Choice, Compulsion, Consequences ... Doubting Free Will & Embracing Determinism

If we could not have acted differently, what becomes of responsibility, meaning and the way we treat one another?

We praise achievement and blame wrongdoing. Yet when we reflect on someone's behavior, we look for causes in their circumstances, experiences and biology. What follows when we take those causes seriously, i.e., when we imagine that absent those causes the person would have acted differently?

In Choice, Compulsion, Consequences ... Doubting Free Will & Embracing Determinism, Judith Herzfeld makes the affirmative case for embracing determinism.

Drawing on decades of scientific research and interdisciplinary teaching, Herzfeld connects theological dilemmas, discoveries in physics and neuroscience, and familiar experiences of choice and regret. She brings these perspectives together to examine the likelihood that, under the same internal and external conditions, a person could not have acted otherwise.

The implications reach into our closest relationships, our justice system and our public life. Herzfeld considers how society can respond to harmful behavior without assigning blame, how love and purposeful action retain their meaning, and why the information we share carries responsibilities of its own.

Concise, yet wide in scope, this book invites readers to reconsider both their assumptions about human freedom and the consequences of those assumptions.

Throughout, learning and change remain consequential: understanding the causes of an action can help us respond more constructively, while what we do today helps shape the circumstances of tomorrow.