The real challenge to free will and responsibility.

Adina Roskies [1] argues that recent developments in the neurosciences do not challenge our ideas of free will and personal responsibility. She limits her discussion, however, to 'libertarian free will', and her argument focuses on the idea that we are able to act differently from how we choose to act. She does not address the influential new compatibilist views of free will and responsibility (see Box 1). These views, we contend, are most significantly challenged by recent discoveries. According to new compatibilists, it is crucial to our practice of personal responsibility that we are 'practically rational' beings, able to act for reasons, i.e., to figure out what should or should not be done and act accordingly [2]. It is this capacity to act for reasons that matters when we blame or praise one another, not libertarian free will. For example, I am held responsible if I steal something from a shop, but not if I am a kleptomaniac, a three-year old child, or simply did not realize that the item I took should be paid for (thinking it was just a sample). The last case is not properly described as 'stealing'; the reason I took the item was that I thought it was free. In the other two cases my practical rationality was either impaired or not yet fully developed. Thus new compatibilists connect personal responsibility with practical rationality. It is exactly our common understanding of practical rationality that is challenged by our growing understanding of how the brain works. Recent developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences indicate that, more often than not, we act in an automatic and unaware fashion, making up reasons only as we go along [3]. We are not directly aware of what drives our actions but infer reasons on the basis of a priori causal theories, confabulating them if we cannot find reasonable explanations [4, 5]. So many causal factors escape consciousness that confabulation seems the rule rather than the exception [6]. Even our moral judgments seem based on intuitions that are not, or are only partially, accessible to introspection. The reasons we come up with to justify these judgments are post-hoc rationalizations that played no role in their generation [7]. It remains to be seen how best to interpret these findings. However, at the very least, they make clear that we cannot take our practice of giving and asking for reasons at face …