Can neuroscience and psychology really undermine free will, or do they just force us to rethink what moral responsibility is for?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Manuel Vargas is professor of philosophy at UC San Diego, and his work has focused on moral psychology, free will, agency, Latin American philosophy, and more. His book is "Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility".
2. Interview Summary
Manuel Vargas maps the “scientific threat” landscape to free will, focusing on neuroscientific results often taken to show that “the brain decides before you do.” He treats Benjamin Libet–style readiness-potential findings as interpretively underdetermined: neural activity prior to reported awareness doesn’t yet establish that a decision has already been made, since it could reflect impulses, drives, or preliminary considerations rather than settled choice. He also suggests we’re misled if we model agency on arbitrary “picking” cases (grab any identical cereal) rather than “choosing” cases where reasons genuinely matter (e.g., tradeoffs between an SUV and an electric car), since the latter are what moral responsibility disputes are really about. Relatedly, he notes how compatibilist “reasons-responsiveness” approaches can be motivated by the idea that even if the process isn’t transparent at the “high-level,” it can still count as freedom if the overall system is appropriately responsive to reasons.
On the familiar objection that compatibilism is just a “definitional gambit,” Vargas reframes the clash as a deeper methodological dispute about what philosophy is trying to do. One tradition (associated with P. F. Strawson–style descriptive metaphysics and ordinary-language approaches) treats the philosopher’s job as articulating and systematizing the categories already embedded in common thought and talk; another, more revisionist strand treats philosophy as continuous with science and open to reshaping our self-conception in light of theoretical pressure—illustrated via Nelson Goodman / John Rawls–style reflective equilibrium. To show how even widespread communal agreement can be parochial or unstable, he uses a thought experiment about 12th-century Catholics who treat sacramental status as essential to “marriage,” contrasted with a later ethnographer who points to marriage-like practices lacking sacraments—forcing the question whether “sacrament” is essential or merely a local regimentation of a broader institution.
When the discussion turns to moral responsibility, Vargas develops an explicitly instrumentalist/revisionist justification: responsibility practices (blame, praise, resentment, etc.) are defensible if they help “build better beings”—fostering and extending moral sensibility and enabling the cooperation/coordination goods that creatures like us can otherwise struggle to secure. He emphasizes that a genealogical story about emerging from norm-enforcement doesn’t by itself justify continuing the practice; justification depends on whether the practice still produces valuable goods, and he argues the distinctive structure of responsibility talk calls for explaining features like backward-looking assessment and why negligence can count as culpable. At the same time, he resists a purely forward-looking “efficient” instrumentalism: capturing our practices and making revisionism workable likely requires some role for desert-like constraints, partly because uptake matters and partly because there may be independent normative limits—an issue he notes David Brink has treated in detail. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a historically “first-pass,” often messy frontier activity that incubates later disciplines and expands human knowledge—famously tracing even the idea of the academy back to Plato.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - Scientific threats to free will
05:33 - Simple vs. complex decisions
08:29 - Compatibilist response
11:47 - Epiphenomenalist threat
17:37 - Are compatibilists changing the subject?
24:13 - Terminological dispute
29:26 - Theorizing and pragmatics
33:23 - Moral responsibility
43:33 - Content of blame judgments
45:13 - Settling reference
54:27 - Definitions
59:30 - Eliminativism, revisionism, and discretionism
1:02:23 - Issues with discretionism
1:06:54 - Instrumentalism about responsibility
1:12:39 - A thinner altnerative
1:26:19 - Backward-looking practices
1:30:07 - Luck and libertarianism
1:36:09 - Practices justified even with luck
1:37:23 - Stronger opposing reasons?
1:41:59 - Justified on balance
1:45:05 - Value of philosophy
1:50:04 - Conclusion
