Free Will Is Still Undefeated¶
A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Rob Henderson — Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, PhD in Psychology from Cambridge, and author of Troubled — delivers a forceful counterargument to the growing determinist consensus in neuroscience and popular science writing.
Henderson takes direct aim at the works of Robert Sapolsky (Determined, 2023) and Sam Harris (Free Will, 2012), who argue that human behavior is the product of prior causes beyond our control. Against this backdrop, Henderson marshals three key counterarguments:
1. Bloom's Distinction — Accidental vs. Intentional Harm. The cognitive scientist Paul Bloom's work shows that every functioning legal system must distinguish between accidental and intentional harm. A system that collapses this distinction — as pure determinism would — cannot hold together. Our moral and legal frameworks presuppose agency.
2. Doyle's Apple Analogy — A Category Error. Redness exists at the scale of an apple, not at the atomic scale. Similarly, free will exists at the scale of persons and their actions, not at the level of neurons firing. To demand free will at the neural level is to commit what philosophers call a category error — looking for the wrong kind of thing at the wrong level of description.
3. Baumeister's Responsible Autonomy — An Evolved Capacity. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister's work suggests that free will is not an on/off switch but a matter of degree — an evolved capacity for self-regulation that emerged to enable complex social life. It is not magic; it is a cognitive faculty that varies across individuals and situations.
Henderson's core critique of the determinist camp is sharp: they apply their logic asymmetrically. They assume agency for themselves (when making arguments, writing books, persuading others) while denying it to everyone else. The closing warning is pointed:
"The deniers of free will haven't improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it."