In 1266, the monks of Sainte Genevieve monastery in France sentenced a criminal to death for
the unimaginably horrific crime of murdering a child and eating the body.
It seems to have been a cut and dried case.
As far as we can tell the condemned didn’t dispute his sentence, although that might
be because he was a pig.
And no, I don’t mean a nasty guy, I mean an actual pig - what a swine……..
In a similar case in 1474, a rooster in the Swiss city of Basel was tried, convicted and
executed "for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg."
The event was clearly the work of Satan and, as everyone knows, the eggs of Satanic roosters
can contain a cockatrice - a dragon-like creature with two legs.
Not something you want running around the breakfast table.
In the end, the bird was burned alive and the body discarded, which was probably a good
idea.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that you should never eat Satan’s
cock, no matter how tasty it might look.
These cases of capital punishment for animals may seem bizarre, but they are not historically
unusual.
Records going back to the 9th century reveal a long trend of humans putting animals on
trial for bad behaviour.
Culprits have included insects, slugs and snails, leeches, weevils, small mammals like
mice and rats, big mammals like pigs and cows, birds, worms, and a monkey suspected of being
a French spy.
The number of these cases has gradually declined over the centuries, but it hasn’t fallen
to zero.
In 1916 in Tennessee, a circus elephant named Mary was lynched for killing her handler,
an untrained homeless man who, until 24 hours before, had never even seen an elephant.
In 2004, in Kazakhstan, a female brown bear named Katya was sent to an actual human prison
for 15 years after mauling two people.
And, as recently as 2008, a genuine court of law in Macedonia convicted a bear for stealing
a beekeeper’s honey.
The case dragged on for a year while the beekeeper explained the trouble he had gone through
to frighten the bear off with disco lights and high-tempo Serbian folk music.
The bear, who clearly preferred drum and bass, didn’t even have the courtesy to show up
for the court proceedings but managed to avoid punishment on grounds of being a protected
species.
To most people, the idea of sending an animal to prison or sentencing it to be burned at
the stake, even just putting it on trial, seems ridiculous, but these stories actually
raise some tricky questions about how responsible we humans are for our own actions.
You see, the reason animals across the vast majority of the civilised world are not routinely
asked to plead guilty or not guilty to any crimes they may have committed is, quite simply,
because they can’t - and not just because they don’t have the vocal cords to form
the words.
Most societies correctly consider animals to be unable to make moral decisions the same
way we do.
The established thinking is that animals, even well-trained ones, are ultimately slaves
to their instincts, acting out their urges without first passing those impulses through
a filter of morality.
Humans, on the other hand, are believed to be independent, free-thinking creatures capable
of making good moral judgements.
Based on this belief, when we make bad moral decisions we usually risk some form of punishment
at the hands of whoever’s in charge.
This view of the world relies on the assumption that each of us has free will, which means
we have the freedom to choose our actions, even if those actions result in us sharing
a prison cell with a large man named Nancy.
But what if this view is wrong?
What if we actually have no more free will than bears or pigs or weevils?
This question has been bugging philosophers and legal theorists, but probably not bears,
for thousands of years and many regard it as unsolvable.
Over the last few decades, neuroscience and quantum physics have chipped in with some
useful insights, but the debate still rages: do humans truly have free will and, if they
don’t, what does that mean for how we operate society?
If you do something morally wrong, is it completely your fault?
How about if you do something amazing, do you really deserve all the credit?
You may be watching this, thinking, “What ridiculous questions, of course I have control
over my actions - how else could I be watching Youtube in my underwear?”
And that makes sense to all of us, mainly because it just feels right - the notion of
free will, not your underwear.
Every day we can point to numerous decisions seemingly made at our own discretion.
I was hungry, I ate a sandwich.
I was tired, I went to sleep.
I was lonely, I remembered to obey the restraining order.
Simple.
Well, not if you agree with causal determinism, the belief that every event is fully decided
by some cause that came before.
That cause was caused by something, which in turn was caused by something else, and
so on.
In other words, there are no options or choices, there’s just a never ending chain of cause-and-effect
stretching all the way back to the origin of the universe.
You think you chose to have a sandwich for lunch, but that choice was determined by a
collection of factors outside your conscious awareness that guaranteed your lunchtime BLT
was inevitable.
According to determinism, the impression that you had some independent role to play in how
those events unfolded is nothing more than an illusion.
At its core, this is an old idea.
It’s the thinking behind the ancient Greek myth of the Fates, or the Moirai - three goddesses
who decide the destinies of mortals when they are born, weaving the individual threads of
their lives into a tapestry of all humankind.
Their power was so strong not even Zeus himself could alter the course of history, and he
was basically their boss.
Similar themes exist in Norse mythology, German paganism, Roman mythology, even Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
In Chinese myth and legend, an invisible red thread of fate connects the fingers of two
people who are born to be together.
Isn’t that lovely?
Most of the world’s great religions also include a version of this view, in which God
or another form of all-knowing, all-powerful deity has decided - or at least knows in advance
- what is to happen across time.
Fate continues to be a sticky idea even in a secular world.
Many people who regard themselves as agnostic or atheist have had at least one experience
which seemed too amazing to have happened by chance - like it was just - “meant to
be.”
But fate and determinism are not the same things.
Strictly speaking, belief in destiny is a type of determinism called fatalism, that
says all events are mapped out in advance, usually by some form of higher power.
The grand plan doesn’t need to follow any laws of cause-and-effect, it just is, as if
someone once made a movie about life across all time and then pressed play.
In ancient Greece, around the 7th century BC, the notion began to emerge that it was
fundamental laws of nature, not the gods, that decided the events of our daily lives.
Philosophers Democritus and his mentor Leucippus developed the idea that we are all made of
atoms and the motions of these atoms is decided purely by the natural laws of causation.
In their view, the future was entirely determined by the past.
As our understanding of the natural world and the laws that govern it expanded, determinism
became increasingly informed by the emerging disciplines of science, and few people had
a bigger impact on the development of modern determinism than Isaac Newton, the seventeenth-century
mathematician, astronomer, physicist, theologian and all around smart guy.
When Newton developed his laws of motion and universal gravitation, he appeared to have
uncovered the very rules that govern the universe, giving determinism a scientific foundation.
With Newton’s principles it became, in theory, possible to accurately predict the results
that would be caused by almost any action.
In 1814, French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace - the first person to publish literature about
causal determinism - took this to the next level with a thought experiment that became
known as Laplace’s Demon.
Since classical physics explained every reaction in existence, Laplace reasoned we could theoretically
understand the causes and effects that had led us to any point in time.
We could also predict the future from that point in time onwards.
So, if there were some intelligence, let’s call it a demon or a god or giant turnip named
Patrick, capable of knowing all the forces operating in the universe and the exact location
of every particle in the universe, that intelligence would be able to explain everything that had
happened in the past and predict everything that would happen in the future.
And there’s not a lot of space for free will when every action is predictable and
already set in motion.
The viability of Laplace’s Turnip has since been undermined by the discovery of thermodynamic
irreversibility, among other things, but the idea we’re ruled by cause and effect - and
by extension the implication we might not be as responsible for our own actions as we
think we are - hasn’t gone away.
And in 1983, American Physiologist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that rocked
the scientific world by providing compelling evidence that we don’t have free will.
Libet was monitoring brain activity in individuals carrying out a very simple action - tapping
their finger on a table.
His aim was to study how signals in our brain turn into physical actions in the real world,
but during the experiment he noticed something strange: he was measuring brain activity before
his test subjects reported having consciously decided to act - in other words their brains
were initiating finger movement before the subject had consciously made the decision
to move.
As far as Libet was concerned, this was neurological proof we are not the masters of our actions
- our brains are making decisions before we’re aware of them and somehow covering up the
evidence.
We think we’re acting autonomously, but it’s a trick of the mind.
It was a bad day for free will.
The results of Libet’s work became well-known, for many ending the free will debate forever.
But more recent research suggests the experiment may have been flawed in the first place - that
the brain activity Libet was interpreting as the initiator of finger movement in his
subjects might have been little more than background brain activity muddying his results.
In 2012, neuroscientist Aaron Schurger reran Libet’s experiments with a few tweaks accounting
for this possibility and found that our brains might not be making sneaky decisions without
us knowing about them after all.The game was back on for free will.
Schurger’s research has definitely not proved free will is a real thing, but it has forced
a rethink of determinism, at least the hard kind.
Hard determinism is the type we’ve been talking about until now - the belief that
free will and a deterministic universe are incompatible - it’s one or the other.
But soft determinism, usually referred to as compatibilism, is the view that free will
and determinism can co-exist.
For compatibilists, this allows us to avoid simplifying the full complexity of human experience
down to a series of physical laws, a process known as reductionism.
It also opens up space for the uncertainty kicked up by quantum physics.
Hard determinism has its roots in the laws of classical physics, but these rules don’t
apply at a quantum level, a rather inconvenient issue that happens to be one of the biggest
unsolved problems in physics.
Scientists have yet to find a Theory of Everything to explain the way the whole universe works,
from the super big to the sub-atomic, and until then they have to accept that the quantum
world and the macro world mostly operate according to different laws.
With this in mind, the closest thing we can find to causal determinism at the quantum
level are determined probabilities.
For example, it may not be possible to predict the trajectory of a sub-atomic particle in
the same way you can accurately predict the trajectory of a planet or a frisbee, but particles
all obey determined probabilities that give them a degree of predictability.
Some people, including Einstein, argue there are hidden variables we simply can’t see
that would account for gaps in our ability to predict quantum behaviour, and if we knew
these the universe would be fully deterministic, but this is hotly debated by other physicists.
Regardless of which side you take, quantum physics currently casts reasonable doubt on
the idea of determinism - basically if the world around us is inherently unpredictable,
true determinism can’t exist.
Of course, the big question is not ‘Do you have free will?’ but rather ‘Why should
you care?’
Sure, most of us like to think we have free will because we prefer to feel like we make
our own choices, but if we are actually just highly sophisticated robots acting out the
inevitable drama of a deterministic universe, what difference does that really make?
We still feel like we make our own decisions so everything ends up the same.
Well, for one thing it could alter how forgiving we are of each other’s behaviour.
Take for example the case of Charles Whitman, a US marine known as the infamous Texas Tower
Sniper.
On the 1st of August 1966, Whitman killed his mother and wife, before heading to the
University of Texas, where he proceeded to kill another 14 people and wound 31 before
police shot him dead.
It remains one of the most horrific shootings in American history, but a recent study questions
whether Whitman was truly responsible for his actions.
Doctors performing the autopsy on Whitman’s body found a brain tumour pressing against
his amygdala, a part of the brain critical to emotional regulation and behavioural control.
Whitman was one of 17 cases involved in a study that looked at examples of criminal
behaviour committed by people with brain lesions.
Even though the research subjects had brain lesions in different parts of their brains,
the lesions were all found in places connected to a neurological system dubbed the ‘criminality-associated
network.’
This network is closely linked with brain structures related to moral judgement and
decision-making, and researchers believe disruptions to these brain systems could have been responsible
for the individuals’ criminal behaviour.
This conclusion raises some difficult questions about free will and how responsible any of
us are for decisions.
If our actions can be influenced so significantly by events in our brains, how much choice do
we really have in what we do?
Where do we draw the line of moral and legal responsibility?
In the end, is there really so much difference between us and honey-stealing bears?