Free will, responsibility go hand in hand

This is something I never thought I’d write — words of appreciation for the last words of a vicious murderer. Yet I believe they are due, even though the man who spoke these words is now dead, executed in Texas for murdering a nurse in the 1980s after being paid $1,500.

It was reported that George Anderson Hopper, who received a lethal injection earlier this month for the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas in 1983, was asked by the warden if he had anything to say before he was to die, and here is what this man said:

“I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. The things I did changed so many lives. I can’t take it back. It was an atrocity. I am sorry. I beg your forgiveness. I know I am not worthy of it.”

And he was reported to have uttered this with his voice breaking with emotion.

Now this is a rather remarkable event: someone who has done something morally terrible accepting his guilt and making an effort to seek forgiveness for it. It shows, for once rather clearly, that some people accept responsibility for their evil deeds instead of merely putting up excuses and explanations for how they behaved, as if it had nothing to do with them.

In our era it is fashionable to look upon human behavior as but the same kind of event as rainfall, an earthquake, a mosquito bite or a tsunami — an impersonal bit of motion in the course of the unfolding of the multitude of impersonal motions throughout the universe.

This idea, that people are just bits and pieces of matter moving about without any hand in their own activities, is unfortunately encouraged by a pretty dubious report of what scientists, especially physicists, and by some evolutionary biologists, have discovered.

By this account of how the world is, everything is fully determined to go the way it must. That doesn’t mean we know how it will all turn out, although if we knew all the laws of nature and had a full list of the stuff populating the world, that, too, could be done. We don’t, so there are going to be surprises — that is how Stephen Hawking, the famous Cambridge astrophysicist, accounts for our alleged illusion of free will.

But this story is more metaphysics — and a bad kind to boot — than science. It simply assumes that the universe has no room for free will. It doesn’t show this at all. And the evidence is clear that people cause much of what they do, including the scientific work that supposedly gives them this story, not to mention all the artistic, technological and ordinary, day to day, production and creativity we witness from them, for good or ill.

The story so many people tell — that we just are moved objects and cannot ourselves move anything of our own, that we lack the capacity to initiate any of our behavior so we cannot reasonably be held responsible for it — is an extrapolation and a hasty one at that.

Instead, a much more credible, though a bit more complicated, story is that in the universe there are many kinds of beings, and what they can and cannot do depends on their nature.

In the case of people, then, we have minds that we can activate or leave dormant that determines how much of what happens with us will turn out. If we make good use of our minds, if we think things through, if we pay attention and follow through with what we learn, including in the area of human relations, things will go well.

But if we are sloppy, lazy, thoughtless and then try to act accordingly, things will go wrong, and sometimes we will end up perpetrating atrocious things, like Hopper did when he took money to kill Gailiunas.

It’s about time some of us fess up to our complicity in the bad things we produce.

Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at: [email protected]