Neurorights to Free Will: Remaining in Danger of Impossibility

This article refers to:

Contextual and Cultural Perspectives on Neurorights: Reflections Toward an International Consensus

Neurorights, as “new human rights,” have been increasingly recognized in the literature. In the Neurorights Initiative, these rights are supposed to be directed toward mental privacy, free will, personal identity, fair access to enhancement, and protection from algorithmic bias (Yuste, Genser, and Herrmann 2021); In another framework, targeted items are cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity, and psychological continuity (Ienca and Adorno 2017). Herrera-Ferrá et al. (2023) argue that cultural and contextual conditions must be considered to develop the notion of neurorights and their associated concepts. Nevertheless, they do not accept relativism but rather emphasize the importance of universal perspectives across diverse cultural and contextual conditions. This consideration becomes vital when they analyze neurorights to free will. Herrera-Ferrá et al. note that the understanding of free will varies depending on cultural conditions and propose that a “minimal definition” of free will, based on a universal understanding of the relevant notion, should be developed and incorporated into neurorights. This line of reasoning differs substantially from that of Borbón and Borbón (2021), who questioned the idea of neurorights to free will in terms of the metaphysical impossibility implied by determinism and the neuroscientific threat provided by the well-known Libet-style experiments.

However, whether the minimal definition approach leaves room for neurorights to free will remains unclear, given the way the notion of free will could converge across cultures. For example, an empirical survey of the U.S., India, Hong Kong, and Colombia found that people tend to believe in indeterminism about human actions and decision-making and that determinism is perceived as incompatible with morally responsible agency (Sarkissian et al. 2010). Furthermore, according to a large-scale survey across 20 countries, people are inclined to think that one’s ability to act freely and control one’s actions is undermined in a deterministic world (Hannikainen et al. 2019). Although a study (Berniūnas et al. 2021), referenced by Herrera-Ferrá et al., suggests cross-cultural variations in how people conceptualize free will, it does not assess the compatibility between free will and determinism. Therefore, while people’s notion of free will is yet to be fully elucidated, it could follow that agentive features incompatible with determinism turn out to be the core element of the free will notion and thus should be incorporated into the minimal definition of free will. In this case, the metaphysical threat of determinism would imply the impossibility of neurorights to free will.

Neurorights to free will could also become impossible through a neuroscientific understanding of human behavior. Libet-style experiments have shown that a conscious intention to act is preceded by non-conscious brain activity for some hundred milliseconds or more. There are certainly many objections to the idea that this alleged fact threatens free will. For example, it has been argued that consciousness is not required for the existence of free will; it has also been argued that free will is constituted by distal intention to join experiments, not proximal intention with such a short time window as a few hundred milliseconds (reviewed in Bayne 2011). However, these objections do not fit well with what people conceive of as free will since, as some empirical examinations have shown, people are inclined to think that free will is related to conscious and proximal intentions (e.g. Deutschländer, Pauen, and Haynes 2017). Although there have been no cross-cultural studies related to such findings about people’s notion of free will, similar results may be obtained across different cultures. In this case, features such as consciousness and proximity have to be incorporated into the minimal definition of free will, and therefore, neurorights to free will are made impossible by the findings of Libet-style experiments.

Therefore, shifting from “philosophical reflections” toward cross-cultural conditions, as Herrera-Ferrá et al. prompted, does not necessarily avoid the metaphysical and neuroscientific issues concerning free will. Rather, it could revive those issues depending on how the notion of free will converges across cultural conditions.

However, the way forward for neurorights to free will is still open because the notion of free will could be revised. In philosophical debates on free will, “revisionism” has been proposed in the face of the metaphysical threats (Vargas 2013). According to this view, although the current notion of free will is incompatible with determinism, we can transform it into one compatible with determinism. Arguably, a similar revision can be suggested whereby the notion is compatible with the neuroscientific threat; for example, free will is constituted by relevant non-conscious brain activity. From a broader perspective, these attempts can be understood as a project of conceptual engineering (Cappelen 2018). The idea is that we can modify, revise, or ameliorate—that is, engineer—various concepts that delineate the world. There are actually various instances; our understanding of fish has changed so that whales are excluded; what we call marriage has been changed so that same-sex couples can be deemed married. Therefore, the reasoning goes, we can revise the notion of free will to a more relaxed one, whereby the possibility of neurorights to free will would be open under the metaphysical and neuroscientific threats.

Nevertheless, it is not the case that any revisions are permissible. For example, if we redefine the notion of free will as meaning H₂O, then free will is unaffected by metaphysical threats because it is evident that the presence of H₂O is consistent with determinism. However, this is certainly not what we expect about the notion of free will. Therefore, there should be a constraint that conceptual engineering has to satisfy. In the literature, this constraint is supposed to be “topic identity” (Cappelen 2018); a notion or concept has to be about the same thing in some important sense before and after revision. Without this, we cannot distinguish a substantial solution from a trivial one such as the case of free will qua H₂O. One promising idea for this constraint is functionalism, according to which the function of a target concept is continuous before and after revision (Nado 2021). The concept of fish has altered, but it still works for biological classification in the natural order, and the revised concept has improved this purpose. Similarly, we should expect that the revised notion of free will performs its function in a manner that is continuous with the unrevised notion.

What function, then, should we assume for the notion of free will? We could propose that its primary function will be to ascribe autonomy, moral responsibility, personal value, and so on, to human individuals, and that the notion’s sensitivity to metaphysical and neuroscientific threats is not its primary function. To pursue this line of reasoning, a cross-cultural perspective is important in a different light. Whether the notion of free will works in such a manner requires empirical elucidation; we cannot establish it without observing how people apply that notion in various cultural conditions. Furthermore, it can be vital to see how the notion of free will works in customary ethical policies and guidelines. They may include several regional conventions on human rights that are mentioned by Herrera-Ferrá et al., as well as Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such cross-cultural considerations would help elucidate the practical functions of the free will notion and help propose its revision, whereby neurorights to free will are open under the metaphysical and neuroscientific threats.

Thus, the cross-cultural perspective raises many philosophical, psychological, and sociological questions surrounding free will. Although these questions are intricate, we cannot expect any easy paths toward neurorights to free will as any issues related to free will have been profound in history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Moka Kawase, Soichiro Toda, and Takumi Watanabe for their helpful support and comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by JST RISTEX Grant Number JPMJRS22J4 and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 23H00560 and 20H01752.