Imagine lending your car to a friend who then wrecks it by driving off the road into a telephone pole. Your friend walks away with minor injuries, but your car is toast. Your friend is sorry and she apologizes profusely. She asks for forgiveness.
You are curious as to why the accident happened. Was your friend driving recklessly, was she drunk, was she high, was she sleep-deprived?
Suppose, however, that it was none of these reasons. Instead, the accident was caused by a previously undetected brain tumor that at the last minute impinged up a certain part of your friend’s brain causing her to experience a seizure.
In such a case, forgiveness is not even an issue. Your friend did nothing wrong. She just happened to be the victim of bad luck. (Her bad luck goes way beyond destroying your car.) You also were the victim of bad luck. No one is at fault. As a result, no one needs to be forgiven.
Afreeism
Here is the thing though. What applies to your friend applies to everyone in every instance. The exact reasoning applies even if your friend got into the accident by reckless driving, drunk driving, driving high, driving without sleep, whatever. We live in a causal universe. Every action is the product of a chain of causation that began long before any of us were born. The result is that no one can ever do otherwise than what they do.
In other words, free will is just an illusion. All of our actions are determined. True, we may sometimes be able to do what we want, but our wants are also completely determined by a chain of causal factors that began eons ago.
This notion is called Afreeism. It is an idea that is both old, dating back to the ancient Greeks, and modern, stemming from the recent work of neuroscientists. Free will skeptics include the ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus, the philosophers Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in modern times, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, biologist Owen Jones, cognitive scientists Wolf Singer and Paul Bloom, and the philosopher Derk Pereboom, among many others. Afreeism is a scientific worldview, requiring no leaps of faith or dogmatic slumbers.
The End of Desert
A lack of free will has profound consequences. It means that no one deserves anything ever. We do not deserve praise or rewards for good behavior, nor punishment or blame for bad behavior. I am not saying that we should never reward or punish. Just that we should never do so on the basis of desert. For example, we may punish to deter. We should not punish, however, on the basis that someone deserves it. This distinction is important. It affects how, when, and who we punish and reward. (This is a topic for another day.)
The End of Forgiveness
The afreeist perspective also means that forgiveness is never necessary because no one is ever at fault. Since the person who drove your car could not have done otherwise than wreck it, it makes no sense to blame her, even if she were drunk, high, reckless, or lacking sleep. Yes, one can communicate to her that her behavior (say, drunk driving) was not appropriate, and yes, she should probably compensate you for the damage to your car. (This will provide an incentive against drunk driving in the future.) But forgiveness makes no sense. What happened was a result of a complex causal chain that began long before she was even born. To what extent could she be morally responsible for what happened? And why then does she need to be forgiven?
Learning How Not to Judge
Approaching life and our relationships this way means that we no longer judge people. We no longer judge our parents for how they raised us. We no longer judge our friends, romantic partners, and spouses for how they treated us. We no longer judge our children, our co-workers. We simply stop judging. Rather, because the universe is causal, we look for causes. Why did she act the way she did? What was motivating him? What was constraining her? And we look for solutions. What could I do to improve the relationship? What could he do, and should I communicate that? What could I learn from her? Should I even stay in the relationship?
The act of nonjudgment has a long history rooted in many traditions. Both the Buddha and Jesus warned against judging others, although perhaps for different reasons.
The Incredible Lightness of Nonjudgment
It simply feels amazing to stop judging other people! Anger and resentment fall away. A weight is lifted. We look at the world with a new perspective. We look for answers.
And, of course, what applies to others applies to yourself. Everything you do has also been determined. So stop judging yourself. The Stoics understood this. There are only two reasons to look to the past: good memories and lessons to be learned.
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