Free Will's Helper.

Free will needs a helper, which is Scotus’s other dimension of morality: the intellect/cognition. More explicitly, before a person can exercise the capacity to freely choose, a person requires enlightenment by the intellect. The intellect includes two acts: abstraction (cognitive knowing the meaning of reality) and intuition (cognitive knowing what reality is).

Abstraction, for Scotus, refers to cognition, “the act by which the mind knows reality [the meaning of an object] via sense perception” (Ingham 2003, 225). It is what can be abstracted from sense encounters. In other words, it is knowledge based on comparing what is sensed with previously sensed or described images (Bartol 2008). Information gained through bodily senses is transferred to the imagination, which then works to provide a representational image for the mind. “In the act of abstraction, the intellect and this image give birth to the higher order concept for understanding. This understanding is revealed in judgments [assessments] expressed in language” (Ingham 2003, 58–59). Abstraction is the perceptual counterpart of intuition (Wolter 1990a).

Intuition is also cognition; it is “certain knowledge” of reality [that an object exists]” (Ingham 2003, 229). Scotus describes intuitive cognition as a form of simple [nonjudgmental] awareness of an object as existing. It is the mind in direct contact with what is known (Wolter 1990a). It is direct connection with the truth. Intuition is “certain knowledge of a present and existing object or person in its existence, unmediated by images or mental pictures” (Bartol 2008, 222). A person has “an immediate existential grasp of any existing reality in its existence” (Ingham 2003, 61).

When viewed through the lens of the intellect, Scotus considers a person to be one who knows and understands.

Scotus summarizes his conceptualization of the intellect in Lectura II, d. 3, nn. 285, 287–288:

Know that an intellect is capable of two sorts of knowledge and intellection, for it can have one that abstracts from all existence, and another of a thing present in its own existence. … The first sort of knowledge, according to which the intellect abstracts from all existence, is called “abstractive,” whereas the other, according to which the intellect sees the thing in its existence, is called “intuitive.” It is not called “intuitive” because it is not “discursive,” however, but rather because it is distinguished from that abstractive knowledge, which knows a thing in itself through a species. (Wolter 1990a, 107)

Here, again, a comparison of Scotus's and Aquinas’s thinking may clarify Scotus’s conceptualization. In his understanding of the intellect/cognition, Scotus differs from Aquinas. Aquinas emphasizes knowing through intellectual abstraction. Only secondarily is the intellectual form linked with sense perception to form a mental representation. Scotus, on the other hand, sees that human beings can know directly through intuition.

Both Scotus and Aquinas emphasize that moral choices are a combination of reason and desire. But they differ about what makes choices moral or immoral. Aquinas believes that once the intellect judges what is the appropriate moral act, the will as the rational appetite must choose it. Scotus believes that the senses present multiple options for action at each moment of choice. The individual consciously chooses one particular moral act.

Right Moral Action.

According to Scotus, when cognition (the intellect) and desire (the will) function as a single agent, they produce a single, rational choice (Ingham 2003, 95). When Scotus affirms the will as morally rational, this means “self‐control and self‐determination [the will], according to the light of reflection [the intellect]” (Ingham 2003, 96).

When viewed through the lens of the will/desire as rational and the intellect/cognition as helper, Scotus’s vision of the person is holistic.

Scotus uses Augustine's simile of the horse and the rider to clarify what he means (Wolter [1986] 1997, 94). Comparing the horse to the will and the rider to charity, the horse is free to throw its rider (destroy charity through mortal sin), or to choose not to follow the guidance of the rider (commit indifferent or venially sinful action), or to choose to follow where charity leads (act meritoriously). Thus, moral goodness is not something absolute; it is a relationship—of horse and rider, of will and charity. Goodness is an agreement of the act with right reason. It is the capacity to freely choose that is enlightened by the intellect/cognition.

Both the will and the intellect are required for right moral action. But the will is always free. A person can know with certainty—through his double capacity for knowing: abstraction and intuition (Ingham 2003, 94–96)—what is the right thing to do, and still not do it if the will does not choose it. Morality reaches its fullest perfection when will (the capacity to love and to choose) is aided by intellect (the ability to control oneself). The “fullest perfection of the human person as rational involves loving in the way God loves” (Ingham 2003, 28).

In summary, Scotus stresses that the exercise of free will is a necessary condition for any action to have a moral value. Being free to disregard the inclination for self‐indulgence and to follow the dictates of right reason—in terms of the goal the action attains, the effort expended, and the consequences of the action—a person can be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished for the results from the action. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand (Wolter 1990b). “Thus to be morally good an act must be perfect in its morality. It must be a free act elicited as the result of a moral choice, in accordance with the judgment of right reason, and on the responsibility of the individual's own deliberation” (Harris 1927, 310–11).

The Wind Chime Analog.

Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, has conceptualized John Duns Scotus’s religious insight about morality as a wind chime (Ingham 1996, 145–147). The wind chime consists of individual pieces—symbolic of Scotus’s insight about people in community—that must hang in appropriate relationship to one another for the chime to be visually beautiful and to sound musically harmonious. The chime must also be balanced. Balance symbolizes the end of the moral journey, which is communion, not autonomy.

At the center of every wind chime is a disk, which Ingham likens to Scotus’s central element of morality: the freedom of the will. It is weighted by the desire that focuses inward and the desire that focuses outward. But it is free enough to be moved by the circumstances in which it lives. Just as the disk moves to touch the chimes, the will of each person functions in context touching other people.

The chimes surrounding the disc represent not only other people, but also their moral virtues—their practical habits resulting in morally good acts that are set in time, place, manner, and circumstances. The will, according to Scotus, could not function properly without people and their virtues. Together they function best when they function in harmony. “Together, the human goods of balance and harmony constitute that inner peace which gives rise to joy within the heart of the formed moral agent” (Ingham 1996, 147). The moral agent—like the wind chime—responds to what circumstances demand.

For Scotus, freedom and reason are not fundamental opposites. “The reason of nature and action, of … morality, unfold within the architectonic form of freedom” (Wolter [1986] 1997, x). Freedom has its own order and is the glue of the universe. What actually exists in the world finds its reason in the logic of the will's freedom. This can be so because of Scotus’s theory of personhood: human beings are naturally good with a potential for right action. When human beings will in accordance with the assessment of right reason, then the resultant action expresses love—both human love and also the divine love that created the universe.

Nonconscious Bodily Movement.

In the past several decades, neuroscientists have discovered mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of our brains. Mirror neurons are thought to be the way we represent the mental states of another by unconsciously matching those states with resonant states of our own (Gallese 2005). We not only represent mental states but also bodily movement.

Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that when people watch mouth, hand, and foot movements, their premotor cortex activates as if they were performing those actions (Blakemore and Decety 2001). Mirror neurons in the premotor cortex are thought to be mediators of this coding for actions performed by the self and by another person (Gallese 2001; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). What is going on is more than the preparation for and production of actions. Direct bodily understanding also includes recognizing, anticipating, predicting, and interpreting the actions of others. It is the way human beings directly understand another's intentions without reflecting on them. “It may be necessary to mirror action (at the premotor level) to understand it. Finally, … the MNS [motor neuron system] is active when the observed individual is about to perform an action, suggesting that it could also serve as a detector of others’ intentions” (Konner 2010, 151–52).

This process—the process whereby human beings nonconsciously experience direct bodily understanding of another—is called embodied simulation. Embodied simulation is how we understand another by unconsciously matching the states we see in another with resonant states of our own. To the extent that embodied simulation influences free will, the prefrontal cortex is implicated as a possible site for the process of free will.

Autonomic Processes.

All living beings have nonconscious mechanisms for assessing their environment for safety or danger, and responding accordingly. Neurophysiologist Stephen Porges (Porges 2001, 2004, 2011) proposes that human beings have three primary mechanisms, which he calls neuroception. Neuroception mechanisms are governed differently by our brain and body:

• 1

  Mobilization, enabling us to fight or flee;

• 2

  Immobilization, enabling us to go unseen, appear dead, or dissociate from pain and terror; and

• 3

  Social engagement, enabling us to connect with others to feel safe, remain calm, and access higher brain functioning to resolve situations.

Mobilization (fight or flight) occurs when our bodies react to perceived threat by aggressing, standing our ground, or moving away from danger toward safety. This physiological body‐state of fear is mediated by our sympathetic autonomic nervous system. Immobilization (freeze) is an immediate way to preserve our life or to minimize pain if death is inevitable. This physiological body‐state of fear is mediated by our unmyelinated parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, predominantly the unmyelinated branch of the vagus nerve. Mobilization and immobilization are essential when confronted with genuine external danger. Social engagement is our newest evolutionary option for responding to safety and threat. It involves a complex system of neural, facial, and visceral circuitry that physiologically calms our body and readies us for proximity to, reliance upon, and connection with others. This physiological body‐state of calm is mediated by our myelinated parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, predominantly the myelinated branch of the vagus nerve.

Depending on how our body nonconsciously assesses our environment, our body's resultant physiological state shapes our freedom of will and what we choose to do in the world. Our will is most free when we are in a physiological body‐state of calm where we have access to our higher brain functioning to resolve situations (Perry and Szalavitz 2006, 249). Even though neuroception is a nonconscious process, once human beings understand that we live in different body‐states, we can learn to bring ourselves back into an emotionally regulated state that enables our capacity for free will.

Empathy.

Free will involves nonconscious embodied processes such as bodily movement and autonomic processes; it also involves emotional awareness such as empathy. The term empathy is only about a hundred years old. ²

The term “empathy” is derived from the German work Einfühlung, coined by Robert Vischer in 1872 and used in German aesthetics. …  In 1909, the American psychologist E. B. Tichener translated Einfühlung into a new word, “empathy.” Tichener had studied with Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern psychology, while in Europe. Like many young psychologists in the field, Titchener was primarily interested in the key concept of introspection, the process by which a person examines his or her own inner feelings and drives, emotions, and thoughts to gain a sense of personal understanding about the formation of his or her identity and selfhood. The “pathy” in empathy suggests that we enter into the emotional state of another's suffering and feel his or her pain as if it were our own. (Rifkin 2009, 12)

Empathy used here refers to the capacity to experience another's internal state as if it were one's own. Its prerequisite appears in the first year of life as children experience positive human interactions and help from caregivers for coping with stress (Carter, Harris, and Porges 2009). In these experiences, infants experience resonance with the good parent's empathic responses to their needs (Porges 2009). When caregivers meet children with empathic resonance, caregivers and children cocreate secure attachment bonds that become the template for the child's future relationships (Bowlby 1969; Ainsworth et al. 1978; Porges 2003) and their capacity for empathy. Empathy is an essential prerequisite to later moral development (Eisenberg and Miller 1987).

The anterior insula (AI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are implicated in empathic processes (Decety and Moriguchi 2007). Neuroscientists Vinod Menon and Lucina Uddin have proposed that the AI is “the hub of a ‘salience network’” (Menon and Uddin 2010, 656). The “salience network” functions to identify the most relevant stimuli to guide behavior. In other words, the insula is sensitive to salient internal and extrapersonal events, which it selects for additional processing. Because the insula strongly couples with the ACC, it has access to the motor system. Working together, the insula marks salient stimuli for the ACC that guides behavior. The insula and the ACC, thus, may be some of the neural correlates of empathy. As we will see later in this paper, empathy is implicated in free will. Thus, the insula and the ACC may be some of the neural correlates of free will.

Furthermore, Menon and Uddin say, “In the human brain, the AI and ACC contain a specialized class of neurons with distinctive anatomical and functional features: the von Economo neurons (VENs). The VENs have large axons, which facilitate rapid relay of AI and ACC signals to other cortical regions. … We speculate that VENs may constitute the neuronal basis of fast control signals generated by the AI and ACC” (Menon and Uddin 2010, 661). There seem to be more VENs in the right‐brain hemisphere than in the left, which “may be related to asymmetry in the autonomic nervous system in which the right hemisphere is preferentially involved in sympathetic activation … ; the left hemisphere is preferentially involved in parasympathetic activity associated with reduced tension or calming responses” (Allman et al. 2010, 512).

Dr. Simone Shamay‐Tsoory (2009), Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa, has proposed a neural model of empathy (Figure 2). Empathy is experienced when the neural networks mediating both cognitive empathy and also affective empathy are activated. Separate, albeit interacting, processes mediate these two components of empathy. Embodied simulation underlies affective empathy—a function of neural networks located mostly in the right‐brain hemisphere. An example of affective empathy is “I feel his pain.” Neuroimaging studies indicate that the neural networks mediating embodied simulation reside in the following brain areas: the ACC, the amygdala, the insula, and possibly the mirror neuron system in the inferior frontal gyrus.

2

Schematic of Empathy.Adapted from Jean Decety and William Ickes (eds.), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, Figure 16.3. ©2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of MIT Press.

Theory of mind (ToM) ³ underlies cognitive empathy—a function of neural networks located in the right and possibly the left‐brain hemispheres. Cognitive empathy has two components: a cognitive ToM (e.g., “I know that she is thinking about the book”) and an affective ToM (e.g., “I know that he has been feeling miserable lately”). The neural networks mediating ToM reside in the following brain areas: the medial prefrontal cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, the temporal poles, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Empathy occurs when both the cognitive and the affective networks are activated (Shamay‐Tsoory 2009; Shamay‐Tsoory, Aharon‐Peretz, and Perry 2009). To the extent that empathy is implicated in free will, all of the neural networks mediating empathy may be neural correlates of free will.

Intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity—defined in the 1970s—is interpersonal communion. It is a “sharing of experiential content (e.g., feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and linguistic meanings) among a plurality of subjects” (Zlatev et al. 2008, 1). Educational psychologist Ann Cale Kruger writes, “Sharing psychological states with others is more than, but may include, empathy (a matching of moods), perspective‐taking (a shared reference), embodied synchrony (a mirroring of behaviors), theory of mind (an imputation of mental states), or common ground (shared background knowledge). It is having joint thoughts and feelings with another person about some aspect of reality when each is aware of the other's role in the commonality” (Kruger 2011, 113). In short, intersubjectivity is a “sharing of experiences” (Brinck 2008, 116). It is the sharing of physiological states, which then drive the cognitive state.

Three layers of intersubjectivity—two occurring in human development before and one occurring after language acquisition—have been distinguished by researchers working from a simulation perspective (Bråten and Trevarthen 2007). Primary intersubjectivity is direct resonance with another's expression of feelings in a reciprocal subject‐to‐subject contact. This dance‐like proto‐conversation can be seen from the first months of life as infant's facial imitation of another. Indeed, it has been observed in an infant forty‐two minutes old. This is the expression of the innate tendency of all human beings to connect with another. It is our “deepest moral core” (Hundeide 2007, 253). Secondary intersubjectivity is where an object is the focus of joint attention and emotional referencing within the trusting relationship. It appears from about nine months of age. It is a “cooperative awareness” (Trevarthen 2005, 70) of the world we share. Tertiary intersubjectivity—attained in the second year of life—is symbolic conversation sharing goals and unspoken intentions with others. Other researchers from a perspective of Intentional Relations Theory have identified a fourth level that is achieved in year four when the number of VENs are reaching their peak (Allman, Watson, Tetreault, and Hakeem 2005). Now children not only share minds, but they understand minds (Baressi and Moore 2008).

Our neurobiology depends on these layers of intersubjective encounters—even primary and secondary intersubjectivity where the right hemispheres of people (cortical and subcortical neural networks) are nonverbally communicating with and between each other (Bråten 2007). The right hemisphere's communication is emotional and nonverbal (facial expression, prosody, gesture). Intersubjective communication is the process whereby the subjective experience of one person has an impact on the subjective experience of another, and vice versa. It is a reciprocal process of acting on each other physiologically that is experienced as emotions.

In other words, nonconsciously detecting the emotions expressed nonverbally by another triggers the same neurons in the perceivers’ brains that fire when they have those emotions. The perceiver “mirrors” the physiology of the other and experiences the emotions of the other, and vice versa. This is the process of intersubjectivity.