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Imagine you are walking downtown in a major city and you come across an unpleasant protester: an aggressive white supremacist who is handing out racist propaganda. His face seems contorted with hatred as he thrusts a pamphlet toward you. You recoil from this depraved specimen of humanity and quickly go on your way, but it is hard to get his image out of your mind.
You might be even more disturbed, however, if you were to discover that this "protester" was not a human being at all but rather a convincing humanoid robot, the invention of an evil, racist genius who wishes to further his ideology without the inconvenience and risk of making a personal appearance.
If that were the case, your moral disapproval would rest on the inventor. The robot itself (himself?) would be distasteful, but you would no longer think it appropriate to regard the mechanical "person" as evil. For such a mechanism lacks free will. In an immediate causal sense, the robot is "responsible" for its behavior, but in a moral sense, the responsibility lies with the inventor/programmer. The robot can only do what its inventor designed and programmed it to do.
Now, in your imagination, change the scenario one more time. The protester is not a robot, but a real human being. However, this human being has been kidnapped by an evil group of racist genius-scientists, who have implanted tiny electronic sensors in strategic places throughout the protester's brain. This cabal of scientists can completely control the beliefs and acts of will of the protester through remote-control electronic signals. Who is now responsible for the behavior of the protester?
Suppose we assume the protester has no memory of the kidnapping and operation, and no awareness that he is being electronically controlled. (Scientists capable of such sophisticated neural control can surely manage that trick as well.) If we ask the protester if he is doing what he does freely, he answers affirmatively. And he is right about this, in at least one sense of "free." His actions may be free in the sense that he is able to do what he himself wills, wants, or prefers, because the scientists who control his behavior do so by controlling his will and his desires. He is "able to do otherwise" in the sense that he could act differently than he does if he wanted to. But he does not want to, and there is certainly a sense in which, given his situation, he cannot want to do anything different from what he does.
Our intuitions about this imagined case, one that we may devoutly hope brain science will never make possible, may differ. My own convictions lie solidly with the view that the electronically controlled protester is no more morally responsible than the robot, if we assume that the control exercised by the evil scientists is complete.
However, according to the view of freedom espoused by theologian R.C. Sproul in his recent book Willing to Believe, what one ought to say about this case is that the person controlled by scientists is free in the sense of being morally responsible for his behavior. Indeed, following Jonathan Edwards, Sproul says that the human will can be free only in that sense. The will is always free to act according to the strongest motive or inclination at the moment. To be able to choose what one desires is to be free. Clearly, in our science-fiction example, the protester is free to act according to his strongest motive or inclination at the moment, and Sproul says that this is all that is required for freedom.
The view of freedom defended by Sproul is one that contemporary philosophers call a "compatibilist" view, because it allows for the compatibility of human freedom and causal determinism. If freedom merely requires being able to act in accordance with the strongest desires I happen to have at the moment of choice, then it will not matter if those desires are completely determined by events in my past, my genetic makeup, or even a mad scientist. The cause of my desires is simply irrelevant.
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