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Books

Determined by Robert Sapolsky

Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism.

Robert Sapolsky is that rare thing in modern academia, a true polymath. This is evidenced by his multiple and simultaneously held professorships, which range from Anthropology to Neurology, as well as his willingness to stick his nose into what philosophers often consider to be their business. In this case, that business is the debate around free will. Sapolsky espouses a ‘hard’, if non-reductive, form of determinism – the idea that all physical activity is determined by previous physical activity, including in the brain, and so there is no free choice.

From the outset, Sapolsky dismisses outright the classical notion of ‘free will’, which is typically associated with a ‘dualist’ metaphysics – the claim that reality consists of both a causally-determined physical realm and a non-physical mental realm in which events are not causally determined. Instead, for Sapolsky, the real opposition to determinism, at least these days, comes from various forms of ‘compatibilism’ – the idea that free will is compatible with determinism.

Sapolsky has written us a big book (almost 500 pages, including footnotes), but it would have been nice if he’d given us at least a potted idea of why the ‘two-world’ dualist view is so problematic, as well as a greater engagement with the historical context of the debate. Immanuel Kant gets little mention, and the originator of the compatibilist view, David Hume, none at all. Perhaps the reason for this is that modern compatibilists (who do feature in large number) base their arguments on different grounds than Hume’s. For Hume, free will is compatible with determinism as long as our actions are not compelled by forces outside of us. In other words, if I hit you in the face then I am responsible for the act if the impetus for the action came from within me.

For Hume, the antecedent causes of my urge to violence were impenetrable; but not for a person equipped with the insights of modern neurology. Indeed, work by some specialists in the field, especially Ben Libet in the 1980s, suggests that events in my brain can sometimes be used to predict my actions before I am even aware of the urge to act.

Hard Compatibilism

If you claim, as the modern compatibilist does, that the world is governed by the laws of physical cause and effect and, yet at the same time, that I am responsible for my actions, then you need to find to find some crack in the armour of hard determinism for responsibility to emerge through. As Sapolsky demonstrates, that’s not an easy thing to do. For him, life is essentially about luck, in that who and what we are is the outcome of factors utterly outside of our control. Genetic factors may predispose us to psychopathy, depression, creativity, or compassion, but they do not do so in a vacuum, and environmental factors play a huge role in deciding which of our genetic predispositions are realised in the structure of our brain and the behaviours which follow. To be specific, if I am well-nurtured, well-nourished, live a life in which others are not a constant source of threat, and don’t imbibe too many neurotoxins, I am likely to end up with good impulse control, because my prefrontal cortex is well-developed and well integrated with my limbic system (these are the areas of the brain which, respectively, think about our responses to the world, and which feel things emotionally). By contrast, poverty, pollution, racism, and other destructive conditions will make my genetic hand much harder to play (even this metaphor grants too much, with the idea that we might ‘choose’ how to play our hand). In a brilliant passage, Sapolsky asks us to consider the difference between a Harvard Graduate and the guy at the back of the Harvard graduation hall charged with picking up the litter. He argues that in every respect, chance, and nothing but chance, makes the difference between those lives.

Lots of people aren’t going to like that conclusion, but it’s the same one that the political philosopher John Rawls came to: that the rich and powerful owe their position to luck rather than merit (I’m sure Sapolsky loves Rawls). Yet even some hard-headed materialists such as Daniel C. Dennett find this idea so unpalatable that they resort to feeble attempts to rescue the idea of merit – for instance, in terms of the ‘grit’ necessary to overcome adversity; as if ‘grit’ is itself not a product of the same genetic and environmental factors. Even less impressive are arguments which attempt to recover a space for free will by claims about ‘complexity’ (the fact that we can’t understand what the causes of a particular event are is no argument for it not being caused), or about quantum indeterminism (if quantum effects are occurring in the brain, this suggests randomness rather than responsibility). As Sapolsky suggests, even if we decide, as so-called ‘property dualists’ do, that consciousness is ‘simply’ an emergent property of brain activity, this is no argument that it is not an entirely determined result of it.

Bea Ysolda 2025
Artwork © Bea Ysolda 2025. For more art by Bea please visit http://yink.art

Chance, Crime & Causation

If someone hates Sapolsky’s conclusions about the lack of merit, they’ll be incensed by the implications of his arguments for the treatment of criminals.

Here, again, the logic of determinism is inescapable. To put it simply, something external makes the paedophile the way they are; and something external made Hitler and Stalin and every other monster the way they were or are, too. Obviously, it would be a good thing if we could figure out what it is and prevent people being exposed to it (t here are indeed a range of risk factors associated with both paedophilia and psychopathy). Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us much about what we should do with offenders. Sapolsky favours what he calls the ‘quarantine’ model: like Typhoid Mary, these folk shouldn’t be allowed to mix with others, but that’s no reason for doing nasty things to them. And yes, some people are beyond reform and their ‘quarantine’ must be permanent. Sapolsky recognises the evolutionary benefits of punishing those who betray our trust (there is a nice detour into game theory at this point), but also points out the excessive, visceral satisfaction some people seem to get from punishing others. In the US and the UK, this means that politicians fight shy of focusing on reform and rehabilitation in the penal system. But the same isn’t true everywhere. In the Netherlands, for instance, some argue prisons are like hotels, yet the dwindling number of criminals that country produces are less likely to end up back in one than is the case in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Brilliant Imperfection

At times, this book is a brilliant antidote to the incoherence of our thinking about things like good and evil. For instance, Sapolsky resists the urge to portray our considerate frontal cortex as the ‘angel’ on our shoulder by pointing out that moral motivation is essentially emotional, and so compassion lives elsewhere in the brain. Moreover, his employment of a time-scale for the causes of our actions, going from seconds (the firing of neurones and the secretion of hormones), to minutes and hours (low blood sugar, or the depletion of serotonin occasioned by a poor night’s sleep), to years (did dad hit you and beat up your mum?), to centuries (what kind of culture do you live in?), to eons (evolutionary history), is quite brilliant. There is therapeutic merit, too, in his message that the melancholic tendencies some of us endure are not, in the end, any fault of our own.

Of course, no book is perfect, and it would have been nice to have seen a few links to wider philosophy. For example, there is a rather interesting passage about the way we can become habituated to doing the right thing that might give a neurological basis to Aristotle’s virtue theory. Also, and despite his protestations in On Liberty (1859) that the book is not about free will, J.S. Mill’s comments about the “conditions necessary for us to grow, like a tree, according to the inward forces that make us living things” are absolutely in line with Sapolsky’s biologically-based holism. There are more modern thinkers and researchers who also deserve Sopolsky’s attention. For instance, Karen Wynn at Yale has enlightened us about the way that gut feelings about fairness to the individual (which might well serve as the basis of ethics) are ‘hard wired’ by evolution. Social psychologists such as Sheriff taught us as far back as the 1950s how being encouraged to co-operate in childhood might rewire the amygdala – the neurological seat of our fears or other feelings about the ‘other’.

In the end, pointing out these omissions is quibbling about a magnificent book, but I have one substantial worry about Sapolsky’s argument. For all the plausibility of his rejection of compatibilism in favour of a meritless determinism, it can’t be denied that there still needs to be some vocabulary to distinguish a brain like mine which (admittedly by chance) has the capacity to moderate its emotional responses, from one that has not, leading to antisocial behaviour. Indeed, when we recognise the efficacy of interventions like CBT on certain brains, and the capacity of rational argument to change our minds (just as my mind was changed about determinism by one of Sapolsky’s earlier books), then perhaps the concept of compatibilism isn’t entirely redundant after all.

Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology, and social policy with philosophy. He teaches in Sheffield.

• Determined: Life Without Free Will, by Robert Sapolsky, Bodley Head, 2023, 528 pages, £10.99 pb