ABSTRACT
Free will is not a scientific concept. People can say they feel free, but we are not compelled to believe them, and there is no universally agreed way to decide for them. Freedom is a little easier: presumably people feel free if they do not take opportunities to escape (what Skinner calls “counterattack”).
Sometimes “free will” is equated with unpredictability; that seems to be Skinner’s idea of “autonomous man.” Eminent philosophers assert that without free will, there can be no accountability and people cannot be held responsible—punished—for their actions. Legal punishment has two justifications: retribution, an eye for an eye or its modern equivalent, and deterrence, to make similar crimes less likely in the future. Retribution is a matter for ethics, not science. Science shows that deterrence only works if the effects of punishment are predictable, Not only is unpredictability not necessary for punishment, but it is also, in fact, incompatible with any kind of behavioral control.
Behavioral economics derives from some clever poll-type experiments in the late 1970s. Although couched in terms of “rationality” and its discontents, its aim is behaviorist—to control behavior without coercion—and its methods, redesigned so-called choice architecture, are the economist’s version of reinforcement schedules.
