belief in free will may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it eradicates an often-destructive form of moral anger. It contends that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships would not be threatened. It also contends that meaningful forms of love, morality, creativity, and personal accomplishment could be preserved. And although retributivism and severe punishment would be ruled out, incapacitation and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. The view further maintains that there are many instances in which our desert-based moral responsibility practices are counterproductive from a practical and humanitarian standpoint—notably in how they stifle personal development, encourage punitive excess in criminal justice, and perpetuate social and economic inequalities. As a result, optimistic skepticism maintains that by abandoning belief in free will—and with it, the pernicious notion of just deserts—we can look more clearly at the causes and more deeply into the systems that shape individuals and their behavior, and this will allow us to adopt more humane and effective practices and policies.