Freedom Evolves
by Daniel C. Dennett
Viking. 347 pp. $24.95

Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of cognitive science at Tufts, has made a name for himself as a scientific bad boy by writing books that boldly challenge our belief in the special status of man in the universe. In Consciousness Explained (1991), he argued that the human brain is nothing but a complex computing machine, and consciousness merely the software by which that machine operates. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), he declared that not only are human beings the products of natural selection but so too are our thought, culture, ethics, and religion. Though many readers have been troubled by the extremism of Dennett’s assault on human distinctiveness, his enthusiastic advocacy of the all-embracing explanatory power of modern science has earned him a loyal following.

Dennett’s latest book deals with the age-old problem of free will and moral responsibility, toward which one might have expected him to adopt a severely skeptical attitude. Instead, he promises to show that, despite the implications of his earlier work, there are grounds for believing that we are genuinely free and morally responsible for our actions. On this question alone, it seems, Dennett is strangely reluctant to give up his belief in man’s unique status.

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Dennett describes himself as a “naturalist.” He believes that the world consists of nothing but atoms and molecules moving under the iron necessity of physical laws. But if such premises are true, does it not follow that human freedom and moral responsibility are an illusion? Only, according to Dennett, if we are taken in by “myths” like the traditional religious belief in an immortal soul or the Cartesian idea of the mind as a “thinking substance,” somehow standing apart from and controlling our bodies. By contrast, his own more scientific argument, he assures us, will lead to “a stronger, wiser doctrine of freedom.”

Through the operation of natural selection, Dennett asserts, organisms can evolve with greater and greater “degrees of freedom.” Indeed, a crude kind of freedom is already present in primitive organisms that can avoid harm by responding to particular physical stimuli. From such simple switches turned on or off by an environmental change, evolution eventually produces complex “choice machines” that evaluate reams of data before selecting the most favorable option. As more sophisticated choice machines evolve, it becomes steadily more appropriate, as Dennett already explained in The Intentional Stance (1987), to describe their behavior in intentional terms—to speak, for example, of a cell trying to become two cells, of a spider hoping to catch a fly, etc.

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Choice in this limited sense may be explicable on Darwinian grounds. But to be free in the moral sense means doing what is right for its own sake, not merely for selfish reasons. How could such a capacity emerge if evolution is driven entirely by natural selection? After all, Darwinism presupposes that new faculties will be selected and preserved only to the extent that they contribute to the survival of the organisms that exercise them.

Dennett concedes that genuine or pure altruism—doing good for another without any expectation of good for oneself—is elusive and paradoxical, and may be unattainable through natural selection. But he does find room in evolution for what he calls “pseudo-altruism”: a kind of far-sighted self-interest that recognizes the long-term benefits of cooperation and even of (temporary) self-sacrifice.

Nevertheless, one might reply, even if cooperation is on the whole advantageous, and is often buttressed by fear of punishment for misbehavior, why should an individual not break the rules if he can get away with it, especially when the payoff is big? “In these cases,” Dennett concedes, “the voice of temptation speaks with alarming rationality: Nobody will ever know, and think of what you can gain.!” Here we enter the “problematic territory of human free will, the only variety that carries moral weight.” How do we get there by way of evolution?

Dennett’s answer goes like this: once cooperation is an option, it becomes advantageous to appear good to others. On the whole, the most cost-effective way to convince others that you are good is simply to be good. In other words, the elaborate deception required in order to seem upright while secretly practicing injustice is more trouble than it is worth, and the disposition to act unjustly will therefore tend to die out under the pressure of natural selection.

Thus it is, in Dennett’s reasoning, that morality arose by accident as an evolutionary advantage and spread throughout the species, eventually yielding a population of intelligent agents sincerely devoted to the good of others. And what about those whose brains were untouched by this development? Are we justified in blaming them? More broadly, in what sense can people be held morally responsible for their actions? As Dennett recognizes, it is not sufficient to point to “the good of the species” or “the survival of our genes” as grounds for moral praise and blame.

To solve this last problem, Dennett points out that people seem to want to be held responsible for their actions and character and to be praised for their virtues, even if that means being blamed or punished for their vices. Despite what modern science may teach, human beings simply feel themselves accountable and are remarkably impervious to the evidence that praise and blame are unwarranted. That being the case, Dennett concludes, it is proper to hold people responsible precisely to the extent that they are willing to take responsibility.

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By the end of his long, ingenious, and often entertaining argument, has Dennett shown that one can embrace the most austere forms of naturalism and Darwinism and come away with even stronger grounds for believing in human freedom and moral responsibility? The answer, not surprisingly, is no.

By the use of various Darwinian “just-so stories,” Dennett can plausibly point to evolution as the engine of “pseudo-altruistic” behavior, whereby an individual’s larger interests are best secured by cooperation and self-control. But he cannot begin to come to terms with what one might call the “ring of Gyges” problem: how a person should behave if, like the famous shepherd in Plato’s Republic, he were lucky enough to come upon a ring making himself and his actions invisible to others. The best Dennett can offer is the admission that certain “bizarrely free spirits” are simply unmoved by the social pressures that, thanks to evolution, keep the rest of us in line.

Nor does Dennett come close to providing a justification for the feeling that good people deserve to be rewarded and bad people deserve to be punished. There is, in fact, something almost comical about the mental contortions Dennett goes through in his effort to square the moral circle. The closer he gets to the promised proof, the shakier and more circular his argument becomes: we are capable of intentions if we adopt the “intentional stance,” we should be held responsible “as long as we feel responsible,” “wherever thinking gets done, people do things for reasons that are their reasons.” These are little more than verbal tricks, contrivances, and evasions.

Will such arguments persuade scientists? I very much doubt it. Nor will they convince anyone hoping to defend a more robust idea of moral autonomy than seems compatible with present-day natural science. We then have a choice: either to follow the naturalist argument out to its dispiriting conclusion—namely, that moral autonomy is a fiction—or to entertain the possibility that modern science, however powerful it may be in its own domain, can give only a partial, provisional, and hypothetical account of our inner life, and cannot begin to settle the deepest questions we ask about ourselves.

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