Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will | Mindscape 369

Episode Overview

• Physicist Sean Carroll (host of the Mindscape podcast, author of The Big Picture, and a self-identified compatibilist) interviews philosopher Gregg Caruso (author of How to Live Well Without Free Will, Rejecting Retributivism, and a debate book co-authored with Daniel Dennett, who identifies as a hard incompatibilist and optimistic free will skeptic) on how to make sense of human agency, moral responsibility, and living a good life without free will; neither speaker discloses any external business ties, funding, or sponsors during the episode.
• The conversation establishes precise definitions of free will, determinism, and indeterminism, exploring why neither classical physics, quantum mechanics, nor neuroscience rescues the type of ultimate control required for backward-looking moral blame or praise.
• Caruso details the practical consequences of rejecting retributive justice, critiquing deterrence policies that fuel mass incarceration and proposing a forward-looking "public health-quarantine model" focused on rehabilitation and safety.
• The discussion uncovers the dark side of believing in free will—including how it correlates with victim-blaming and accepting economic inequality—before demonstrating how we can still preserve Kantian respect, meaningful responsibility, and loving-kindness in a world governed by luck and causality.

Key Concepts

• Free Will as Basic Desert vs. Compatibilism: Philosophical literature identifies two conditions for moral responsibility: an epistemic condition (knowing right from wrong) and a control condition (equated with free will). Caruso defines free will specifically as the control required for "basic desert moral responsibility"—a purely backward-looking justification for blaming or praising someone simply because they deserve it. While PhilPapers surveys (run by David Chalmers and others) show compatibilism is the most popular view among professional philosophers, followed by libertarianism (which is experiencing a resurgence) and free will skepticism in last place (though growing compared to a decade ago), Caruso hedges that he is unsure of the exact proportions, when the last survey was done, whether libertarianism beats out skepticism, or the exact reasons for libertarianism's resurgence. Ultimately, Carroll and Caruso discover they agree on almost every substantive issue—such as human rationality and rejecting basic desert—disagreeing mainly on whether to retain the term "free will" once backward-looking desert is stripped away.
• Hard Incompatibilism and the Failure of Indeterminism: Determinism and free will are distinct questions. Caruso is officially agnostic about the truth of determinism, identifying as a "hard incompatibilist" because whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic, our actions result from factors beyond our control. Just as the ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius introduced random "Lucretian swerves" to save free will from atoms falling in straight lines, modern appeals to quantum indeterminacy fail because agents do not control random events any more than determined ones. (Carroll notes that some free will skeptics bizarrely refuse to admit quantum mechanics involves indeterminacy, even though it wouldn't hurt their argument.) Caruso also rejects "agent-causal libertarianism" (which posits agents as uncaused causes via radical emergence or a Cartesian soul) because it violates physical causal closure and conflicts with modern science.
• Neurological Grounding and Manipulation Arguments: All behavior is grounded in neurology, illustrated by a classic case study (also cited in Carroll's The Big Picture) of a remarried man (possibly a teacher) who developed pedophilic desires and pornography habits toward his stepdaughter. The day before court-mandated treatment, he collapsed; doctors removed a large brain tumor, and the desires vanished, only to return two or three years later when the tumor regrew. While neuroscientific arguments against free will often cite Benjamin Libet's findings that unconscious causal antecedents precede conscious awareness of a decision, Caruso hedges on Libet's experiments, noting he used to champion them but now thinks they do not settle the ultimate debate either way. Instead, he relies on philosophical "manipulation arguments" against compatibilism—such as Derk Pereboom’s "four-case version" (starting with remote-controlled brain implants by neuroscientists) and Al Mele’s case (where wise angels set up initial conditions at the Big Bang so a person robs a liquor store on their 21st birthday)—arguing there is no morally relevant distinction between external manipulation and natural determinism.
• Skepticism vs. Fatalism: Rejecting free will does not mean embracing fatalism (the view that events like JFK's assassination or Oedipus's fate happen regardless of causation). Free will skeptics maintain that voluntary choices still causally determine future outcomes; we simply lack ultimate control over the underlying desires that drive those choices.
• The Critique of Deterrence and Mass Incarceration: While the United States has 4.5% of the world's population, it houses 25% of the world's prisoners—the highest incarceration rate ever. Caruso rejects not only backward-looking retribution, but also forward-looking deterrence as a justification for punishment. He argues deterrence treats individuals as a mere means to an end (using one person as a tool to change another's behavior) and drives excessively punitive policies like "truth in sentencing" and "three strikes you're out" laws. For example, in Rejecting Retributivism, Caruso details a California man sentenced to life in prison under three-strikes laws for stealing VHS tapes (including the movie Free Willy) from two Walmart stores six days apart (starting June 1st), representing a total financial loss of $13.
• Trauma and the Public Health-Quarantine Model: Criminal behavior is heavily shaped by environment and trauma. On the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scale—measuring poverty, sexual assault, having an incarcerated parent, etc.—every single point/tick up increases the likelihood of antisocial behavior, like violent crime, by 35%. Furthermore, almost 90% (specifically 89%) of incarcerated women in the U.S. were previously victims of violence (sexual assault, child molestation, or domestic violence). Following Derk Pereboom, Caruso endorses a forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in safety, reconciliation, moral formation, and victim restitution. He proposes a "public health-quarantine model": just as the state quarantines an Ebola patient at an airport for self-defense and harm prevention without blaming them, society can incapacitate dangerous criminals. This requires no dehumanization, the principle of least restriction, a duty to rehabilitate and release once the threat is gone, and preserving human rights—similar to Norway's "principle of normality," where prison conditions mimic the outside world as much as possible and prisoners retain the right to vote.
• The Dark Side of Free Will and the "Just Deserts Cluster": Believing in free will is not a purely pro-social force. Studies show that a stronger belief in free will correlates with greater acceptance of economic inequality and directly correlates with "just world belief" (measured on a 1 to 7 Likert scale), leading people to blame victims (such as questioning what a rape victim was wearing or drinking) to preserve the illusion that people only suffer if they deserve it. A friend of Caruso's also wrote about public health contexts where obesity and addiction in organ donors are judged as personal moral failures, leading to punitive medical policies. Similarly, when President Obama told businesspeople, "If you succeed in business, you didn't do it alone" (pointing to teachers, parents, and taxpayer-funded roads), conservatives built a day of the Republican National Convention around the slogan "Yes we did," which Caruso attributes to the "just deserts cluster."
• Compounding Constitutive and Present Luck: All actions are a byproduct of "constitutive luck" (genetics, upbringing, the lottery of birth), "present luck" (indeterminacy or which thoughts pop into one's head during deliberation), or both. In their debate book, Daniel Dennett argued initial luck is like a staggered start in a marathon that equals out over time, a claim Caruso calls "demonstrably false" because inequalities compound. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers found that 60% to 80% of professional NHL hockey players were born in just two months (e.g., January and December); due to Canadian peewee league age cutoffs, these children were up to 11 months older than teammates at ages 4 or 5, creating physical advantages that snowballed into better coaching and elite leagues. Conversely, the youngest children in a school class—particularly boys—are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at a much higher rate than the oldest kids simply because they are nearly a year behind developmentally and struggle to sit still for 6 to 7 hours a day.
• Varieties of Responsibility and Kantian Respect: Free will skeptics only reject one of the 7 or 8 conceptions of responsibility (basic desert), while preserving others: causal responsibility (like Hurricane Katrina causing destruction), take-charge/role responsibility (duties as a parent, search committee chair, or programmed AI bot), attributability responsibility (attributing brilliance to Einstein, who was a hard determinist and wrote in a newspaper article that he did not deserve praise for general relativity), and answerability responsibility (explaining one's decisions for forward-looking moral formation). Furthermore, by adopting philosopher Benjamin Vilhauer's distinction between "action-based desert claims" (requiring free will) and "person-based desert claims" (respect owed simply for being a person), we can maintain Kantian respect for humanity without believing in free will.

Quotes

• At 0:01:38 - "Determinism and free will are two completely different questions. You can believe in determinism or not, and believe in free will, and you can also believe in determinism or not, and not believe in free will. So if you want to talk about free will, talk about free will. Don't talk about determinism." - Sean Carroll framing the philosophical landscape by separating the physics of determinism from the concept of human agency.
• At 0:05:13 - "I have a really precise definition of free will that I use. I define free will as the control in action that's required for a particular type of moral responsibility. And it's the kind of moral responsibility that philosophers like myself call basic desert moral responsibility." - Gregg Caruso establishing the exact target of his skepticism: backward-looking blame and praise.
• At 0:11:10 - "So I'm a free will skeptic. I maintain that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control." - Caruso summarizing the core thesis of hard incompatibilism.
• At 0:11:32 - "Because we don't control determined events any more than we control indeterministic events, and because of this, we lack the kind of control in action that I just defined as necessary for this kind of moral responsibility." - Caruso explaining why appeals to quantum mechanics or randomness fail to rescue free will.
• At 0:26:12 - "There's no denying there's a difference between having an eye twitch and choosing to make a cup of coffee. So what I would say, how I define it, is that we could still preserve the distinction between voluntary and involuntary." - Caruso clarifying that rejecting free will does not erase everyday human agency or conscious deliberation.
• At 0:35:05 - "And I don't think that's what free will skeptics have to say. Like, free will skeptics say, like, no, these future events, you know, will happen because of causality. Like, you don't jump in front of the train and say, if I'm fated to die today, I'll die, and if I'm not, I'll survive. No, because the decision to jump in front of the train is going to be the cause of your death, you know? The question is just whether the desire that caused you to make that decision was itself within the control of the agent." - Caruso distinguishing free will skepticism from fatalism.
• At 0:44:49 - "We have 4.5% of the world's population in the United States, but house 25% of the world's prisoners. It's the highest rate of incarceration ever." - Caruso illustrating the real-world scale of punitive and deterrence-based criminal justice policies.
• At 0:48:38 - "And so, on my account, the purpose of criminal justice should be reoriented toward rehabilitation and reintegration. So instead of a punitive system of criminal justice where we're distributing punishment in accordance with desert, we should be attempting to rehabilitate wrongdoers and reintegrate them back into society as quickly as possible." - Caruso outlining the practical goal of his public health-quarantine model.
• At 0:51:40 - "If you look at things like Adverse Childhood Experience scales, which measure everything from poverty to sexual assault to have you had a parent incarcerated, every tick up on that scale, like every point you get that raises that scale, increases the likelihood of antisocial behavior, like violent crime, by 35%." - Caruso providing empirical evidence of how deeply environmental luck and childhood trauma shape adult criminal behavior.
• At 0:53:06 - "Almost 90%, I think it's 89% of women who are incarcerated in the United States have been previously victims of violence." - Caruso highlighting how the prison system punishes individuals whose actions are downstream of severe victimization.
• At 0:57:26 - "So in my new book, I talk about how there's studies that show that the stronger the belief in free will, the more accepting people are of economic inequality." - Caruso revealing the counterintuitive psychological dark side of believing in free will.
• At 1:04:44 - "And so, you know, it sounds odd for someone who's written, you know, many books and articles on free will: I don't really care that much about the term. I care more about the set of practices." - Caruso finding common ground with compatibilists by prioritizing humane social and legal practices over semantic debates.
• At 1:21:43 - "And not only can we live without the belief in free will, we could live better without the belief in free will." - Caruso concluding that letting go of basic desert allows us to foster greater compassion and agape love.

Takeaways

• Shift from backward-looking blame to forward-looking moral formation: In parenting, relationships, and management, stop asking whether someone "deserves to suffer" for a past mistake. Instead, use answerability responsibility to ask forward-looking questions: What does this choice reveal, how can we repair the harm, and how can we improve future decisions?
• Apply the public health-quarantine framework to justice and policy: Advocate for criminal justice reforms that treat harmful behavior like an infectious disease rather than a moral failing—using the least restrictive means necessary (including decriminalizing many non-violent offenses), rejecting dehumanization, preserving basic rights like voting, and focusing resources on rehabilitation and safe reintegration.
• Do not confuse agency with fatalism: Continue to deliberate and make active choices in your daily life, recognizing that your voluntary decisions are the vital causal mechanisms that shape your future, even if your underlying desires were shaped by prior causes.
• Audit your "just world" biases: Actively check your impulse to blame victims of crime, poverty, or medical conditions (such as addiction or obesity) for their own suffering, recognizing that this impulse is often an unconscious psychological defense mechanism tied to believing people get what they deserve.
• Account for compounding luck when evaluating success and behavior: Recognize that small early advantages or disadvantages snowball over time. Avoid misdiagnosing developmental differences (such as the youngest kids in a classroom struggling to sit still) as personal or medical defects, and cultivate humility regarding your own achievements.
• Ground human dignity in personhood rather than actions: Treat every individual—including those who have committed severe offenses—with fundamental Kantian respect based on "person-based desert" (their intrinsic moral standing as a human being) rather than "action-based desert," and refuse to use punitive deterrence that treats people merely as tools to manipulate others.
• Separate excellence and role duties from moral superiority: Continue to fulfill your take-charge responsibilities (as a parent, professional, or citizen) and admire attributability traits like creativity or intelligence in yourself and others, without leaping to the conclusion that natural talents make someone more morally deserving of basic human thriving.
• Cultivate agape love through causal understanding: Practice the loving-kindness championed by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement by actively looking at the biographical, neurological, and environmental histories behind people's harmful actions, using that understanding to let go of destructive anger and hatred.