The Economist brings us a seemingly new twist on an age old question - does free will exist?  With science continuing to box in  the "ghost in the machine", do we hit a point where specific morphology or genetics gets the blame for our actions rather than our "selves"?

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

... and the rest of the piece discusses how Free Will forms the bedrock of so many of our institutions....  

While an interesting anecdote, count me as one of those idealists who isn't quite swayed that we're on the cusp of a great social unravelling.  One reason is that Tragics like myself start many of these sorts of discussions with a a strong notion of Human Nature.  As James Madison famously noted, "what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"  And these reflections have, for millenia, considered things like Are people naturally violent?  Or, in modern terms, what do we do about the violence gene?  Are people naturally covetous?  Egomaniacal?  Prey to cognitive biases of all sorts?

Implicit in all of those assumptions is a chipping away of the domain of free will.   No matter how much you reason and appeal to the Free Will of some folks, we've gotta maintain social safegaurds against the impulsive, the irrational, the stupid, and sometimes the just plain Evil.   As Pinker noted, many "conservative" tenets such as competitive markets and small governments emerge from a similar mindset of an unwavering and eminently fallible human fabric. 

So, while the metaphysical question of free will is interesting, the socio-political answer is one humanity has been testing for ages.  Some of the most controversial answers are grounded in doctrinal effects.   Whether or not Free Will is True in a strict, scientific sense, there are important social benefits from presuming it's True.  A society that believes the Horatio Alger myth is more likely to produce... Horatio Algers.

Or, in this context, Free Will isn't a question of underlying brain mechanics so much as assignment of legal liability.  The Economist seeks to connect liability with causality while an econo-minded Tragic would assign liability based on identifying the "least cost avoider".   Do we place the blame for certain behaviors on the sex offender (and incent him screen for and address the root causes of his own brain tumor?) or on biology (and presumably burdening "society" to proactively find and help cure this particular offfender).   Causality might lean one way, but liability (and the socially lowest cost solution) clearly points us in another direction.  To use a trite example, cops blame you if your car's taillight broken - not the shopping cart in the parking lot.  

BTW - Merry Christmas!