Category: Articles & Essays

Why the Free Will Debate Never Ends

Articles & Essays

Many see the compatibilist version of free will as a “watered-down” version of the real thing, as Robert Kane puts it. Others dismiss compatibilist accounts of free will in less temperate terms. For Sam Harris, it amounts to nothing more than the assertion “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.” Kant called it a “wretched subterfuge,” James a “quagmire of evasion” and Wallace Matson “the most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject to be encountered anywhere in the complete history of sophistry.” For many, the free will which compatibilism offers is never as attractive as what they set out to look for, and so we are caught between settling for what we can get and holding out for the elusive ideal.

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The few and the many

Articles & Essays

When asking whether inequality is unfair, we have perhaps too often made the mistake of asking whether it is unfair in and of itself. A better question is to ask whether the inequality we see is the inevitable result of a fair economic and political system. The answer to that appears to be no. But even if it were, we have more good reasons than ever to see rising inequality as representing a grave threat to our health and to the legitimacy of capitalist democracies.

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The good news from Homo naledi

Articles & Essays

Much as we like to celebrate the fact that all humans are essentially the same, our reactions show that we are not. Homo naledi holds up a mirror not to unchanging human nature: it would reveal very different things to a southern creationist, a Victorian bishop, and a secular 2015 Guardian reader. These bones remind us that it is our nature to change, and that what the human species becomes in the future is at least in part in our own hands.

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