This book might be useful as an introduction to the scientific literature on free will, but I found it underwhelming despite its promise (perhaps purely because of its very short length). In the first chapter the author distinguishes three varieties of free will: the “supernatural” conception (having an immaterial soul dictating our behavior), the “modest” conception (making informed decisions that are not forced on us) and the “ambitious” conception (choosing between alternative courses of action). In the following four chapters Mele moves to consider the classic psychological literature critical of free will. What strikes me about Libet’s, Soon’s, Fried’s and Wegner’s experiments is their primitive nature: are psychologists and neuroscientists still using such rudimentary experimental protocols? I found Mele’s critical analysis substantially correct. In chapter five Mele assesses the social psychology literature. Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s experiments are indeed shocking, even though what is most shocking might not be the reaction of their participants, but the objectionable nature of the experiments. Even in this case I found many areas of agreement with Mele’s critical analysis. The first five chapters might be used as a short introduction to the topic. I was expecting something more from the final sixth chapter but the book, instead of finishing with a bang, implodes. The narrative in the first five chapters is reasonably entertaining. The analysis apportioned never dull. But the last chapter disappointed me. In fact, the book does not treat satisfactorily a central philosophical issue. The issue is touched by Mele on page 89 when he claims that a serious theory of ambitious free will (the only one worth pursuing in my opinion) should find an answer to two challenges. The first is that having free will requires making conscious choices which are independent of brain activity. I can think of at least two ways to accomplish this result. One way is to endorse a supernatural conception of free will. The second way is to reject physicalism and argue that free choices are not the result of physical brain states. Mele does not discuss these two options in any detail, possibly thinking they are dead ends. Furthermore, Mele does not explain why our choices must be conscious in order to be considered free. I suspect Mele finds the second challenge more interesting, but he never claims this explicitly.

The second challenge is that having free will requires being “unconstrained by genetics and environment”. I think this challenge, as it stands, is deeply unclear. In chapter five Mele explains that by environment we should mean “the situations in which people find themselves” (p. 72), making reference to the position called situationism (or automaticity, p. 67) in the specialized literature. Situationism might be characterized as the view according to which the situations in which humans (and by analogy all other organisms) find themselves dictate their actions, rendering them automatons, i.e., closer to zombies than sentient beings (p. 69). This view thus implies a strong pessimism about human agency and our capacity to (consciously) chose; the reason being that the environment (i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves) determines and compels our actions. Mele rejects this view via this argument: “If situations really did completely determine behavior, then everyone in the same situation would act the same way” (p. 73); but, as a matter of fact, people behave differently (e.g., the people who participated in Milgram’s experiments did not act in the same way, some of them stopping to send electric shocks to the “learners”); as a consequence, situations do not totally determine our behavior. I find Mele’s argument flawed as it is based on an insufficient characterization of the concept of environment. Let me explain.

One way to define environment is negatively: everything that is not genes is environment. Therefore, whatever is localizable outside the DNA sequence is in this sense environment. But this definition has many obvious limits, some of which become clear in the context of the problem of free will. The reason is that we cannot define the environment only spatially because, by doing so, we miss the temporal dimension of the developmental process, that is, the various ways in which “all-that-is-not-DNA” shaped the life history of the organism. All these environmental contributions to the development of the organism, being part of the past, are largely inaccessible to scientific investigation. By focusing on the environment in the sense of “the situations in which people find themselves” we are defining a synchronic rather than a diachronic context for the evaluation of putative freedom. Why did I choose to read this book? I assume that a genetic explanation is meaningless at this juncture. What about an environmental explanation? Given that environment is whatever is not genetic, then some sort of environmental explanation must be assumed to be correct unless we either believe in the causal intervention of an aphysical mind or supernatural soul, or that it was a purely fortuitous choice. The crucial issue is that we need to be able to identify a suitable environmental explanation. Scientists would need to focus on accessible environmental factors in order to attempt to find an answer to the question of what led me to read this book. But here lies the rub: perhaps you cannot explain my decision without taking into account my life history, a chain of events that stretches back to at least the time when I was an embryo. Given that reconstructing my life history is in this sense technologically impossible, any evidence in favour or against free will is bound to be limited and objectionable. So, Mele’s conclusion that situations (characterized as genetics plus environment defined synchronically) do not determine human behaviour is trivially true because a crucial element is missing: the individual’s personal life history.

Therefore, contrary to what Mele argues, situations (defined in terms of the genome plus environment plus life history of relevance of a specific individual) might indeed determine human decisions. If so, what is left for free will? This seems to me a very obscure question. A more sensible question would be: what could be evidence in favour of ambitious free will? Mele touches this fundamental issue, but I found his scatty treatment unsatisfactory. Part of the problem is that in order to be able to think about supporting evidence, we need to relinquish our anthropocentric biases. As I argued, humans are organisms with complex life histories, histories that are scientifically inaccessible. I suggest that the most promising avenue to study free will would be to study organisms that have minimal life histories. In this respect Mele cites an article by the neurobiologist Björn Brembs on Drosophila (p. 81). The advantage of studying fruit flies is that their life history is a few orders of magnitude less complex than a human life history. Particularly intriguing is the evidence presented by Brembs concerning fruit flies behaving differently in “identical environments” (how this latter concept is defined remains to me unclear). Fruit flies seem to be in this sense causal agents, i.e., spontaneous “initiators” of some of their behaviors, which do not seem to be triggered by some environmental stimulus. This potential to behave spontaneously and variably, argues Brembs, provides animals with “choices” that remain, however, neither controllable towards a specific outcome nor conscious. So who cares about this type of constrained and unconscious freedom? I think we should because these studies provide putative evidence against situationism. If the life choices of fruit flies are indeed free, then we would have an in principle demonstration that basic, primitive free will exists. It might be a small step for the fruit fly, but it would be a giant leap for philosophy.

© 2015  Davide Vecchi

Davide Vecchi, Department of Philosophy, University of Santiago, Chile