369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will

Sean Carroll (0:00)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I want you all to appreciate how much I care about what the people want when it comes to podcast topics. The people love talking about free will. I don't always love talking about free will. I sort of feel like I get dragged into it a little bit. I appreciate that the topic is important, but I appreciate that it's important in a very particular way. There are a whole bunch of things that can be said and argued about concerning free will, which really just come down to disagreements about definitions, about what things mean, and to me that's like extremely tedious. Again, it's important we should have definitions for our words, but you don't want to spend hours talking about them. But there's also a substantive side, which is why it is actually important to talk about, because there might be implications for believing that you have free will or you don't. Where do you locate moral responsibility? How do you arrange systems in society to put praise or blame on people for doing things? That might matter if you believe that people have free will or don't. So even though I sometimes roll my eyes, sometimes we have to have these conversations. We had Christian List, who is one of the leading compatible lists out there on the podcast recently. Compatible list is someone who believes in free will and also determinism underneath the surface. One way you can tell that someone is not giving you a very sophisticated discussion of free will is if they keep talking about determinism.

Determinism and free will are two completely different questions. You can believe in determinism or not and believe in free will, and you can also believe in determinism or not and not believe in free will. So if you want to talk about free will, talk about free will. Don't talk about determinism. So Christian gave us the sales pitch for believing in determinism if you want to, but still believing in free will. That's the compatibilist line. Today, we have Gregg Caruso, who's a philosopher who is an advocate for the hard incompatibilist line, as he calls it.

This is a point of view that says that, again, Gregg is smart enough to know that the argument is not enough about determinism. He wants to say that it doesn't matter whether it's determinism or not determinism. In either case, you don't have free will. In the real world, it's the argument that he wants to make. I think that he actually does a very good job in this discussion of explaining exactly what those consequentialist implications are of believing in free will. It becomes very, very clear that the reason why he wants to reject free will is because of the consequences of talking that way, in particular, the idea that people might deserve punishment for doing bad things. It's not that he's against enforcing the law or whatever, but the reason why you enforce the law in certain ways and the ways in which you enforce the laws might matter depending on how you think about people's conscious choices to do the wrong things. So, Gregg has a new book out called How to Live Well Without Free Will, and this is focusing on the idea that some people, some skeptics, and by the way, Gregg has participated in debates and discussions and back and forth with people like Daniel Dennett and Christian List, the people who are the most out there compatibleists, out there in the sense not that they're crazy, but that they're fighting the fight for compatibilism, making the case for it. And so he is engaged with those people. He knows exactly what the arguments are. And his most recent book is about, okay, let's imagine you don't have free will.

How do you nevertheless have love and friendship and making good choices in your life? He doesn't think you can't make choices. Honestly, I think that we're very, not very far apart. Let's put it that way. Gregg and myself, we disagree about some nomenclature, some ways to call certain things, but on the substance, we're really not that far apart at all. We're less far apart than I might have thought. I had interacted with Gregg before, but never sat down with a long conversation with him. So this is very useful in that way. Hopefully, we'll bring some clarity to these debates we all love to have. So let's go.

Gregg Caruso, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Gregg Caruso (4:44)

Thank you for having me.

Sean Carroll (4:45)

This is something where we've talked about free will before, I have on the podcast, you and I have, although not recorded as far as I know. But let's start with obvious, easy questions. What do you mean by free will? What's the definition here that you like to use?