LSAT 152, Section 3, RC Passage 3, Free Will

RC Passage 3 Explanation (Comparative)

PASSAGE TEXT: The legal system rests on the assumption that people use conscious deliberation when …

Paragraph Summaries

Passage A

1. The legal system assumes people freely choose their actions. But some behaviors, including complex ones, may happen without free will.
2. If every part of the brain is driven by other parts of the brain, then it’s hard to see where a truly independent “free” choice could come from.
3. Free will, if it exists at all, probably plays only a tiny role. Bad decision-making may eventually be viewed more like a physical condition than a moral failure.
4. The law should stop focusing on blameworthiness because it may be impossible to isolate free will from genetics and environment. Instead, the law should focus on how a person is likely to behave in the future.

Passage B

1. If people don’t have free will, it’s unclear how rational argument could move the law away from blame. That creates a paradox.
2. People often keep making moral judgments even when they believe behavior is physically determined. The urge to blame is deeply rooted and may be impossible to remove from criminal law.
3. The criminal justice system has tried moving toward rehabilitation before, but public support faded and punishment-based thinking returned.
4. Blame may serve an important social function even if it’s partly false. The criminal justice system should understand why people blame instead of simply trying to remove blame altogether.

Analysis

Welcome to an intro to Criminal Law that you’ll be taking in law school!

The passages agree on the neuroscience. Passage B doesn’t contest Passage A’s claims about neural interconnection or determinism. It actually concedes that criminal behavior might be a matter of biology, not choice.

The disagreement is about what follows from those claims.

Passage A thinks: if behavior comes from biology, genetics, and environment, then blame starts looking confused. The author doesn’t want courts trying to find the tiny ghost of free will inside a person’s brain and then punish based on that.

So A’s replacement is prediction. Don’t ask how blameworthy the person was. Instead, ask what they’re likely to do next. It’s much closer to rehabilitation/risk management than retribution.

Passage B’s objection is practical and social: even if blame is philosophically shaky, people may not be able to give it up.

That’s the tension most of the questions are built around. A thinks blame should be removed because it rests on a bad assumption about free will. B thinks removing blame may be unrealistic, and maybe not even desirable, because blaming seems to do some social work.

The rehabilitation example is there as historical evidence against A’s optimism. We already tried a less blame-centered model, and the public eventually swung back toward retribution. That doesn’t prove A is wrong in theory, but it makes A’s policy look hard to implement.

The trap is to make B sound more opposed to science than B is. B isn’t saying free will definitely exists. B is saying the human impulse to blame survives even when people are told behavior is determined. So the disagreement is less “is brain science true?” and more “can criminal law actually stop using blame?”