Punishing Without Free Will

In a few memorable lines of dialogue between Candide and his faithful servant Martin, Voltaire eloquently conveyed the relevance of free will to our practices of punishing and blaming. In a naturalistic world, as Martin observes, human beings are merely another cog in the wheel of nature. As such, it would be as absurd to blame humans for their sins as it would be to blame hawks for eating pigeons. The always-optimistic Candide begs to differ.

The hawk’s nature is fixed because animal conduct is determined by natural laws. Mankind’s nature, on the other hand, is variable because humans have the ability to change their ways. They have, in other words, free will. And it is because of this uniquely human capacity to freely choose to do otherwise that humans can and should be blamed for their crimes.