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?
