Responsibility

Tom Gilson, in a post titled "Ideas Have Consequences: Free Will vs. The Programmed Brain," discusses some interesting research about what happens when people come to believe - or wish to believe - that they are not responsible for their decisions. He begins with the results of "an experiment described in Scientific American":

[R]esearchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected [the philosophical notion of] free will...

The correlation was positive: those who rejected free will tended to cheat more. The 22-page original research paper, written by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan W. Schooler of the University of British Columbia, opens with a provocative quote from Sartre:

We are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse.

The paper goes on to note the increasing public attention being given to scientists who claim to have disproved the existence of free will. ....[more]

The research, Gilson points out, isn't about whether the idea of free will is true or not, but what the consequences of rejecting the belief may be. It does make sense. When we do things that we know are wrong, it can be very comforting to be able to believe that we can't help ourselves.

Gilson finishes by quoting the conclusion of the Scientific American article:

Many philosophers and scientists reject free will and, while there has been no systematic study of the matter, there’s currently little reason to think that the philosophers and scientists who reject free will are generally less morally upright than those who believe in it. But this raises yet another puzzling question about the belief in free will. People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?

Ideas Have Consequences: Free Will vs. The Programmed Brain | Thinking Christian