On the Matter of Free Will
The "Wave-Particle Duality" in Human Behavior
by Siegfried Othmer
"As soon as we have a drug for violence, violence will be considered a disease."
---Andrew Solomon, Anatomy of Melancholy, The New Yorker.
One of the lingering philosophical issues for our age is the question of free will, and with it, the issue of moral responsibility. With the advent of quantum mechanics in the last century, it became possible to argue that behavior was not necessarily deterministic, but rather retained some fundamental uncertainties because of the probabilistic interpretation of quantum-mechanics. On reflection, it seems unsatisfactory to assign something so fundamental as free will to the vagaries of electron trajectories. If such uncertainty really played a prominent role in brain function, the outcome would be chaos, not free will. After all, if the "agent" is not in control of the process, just how is the will free? As a matter of fact, we will argue that rather than being the antithesis of free will, predictability and determinacy of brain function is a precondition for it. In order for us to be able act reliably as moral agents, we must be predictable to ourselves. And if to ourselves, then in principle also to others. After every act we perform as ostensible free moral agents, the film can be replayed, if you will, and it will be found that the laws of nature were obeyed at every point. Microscopically, every synaptic junction played its ineluctable role, and the whole process unwound in a manner that is in principle predictable. Complexity makes any real predictability problematic, and "noise" in the system will be found to play an essential role in brain function. But the point is that predictable, orderly brain function lines up on the same side of the ball as moral agency and free will. The two are not antithetical. One could say that free will and determinacy are the wave-particle duality of the biological sciences. Both clearly coexist, and are even inter-dependent, but in any description of reality only one can appear at a time. When free will and its contingencies is being discussed, determinacy remains indeterminate. When predictability is being discussed, free will is elusive. It is not localizable in any specific, measurable biological event. Yet it exists. All of this is background to the discussion of moral agency in the case of Andy Williams and the carnage he unleashed at Santana High School. Immediately after the event, Daniel R. Weinberger (director of the Clinical Brain Disorders Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health) rushed into print at the New York Times with the claim that "The 15-year-old brain does not have the biological machinery to inhibit impulses in the service of long-range planning." Further, he said: "I doubt that most school shooters intend to kill, in the adult sense of permanently ending a life and paying the price for the rest of their own lives. Such intention would require a fully developed prefrontal cortex, which could anticipate the future and rationally appreciate cause and effect. The young school shooter probably does not think about the specifics of shooting at all. The often reported lack of apparent remorse illustrates how unreal the reality is to these teenagers." There is something wrong with this picture. If this were really the case, we would have a lot more problems of this kind than we do. Nearly all 15-year-old children would find raising a gun against a hapless stranger and cold-bloodedly pulling the trigger to be almost inconceivable for them. Their frontal cortex is adequate to forestall this, and has been for years. The almost universal response of shock to the event is proof. But the issue is worth discussing qualitatively for what it says about the development and underpinnings of moral agency. Some years ago, there was quite an uproar in England about the case of a four-year old who took his younger brother, a toddler, for a walk. He came back alone, and days later the body of the toddler was found hidden under rocks by the railroad tracks not far away. One can imagine a scenario with an innocent beginning-the toddler falls down and starts crying; the brother makes him stop; the crying continues; the brother hits him; eventually he hits him with a rock to stop the crying; there are more rocks; eventually the crying stops. Here one can invoke Weinberger's hypothesis of immature frontal lobe function. But the existence of a moral sense that something was deeply amiss is demonstrated by the attempt to hide the deed, and by the silence that followed. There was also the case of a six-year-old who grasped her little sister around the neck and squeezed, while exclaiming for all to hear, "I love my sister." The little girl couldn't breathe, turned purple, and had to be liberated from the embrace of her devoted elder sister. Here one might imagine that the six-year-old had no idea that she had her baby sister in a death grip. Alternatively, she may very well have known of the hazard of choking, and this may be a case in point of inadequate behavioral inhibition of which Weinberger speaks. The story was just reported of a 14-year-old convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, for the brutal beating death of a six-year-old girl, whom he had body-slammed in imitation of TV wrestling programs. This occurred two years ago, when he was 12 years of age. Even the prosecutor thought the long sentence for such a child was inappropriate. One can make the case that this child did not know the consequences of what he was doing. After all, body-slamming didn't seem to bother the people on TV. But there was lots of evidence of grievous injury to the girl. Nearly all 12-year-olds could not have been oblivious to such distress and continued the assault. This is not behavior that could be written off to the generic issue of immature frontal lobe function. The jury was unanimous. This was not child's play, but murder. And what about the fifteen-year-old, Andy Williams? What persuades me that he knew what he was doing is the rehearsals. After all, he told people what he was going to do repeatedly. He knew that what he was threatening was monstrous. And when his friends blew him off, he escalated to an execution of his plan in a desperate move to be taken seriously. This is not of a piece with the six-year-old girl strangling her sister, or with the 12-year-old "murderer." This was cold-blooded execution, and we cannot write it off as due to an immature frontal lobe. We lived with the problem of neurologically driven behavior in our epileptic son Brian for many years. He was occasionally unpredictably violent, but this was very much a problem even for him. He was a mystery to himself. This was brain-driven behavior, and yet the world was holding him responsible. There was usually profound remorse about these outbursts, but he felt himself powerless to prevent them. The moral sense that these things were wrong was fully established by the time these behaviors became a serious issue at the age of eight. The whole-hearted attempt to subdue these strange impulses was engaged throughout. Here we are dealing with what may be called the Phineas Gage problem of a manifest organic injury. Gage displayed adverse personality changes that surely were traceable to his encounter with the tamping iron. The sudden behavior change in the Texas Tower killer in Austin was surely due to the brain tumor that was pressing upon certain brain centers, even if the specific mechanism remained obscure. And Brian's occasionally bizarre behavior was surely attributable to the paroxysmal activity spreading from a seizure focus. But Weinberger is rationalizing the outrageous behavior of Andy Williams not as the result of an organic insult, and not even as the result of a functionally based disorder, but rather as the rather predictable concomitant of mere immaturity---something we all have experienced. What are the implications of this for our moral calculus? The McNaughton rule established that one cannot hold someone legally accountable who is unable to tell right from wrong. And Phineas Gage would surely have benefited from the defense of diminished capacity if he had been charged with a crime. The four-year-old was thought to be incapable of pre-meditated killing. The six-year-old girl also would not have been judged a criminal if her sister had died. And if our son had ever been accused of a criminal act, I would have been the first to argue strongly for blaming his brain instead of him. As brain mechanisms are further elaborated, and causal chains are pieced together, our repertoire of explanations of criminal behavior increases. In retrospect, every criminal act can in principle be explained by the hypothesis that certain neural circuits weren't working, or should not have been expected to work, by virtue of immaturity, injury, trauma, or senility. This argument cannot carry the day to the exclusion of the moral dimension of behavior. The elucidation of the causal chain of events does not abolish the moral universe; it underpins it. Let's just face it. Even our most cherished human values and impulses ultimately have a network representation in the brain. But these "emergent properties" are not reducible to their mechanistic descriptions. A retrospective understanding of what went wrong cannot always give moral absolution. We have to consider the other part of the wave-particle duality-the subjective experience. Rather than blaming inoperative or diminished brain circuits, it makes much more sense to me that Williams was fighting extinction in the hostile environment of a high school of 1900 pupils. Thom Hartmann makes the case for the addition of a new category in Maslow's hierarchy of needs: the need to feel alive. Andy Williams was probably never more alive than when he was shooting his classmates. Having witnessed the Columbine tragedy, he also knew that by this act he was maximizing his potential for making a difference in this world. It seems to me that the circuits were working. He did exactly as he intended. We must retain space in our conceptions for such things as "the need to feel alive," and even for what has traditionally been called "evil." These may be better organizing principles for what happened than either organicity or neurological immaturity. The latter only focus on the brain at issue. The former also allow us also to invoke the larger entity of the emerging "self," and on a yet larger scale, the societal context for that self. Something was fundamentally amiss in this particular self, something that goes beyond misfiring neurons. And just as surely our society has been a facilitator, if not a co-conspirator, in these events.