FREE

The subtitle 'why science hasn't disproved free will' encapsulates the argument of this rigorous and interesting book. The question of free will has a long philosophical history and it was interesting to find that, in the annals of the Edinburgh Speculative Society, debates on these questions were regularly happening in the late 18th century. The Network has in the past provided a forum for questions relating to neuroscience, free will and the law, focusing on moral responsibility and accountability. If our brain states determine our behaviour, then to what extent can we be held accountable? These questions have become all the more pointed since experiments conducted from the 1980s onwards. Some experimenters argue that our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore outside our control. In addition, social psychologists advance many other outer factors that, they argue, preclude free will.

This book considers such experiments and social thought in some detail. Mele has been running two programmes funded by the John Templeton Foundation including Big Questions in Free Will, and will be presenting his arguments at this year's Beyond the Brain conference. He brings a nuanced understanding to the definition of free will with his idea of deep openness, while acknowledging the important role of the brain. He devotes a chapter to the well-known experiments by Benjamin Libet about readiness potential and the timing of decisions. Libet generalises his findings about urges and intentions to all intentional actions, which is a problem for Mele, who sets the arguments out schematically showing how their premises rest on shaky ground. He then moves on to more recent experiments with fMRI, from which similar arguments are derived. Pressing a button at a particular moment is not the same as carefully weighing the pros and cons of a particular course of action.

The next chapter moves onto behaviour-based challenges to free will, such as those advanced by Daniel Wegener with his arguments for automaticity. He maintains that no human actions are caused even partly by conscious intentions and therefore we have no free will. Mele asks why all actions need to be caused in the same way and echoes Keith Ward's argument about purposeful intention as a necessary category of explanation. His own less bold claim is that conscious intentions are among the causes of some human actions. He also looks at the work of Michael Gazzaniga on post hoc explanations and Philip Zimbardo on prison guards as well as the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram on obedience. The argument here is for situationism - a form of social determinism where a pattern of behaviour is automatically produced. This is also a form of post hoc explanation. The reality is more subtle: we are of course influenced by situations but can still choose a course of action, for instance when confronted by a person falling in the street.

In the last chapter, Mele considers where different people set the bar for free will - a modest version on the basis of rational informed decision-making, and a more ambitious one involving deep openness that is also compatible with everything they have experienced. He concludes that the experiments discussed don't rule out the existence of modest free will, and that some experimenters set the bar too high by requiring conscious decisions entirely independent of brain activity, hence ruling out free will. This brings him back to the moral dimension with its legal implications for accountability and the observation that Gazzaniga is inconsistent in where he sets the bars for free will and responsibility respectively. Interestingly, there is also research suggesting that denial of free will encourages bad behaviour so there are also pragmatic reasons for advocating it. Whether readers agree with this conclusion, they will in any event be stimulated by the arguments in this lucid and accessible book.