Review of The Illusion of Conscious Will

by Daniel M. Wegner: “Conscious will plays a special role in Western moral thinking. Although we may blame each other for negligence and other sins of omission, acts stemming from conscious decisions are considered to be paradigmatically subject to moral evaluation. In his latest book, Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner tries to undermine the very notion that what we experience as conscious will has any real control over our behavior.

Wegner’s approach is stalwartly empirical. Some reviewers have celebrated him for snatching the issue of conscious will from the hands of benighted philosophers, and for bringing the cool light of experimental research to bear on issues that have traditionally been the subject of futile speculation. Actually, Wegner’s relationship to the philosophical tradition is more complicated. On the one hand, he is fully aware that his ideas hearken back to the thought of the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. On the other hand, as I will argue below, Wegner does not fully develop the ethical consequences of his theory.” Human Nature Review 2003 3:360-362 This philosophical trend to reconceptualize consciousness as an outgrowth of mechanistic processes and, as here, an illusion, goes fist-in-glove with the changes in psychiatric paradigm I discuss below.