You’re driving in heavy traffic when you hear the screech of tyres, followed by a thud. You glance to the lane beside you and see that a black sedan has just slammed into the back of a silver SUV.
At first, the explanation seems uncomplicated. Brakes constrain motion, but not enough to overcome the car’s momentum, and the collision causes damage. A leads to B. Cause and effect in its simplest form.
Then you notice the drivers.
From the black sedan, music still playing, steps a young man in a tailored suit. You notice the car is a new BMW. He checks his phone and then surveys the damage to his vehicle. In the silver SUV, a woman in her early 40s turns immediately to the back seat to check on two children. You notice the family stickers on the rear window, and her hair coming loose as she leans inside the car.
You are no longer tracing forces and distances, but interpreting people, and your thoughts start to race. As the search for causes becomes a search for blame, a further assumption settles in, that somewhere in this chain of events, someone could have chosen otherwise.
It was probably the BMW driver’s fault. He checked his phone and the damage to his car before he even thought about the other people. He was probably looking at his phone while driving. Reckless.
This way of thinking is not confined to road accidents. When someone is late, we assume they failed to manage their time. When someone struggles with addiction, we say they need more self-control. When a person gains weight, loses their temper or falls into debt, the explanation often arrives quickly: they could have chosen otherwise.
Across these situations, complex interactions of biological, psychological and environmental influences are replaced with a narrative about personal choice.
To break this habit, I suggest a small experiment. For two weeks, try living as though free will were not the most useful way to interpret behaviour. You don’t need to decide whether it exists. If you live as if there is no free will, blame is no longer the default; behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.
When someone says they believe in free will, they usually mean that, in a given set of circumstances, we all have the freedom to choose differently. But I take a deterministic view of behaviour: what we do emerges from our biological state at any given moment, and that state itself is the product of how our body and brain grew, including genetic influences (development), what’s happened to us until now (life experience), and the current immediate and wider situation (environment). Environmental influences matter because biological systems are plastic and change in response to them.
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