This year marks the 80th anniversary of Clarence Darrow’s brilliant and passionate defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy teenagers who pled guilty to the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Bobby Franks. On August 22, 1924 Darrow gave his famous twelve hour closing statement, bringing tears to the eyes of the presiding judge and saving his clients from the death penalty. Here are two excerpts from the summation:
In seeking to establish the existence of what he calls a ‘plain person’s free will’, David Hodgson adduces 8 conditions, the joint satisfaction of which would, he claims, result in our having such free will (proposition 9 asserts this conclusion). The plain persons’ conception of free will, Hodgson says, is the libertarian conception, in which it is incompatible with determinism. Although what ordinary people actually believe about free will is an empirical matter in need of research, it’s likely that many people (but not all) have at least a vague
In his latest book, Freedom Evolves, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett coins the wonderful term “moral levitation” – you’ll even find it in the index. It names what some philosophers and many lay people think is required for morally responsible choices: “Real autonomy, real freedom, requires the chooser be somehow suspended, isolated from the push and pull of…causes, so that when decisions are made, nothing causes them except you!” (p.101-2, original emphasis).
6/17/03, BBC News
However, Dr Jonathan Chick, a consultant psychiatrist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, who specialises in alcohol problems, told BBC News Online that regardless of the influence of genes, free will still played an important role.
He said: "There is no genetic condition that completely removes free will with respect to drinking or smoking.
4/15/03
Reason Magazine
To the Editor:
Quoted in Jacob Sullum’s review of Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America, Thomas Szasz writes that “Attributing mental illnesses, such as addiction and panic disorder, to biological alterations occurring at a ‘subcellular level’ is a parody of the denial of free will, choice, and responsibility".
by Sheldon Richman
2/28/03, Manchester Times
Time magazine recently published its annual cover story on health, focusing on the relationship between mind and body. To its credit, it contains some rarely heard criticisms of the mental-health laws, which nearly everyone accepts as appropriate in the land of the free.
Join Together is to be congratulated for convening a national policy panel on discrimination and addiction, and for the resulting report, which highlights important changes that should be made in policies involving those in recovery.
