Afreeism 101

Against Moral Responsibility

. . . and the Damage Done

One of the central insights of afreeism is that no one is morally responsible for past actions. I have written about afreeism elsewhere (please see Medium articles How to Live Without Guilt and Why I Don’t Believe in Forgiveness), so I am going to give just the bare bones here. Afreeism is an evidence-based philosophy that concludes that there is no free will. Afreeism is based on the idea that all events are caused and that any given event is the result of a complex chain of causation. Humans are not exempt from the laws of physics that govern causation. Every thought, every feeling, every desire, and every action is the result of a complex yet deterministic causal chain involving atoms and molecules and cells and tissue. In the brain, neurons fire and trigger other neurons. This causal chain originated long before any of us were born. As a result, every thought, every feeling, every desire, and every action has been determined. None of us could have done otherwise than what we did. Free will is just an illusion.

Moral Responsibility for Past Actions

Because we could not have done otherwise, because we have no free will, it does not make sense to hold someone morally responsible for past actions. This is something that we know intuitively. Suppose someone…