Aristotle, Aquinas, and AI

What have a Greek philosopher who lived about 2300 years ago, a Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher who died in 1274 A. D., and artificial intelligence (AI) got to do with each other?  Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  What I have to say is no joke, however, because if we don't heed the wisdom of these two parties, which has been almost totally forgotten, we are liable to make some mistakes shortly that will be exceedingly costly in terms of missed opportunities, misdirected hopes, and maybe even lives.

 

The particular wisdom I speak of is known by the technical term of scholastic metaphysics.  It was, and still is, a way of viewing the universe, and it dominated the West for over a thousand years.  The Scientific Revolution vigorously uprooted it and threw it in the trash pile, to oversimplify a very complicated history.  And now it is almost completely forgotten except by a few lucky people such as yourself, if you keep reading.

 

The aspect of scholastic metaphysics I wish to explain concerns the nature of things.  Here's an example, taken from an article by journalist Mary Harrington in the June/July issue of First Things.  Take a dog, any dog.  It may be black, white, spotted, or bald.  But none of those attributes change the fact that it's a dog.  The scholastic metaphysical term for the dogness of a dog is its substantial form, also known as essence.  The aspects of a thing that can change without changing its substantial form are called accidents.  That's a weird use of the word, I know, but I'm not going to argue with Aristotle, who came up with these ideas, and Aquinas, who put them in terms compatible with Christianity.  The substantial form of a thing is its organizing principle.  The accidents are characteristics that can change without altering the substantial form.

 

What about people?  We have an organizing principle called the soul.  No matter what accidental characteristics we have—whether a person is fat, thin, from Teaneck, New Jersey, or in a coma—that substantial form remains. 

 

What about computers, and all the systems that are known by the general term of AI?  AI is, of course, artificial—that is, it is a man-made artifact.  Unlike living things, an artificial object has no substantial form that is prior to what its human makers say it is.  We can cobble together a bunch of transistors, call it a computer, and get it to do certain things for us.  But computers, and the AI systems supported by them, are simply assemblies of accidents.  This makes AI systems fundamentally different in kind from human beings. 

 

What emerges from looking at humans and AI from the viewpoint of scholastic metaphysics is this:  human beings are just a clean different kind of thing from AI systems.  And treating AI systems and humans as though they were basically the same kind of thing, simply piles of atoms arranged differently—which is how modern materialistic science encourages us to think—ignores a vital difference between the two.  Human beings have souls as their organizing principle, and AI systems do not.  No imaginable or unimaginable future progress in AI can change that fact.

 

This viewpoint flies in the face of the transhumanist agenda so popular in Silicon Valley, which looks forward to the day when human beings can transcend their messy, disease-and-death-prone meat-cage origins and live forever in an eternal bit-world of computer-borne bliss that will take over the universe.  (I may have left something out in that description, but I think I got most of it.)  Human beings are the rational animals that result from propagation by other human beings.  Anything you might upload from a human being to a computer is not going to be that human being.  And treating it, or any other AI product, as if it were human is a category error that can lead to heinous consequences.

 

In Harrington's words, trying to teach sand to think is not only futile, but if we start treating the result as though it had a soul, we are in danger of losing our own souls.

 

This may sound like just another anti-technology rant, but it's not.  AI can do truly amazing and useful things, but only if its human users keep in mind what it is and don't try to endow it with quasi-human agency.  A tool should be under the control of its human users at all times.  That control may be loose and barely perceptible sometimes, but it has to be there.  If we begin to bow down to AI entities as though they were thinking humans like us, we will soon regret it.  An automobile provides useful service when under control, but if it gets out of control it becomes a dangerous missile.  The same thing is true of AI.

 

Thinking in terms of scholastic metaphysics seems strange to most people unfamiliar with it, and it takes a while to realize that it's just as useful as it ever was.  I have had a passing acquaintance with it ever since I read a book on Thomistic philosophy in the 1990s.  The thing that drove me to that book was a statement by a former theoretical physicist turned pastor, who said that the Catholic Church's notion of transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ was based on an outmoded theory of matter.  I wanted to know more about this outmoded theory, and it turned out to be scholastic metaphysics. 

 

What modern science did to scholastic metaphysics is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  There was a lot of useless bathwater in Aristotle's physics—rocks having a desire to fall downward and so on—but there was also great wisdom in his metaphysics.  The wisdom of scholastic metaphysics can save us from making lots of mistakes that could be avoided if we just keep in mind that however clever and human-like AI appears, it's really just words written in the sand.  And we wrote the words to start with. 

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's article "Thomophobia" appeared on pp. 19-27 of the June/July 2026 issue of First Things.  For those wanting to know more, she refers to Edward Feser's book Scholastic Metaphysics (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, $34 on Amazon).

 

Sentiment, Calculation, and Prudence

 

Some engineers eventually become managers, and managers not only of engineering projects but of entire companies or even public organizations.  The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a spotlight on the question of how those in charge should allocate scarce resources (including technical resources) in the face of life-threatening situations.  And so I would like to bring you a brief summary sketch of three ways to do that:  two that are widely applied but fundamentally flawed, and one that is not so well known but can actually be applied successfully by ordinary mortals like ourselves.

 

None of this is original to me, nor to Robert Koons, the philosopher who describes them in a recent issue of First Things.  But originality is not usually a virtue in ethical reasoning, and in what follows, I'll try to show why.

 

In the 1700s, the Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and David Hume devised what Koons calls a "difference-making" way of coming up with moral decisions.  The way this process works is best described by an example.  To properly assess an action or even the lack of an action, you must figure out the net difference it makes to the entire world.  Koons uses the example of a homicidal maniac who, if left to himself, is bound to go out and kill three people.  Suppose you know about this maniac: you can either do nothing, or choose to kill him.  If you do nothing, three people die; if you kill him, only one person dies.  Other things being equal, the world is a better place if fewer people die, so the logic of difference-making says you must kill him.

 

That's an extreme example, but it vividly illustrates the rational basis of two popular ways of making moral decisions involving public health.  Let's start with the commonly-heard statement that every human life is of infinite value.  Few would dare to argue openly with that contention, yet if you try to use it as a guide for practical action, you run into a dilemma.  Even something as simple as your driving a car to the grocery store exposes other people to some low but nonzero chance of being killed by your vehicle.  If you take the infinite value of human life seriously, you will never drive anywhere, because infinity times (whatever small chance there is of running over someone fatally) is still infinity.

 

Koons calls one way of dealing with this dilemma "sentimentalism."  He's not talking about people who watch mushy movies, but the fact that the sentimentalist, in the meaning he uses, abandons logic for emotion and settles for life more or less as it is, but feels bad whenever anybody dies.  Such people exist in a constant state of deploring the world's failure to live up to the ideal that every human life is of infinite worth, but otherwise derive little moral guidance from that principle in practice.

 

The more hard-headed among us say, "look, we can't act on infinities, so if we put a finite but large value on human life, at least we can get somewhere. " Applying the difference-making idea to human lives valued at, say, a million dollars, allows you to make calculations and cost-benefit tradeoffs.  Engineers are familiar with technical tradeoffs, so many engineers find this method of moral decision-making quite attractive.  But one of many problems with this approach is that it requires one to take a "view from nowhere":  there are no boundaries to the differences a given decision makes, other than the world itself.  Again, if we try to be truly logically consistent, calculating all the differences a given life-or-death decision makes is practically impossible.

 

At this point Koons calls Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to the rescue.  Operating under the umbrella of the classical virtue called prudence, Koons asks a given person in a given specific set of circumstances to judge the worthiness of a particular choice facing him or her.  He sets out four things that make a human act of choice worthy:  (1)  whether the human is applying rational thinking to the act, rather than random chance or instinct; (2) what the essential nature of the act is; (3)  what the purpose or end of the act is; and (4) what circumstances are relevant to the act. 

 

Unlike the difference-making approach, which imposes the impossible burden of near-omniscience on the decider, judging the worthiness of an action doesn't ask the person making the decision to know everything.  You simply take what you know about yourself, the kind of act you're contemplating, what you're trying to accomplish, and any other relevant facts, and then make up your mind.

 

In this process, some decisions are easy.  Should I kill an innocent person, a child, say?  Item (2) says no, killing innocent people is always wrong. 

 

Here's another situation Koons uses, but with an example drawn from my personal experience.  You walk outside your building past a bicycle owned by a person you really hate (call him Mr. SOB) and would like to see out of the way.  You notice that someone who hates Mr. SOB even more than you do has quietly disconnected the bike's brake cables, so that unless Mr. SOB checks his brakes before he gets on his bike, he will ride out into the street with no brakes and quite possibly get killed.  If you decide to say or do nothing, you have not committed any explicit act; you have simply refrained from doing anything.  But item (3) says your intentions in refraining were evil ones:  you hope the guy will get killed on his bike.  In this case, not doing anything is a morally wrong act, and you are obliged to warn him of the danger. 

 

And in less extreme cases, such as when public officials decide how to trade off lockdown restrictions versus spending money on vaccines or public assistance, the same four principles can guide even politicians (!) to make decisions that do not require them to be all-knowing, but do ask them to apply generally accepted moral principles in a practical and judicial way.

 

Of course, judiciousness and prudence are not evenly distributed virtues, and some people will be better at moral decision-making than others.  But when we look into the fundamental assumptions behind the decision-making process, we see that the difference-making approach has fatal flaws, while the traditional virtue-based approach using prudential judgment can be applied successfully by any individual with a good will and enough intelligence to use it.

 

Sources:  A much better  explanation of these approaches to moral reasoning can be found in Robert C. Koons's original article "Prudence in the Pandemic" which appeared on pp. 39-45 of the October issue of First Things, and is also accessible online at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/prudence-in-the-pandemic.

Aquinas Looks at Bitcoins

On the face of it, it's hard to think of two more unrelated subjects than St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, and bitcoins, the original blockchain-enabled digital currency that has spawned a flock of imitations and variations.  But Aquinas set out some guidelines that can let us at least speculate (so to speak) about what he would say about bitcoins.

It's hard to imagine how different the economy of 1250 A. D. was from today's economy, but some things were the same.  There were merchants, traders, banks, and markets then as well as now.  But in Europe, everything was done under the direct or at least indirect supervision of the Church, and so anyone who tried something too innovative had to justify it on the basis of Christian doctrine. 

Aquinas viewed money much as his philosophical ancestor Aristotle did:  as a medium of exchange, a legitimate accounting method that allowed trade to take place without the inconvenience of bartering this good for that unrelated service.  To use a time-honored analogy, if a shoemaker needs bread and a baker needs his shoes repaired, a swap could conceivably be arranged without money.  But if the baker needs his shoe fixed at a time when the shoemaker doesn't happen to want any bread, the barter system breaks down.  Money solves this problem by keeping track of the values of goods and services and allowing trade to take place without the need for barter.  The baker takes money he's earned and pays the shoemaker for his services, even if the shoemaker doesn't like the kind of bread the baker makes.  And so on.

Even in the case where a person gains a speculative advantage, Aquinas said that there is nothing necessarily wrong or sinful in taking that advantage.  According to an article by Murray Rothbard, Aquinas gave the example of a trader who is the first to bring a wagonload of food to a famine-stricken area where food is very scarce, and consequently the price he can get is very high.  In essence, Aquinas asks the question, "Would it be wrong for the trader to charge the prevailing high price, even though other traders will probably follow him and lower the price?  Or should he charge the lower price that he knows will prevail after the other traders arrive?"  Aquinas says charging the higher initial price would not be a sin, though it would be more charitable to sell the food below the market price.  So in saying this, he implied that taking advantage of a favorable market position, as we might put it today, is not necessarily wrong.

The bitcoin variety of digital currency is a particularly pure form of speculation in which the thing of value is so abstract as to be nearly nonexistent.  A bitcoin itself is just a record of transactions that play out under certain rules that are publicly known, and can be created only with the expenditure of a certain amount of energy, time, and other resources.  Its value in terms of more familiar monetary measures such as the dollar depends entirely on what people perceive its value to be.  While that perception is not completely random, as the throw of a die is, it is so far beyond the control of most individuals that it might as well be random.  So in this aspect, speculating in bitcoins amounts to a kind of gambling, as many other forms of financial speculation do as well.  And Aquinas had something to say about gambling.

In one section of his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says that giving gambling winnings to charity would be wrong if the winnings were garnered from those who have "no power to alienate their property," such as children and the mentally disabled.  And if gambling is illegal according to civil law, it would also be wrong.  But he implies that gambling winnings from a game in which everyone knows and understands the rules, and gambles anyway, would at least not be sinful, although as with any other indulgence, excessive gambling can become harmful to oneself and others and becomes a sin against charity.  So to the extent that buying bitcoins amounts to gambling, Aquinas would also give them a conditional pass.

I will close with a personal bitcoin story that I hope the subject of it won't mind my sharing, if I don't give any names.  Some time ago I had a student in one of my classes come up to me and ask for advice.  It turns out she had learned about the bitcoin business in the very early days of its existence when you could get some for a few dollars each, and she'd gone ahead and bought some.  At the time she approached me about the matter, they were worth some very serious money—many thousands each, was my impression—and she wanted some advice as to what to do with them.  This was when their value was reaching a historic high.

I warned her about adverse tax implications, and told her I was no financial expert, but selling a few of them with awareness of her tax situation wouldn't be a bad thing.  I'm not sure what she did, but it's likely she was able to pay for her whole college education that way and then some.  I also encouraged her to give some of her profit away as a way of developing a habit of charity.

To be frank, I began this post hoping that I could find a blanket condemnation by Aquinas of bitcoins.  But I don't see that in what I was able to find, at least in this brief and superficial inquiry.  After all, we're used to our bank accounts being recorded in digital form, and bitcoins are just an elaboration of digital banking, in a sense, although with different rules.  So I'm pretty sure that if we had Aquinas with us today, and we could manage to translate the idea of digital currency into Latin, he would catch on and probably say that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with bitcoins.  But like any medium of exchange, bitcoins or dollars or bars of gold can either be used wrongly—e. g. stolen—or used to benefit people.  The problems with them, if any, will not be found in the software or the hardware, but will arise from the human heart.

Sources:  I referred to the website https://mises.org/library/philosopher-theologian-st-thomas-aquinas which carries an article dated 12/25/2009 "The Philosopher-Theologian:  St. Thomas Aquinas" by Murray Rothbard, and a Google-enabled excerpt from the Cambridge University Press edition of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae edited by R. J. Batten, O. P., vol. 34 (section 2a2a3, 23-33, art. 7.2), p. 263.

Light On the Dark Side: Planned Parenthood and Ashley Madison

In the last few weeks, an organization called the Center for Medical Progress posted videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing cash transactions involving the body parts of aborted fetuses.  And just last week, a hacker group calling itself the Impact Team posted personal information on 32 million users of Ashley Madison, a website that advertises itself as a matchmaker for those wishing to have extramarital affairs.  In both of these cases, the hackers or investigators "went to the dark side" technologically, using spy technology or hacking abilities to penetrate secrets of the target organizations.  What can we say about the use of technology in this way?  Does the end justify the means?  Or are we not permitted to do evil, even if good may come from it?

Though the technology is new, the moral dilemma posed by these cases is very old.  Both St. Augustine (354 - 430 A. D.) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274 A. D.) took up the question of whether good intentions can justify an evil act.  In fact, Aquinas cited Augustine approvingly as he considered this question:  ". . . Augustine says that there are some actions which neither a good end nor a good will can make good." 

For those familiar with digital logic, we can express what Aquinas says about the matter in terms of an AND function of three inputs A, B, and C.  All inputs  have to be true in order for the output of the AND gate to be true.  For Augustine and Aquinas, not only must the will (intention) of the actor be good.  And it's not sufficient even if the outcome of the action (the end) is good.  The act itself has to be good, or at least not on a list of intrinsically evil acts, for the overall action to be permissible.

What does the list of intrinsically evil acts look like?  Well, most moral theorists include lying on the list.  Right there, the anonymous investigator of Planned Parenthood who posed as a buyer for a fetal-tissue company ran afoul of the no-evil-acts principle.  He wasn't telling the truth—there was no such company.  And he was wired with audio and video recording equipment that took down every word spoken by the Planned Parenthood representatives, who wouldn't have been so forthcoming if they had known the guy they were talking with was a spy, basically. 

How about the Impact Team, those Ashley Madison hackers?  We're on softer ground here.  About the worst moral transgression they committed was theft of the Ashley Madison records, though it is theft of a peculiarly digital kind, because Ashley Madison still has all the records they used to have.  They're just exposed to public view now, for curious spouses to peruse in case they have had some suspicions about whether their partner has been straying, or trying to.  As it turns out, there were a lot more wanna-be adulterers signed up than real ones.  One of the embarrassing things the Impact Team revealed about the website was that about 85% of the site's customers were men, and it's likely that many of the female profiles on the site were fabricated.  Add that to the fact that the site charged users $19 to allegedly remove all their personal data from the site, only they didn't, and Ashley Madison's business model looks to be coming apart at the seams.  Which is probably just what the Impact Team hoped would happen. 

Now, I happen to believe that the planet would be a better place if neither Planned Parenthood nor Ashley Madison existed as organizations, at least in their present forms.  If the actions of hackers or investigative journalists move circumstances in the direction of ending or diminishing the influence of these outfits, I think that outcome would be a good thing.  Does this mean I disagree with Augustine and Aquinas that a good end sometimes does justify intrinsically evil means?  Not necessarily.

Just to show how complicated things can get, let's consider St. Thomas's views on war, specifically, killing in the context of war.  He allowed as how there were sometimes "just wars" and in such cases, killing was justified in that context, even though murder was on that list of intrinsically evil acts. 

The people at the Center for Medical Progress may view what Planned Parenthood does in its abortion clinics as a war on unborn children.  They, along with virtually everyone else in the prolife community, reject violence as a means of stopping abortion.  But nobody was physically injured by their investigations.  Instead, the statements of Planned Parenthood personnel that were intended for a private audience have been exposed to the world—brought to the light, in other words.  The same happened with Ashley Madison's client lists.  Both organizations have issued strenuous condemnations of the people who exposed them, which is not surprising.  It's just like Jesus said:  "For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed." 

There is a difference between deciding that you would do a thing yourself and observing the actions of someone else in a historical process.  The radical abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859) killed numbers of slavery supporters and was captured as he tried to take over a Federal armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.  He was tried and executed for his crimes, but his actions brought attention to slavery in a way that moved the mysterious processes of history forward, and may have hastened the day when slavery was abolished throughout the entire U. S.  The U. S. Civil War was not a good thing in itself, but the outcome of ending slavery was.

I would not personally go around hacking somebody's private customer lists or carrying spy cameras to get the goods on somebody engaged in nefarious dealings.  But other people have already gone and done these things.  The Impact Team and the Center for Medical Progress knew what they were getting into, and I hope they are prepared for the legal and moral repercussions of their actions.  I'm not them, and I can't presume to say what natural or supernatural motives stirred them to their actions. 

But I can say that the exposure of evil deeds, leaving aside the means by which they are exposed, is a good outcome.  The vulnerability of sites like Ashley Madison to hacking is now known.  The fact that Planned Parenthood exchanges fetal tissue for money in long-standing contracted relationships with outside organizations is also known.  And while I might have advised the Impact Team and the Center for Medical Progress not to do what they did, they didn't ask me before they did it.  And maybe that's a good thing, too.

Sources:  My sources for information on the Ashley Madison hack included the Defense One military site (a lot of the users turned out to be military personnel) at http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/08/ashley-madison-hack-opm-government-military/119279/ and Wired.com articles at http://www.wired.com/2015/08/happened-hackers-posted-stolen-ashley-madison-data/

and http://www.wired.com/2015/08/ashley-madison-hack-exposes-wait-lousy-business/.  The latest Center for Medical Progress video as of this writing can be viewed at http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org.  I also referred to St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica (First Part of the Second Part, Question 20, Article 2) from which the above quotation from St. Augustine is taken (Anton C. Pegis, Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Random House, 1945).  I also referred to an article on the Planned Parenthood videos on Yahoo at https://www.yahoo.com/health/with-release-of-6th-undercover-video-evidence-of-126520215477.html.  The quotation from Jesus is from the New Testament book of John, chapter 3, verse 20 (Revised Standard Version).

The Dendrites Made Me Do It: Free Will and Morality

Back in the 1970s, TV comedian Flip Wilson liked to play a character named Geraldine, whose Church of What's Happening Now taught her to say, whenever she did something bad, that "the devil made me do it!"  Recent research over the last decade or two has given new strength to the argument that our will is determined not by the devil, but by certain neurons, whose axons and dendrites transmit characteristic nerve impulses that appear to precede our conscious decisions to do a thing by a substantial fraction of a second. 

Both research scientists and the general public tend to conclude from brain science that there is no such thing as free will.  If free will is an illusion, then so is responsibility, and it doesn't matter what we do.  And thinking we don't have free will actually affects the way we act, according to a body of research pointed out by Azim Shariff, a psychologist, and Kathleen Vohs, a business-school professor. 

Writing in the June issue of Scientific American, Shariff and Vohs describe a series of experiments in which researchers first primed subjects to think critically of free will.  This priming took various forms.  Reading an essay explicitly criticizing the concept of free will was one way.  But popular-science articles describing brain research, without explicitly mentioning free will, appeared to be about as effective.  However the researchers brought up the topic, it tended to make their subjects less likely to act nice, and less likely to punish others for not-nice behavior.  In one study, volunteers who read an anti-free will article put almost twice as much hot sauce on tortilla chips they were asked to prepare for another volunteer (secretly in cahoots with the researchers), who had previously made it well known that he didn't like hot sauce.  Other subjects shown anti-free will material then proceeded to cheat on an academic test more than subjects who read about an unrelated matter.  The idea that we are simply complex material objects reacting in an entirely predetermined way to our environment appears to lead people to behave irresponsibly, and to judge others as having less responsibility for their actions as well. 

The essay by Shariff and Vohs is an outstanding example of what I would call scientific fence-sitting.  Nowhere do they say what their personal views are on whether free will exists.  Instead, they cite studies of what happens to people when they are exposed to the idea of determinism, either directly or indirectly, and they find that mostly, the results are not good, except that people tend to ease up on the idea of punishment as revenge.  Shariff and Vohs seem to think that modern societies are gradually abandoning the idea of free will, and that this might lead to trouble, although if things get too bad after we leave the concept behind, we "might have to reinvent it."  But they write as though science is the only way of knowing anything for sure, and because science can't resolve the question of whether free will really exists, there's no point in talking about it directly.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that science is not the only way to know things.

I have a couple of modest proposals in the form of hypothetical questions.  Dr. Shariff is an assistant professor, meaning that in the normal course of events, he will go up for tenure some time in the next few years and be evaluated by his peers in the department.  Dr. Vohs is Land O'Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing, which presumably means she owes her living to the success of Land O' Lakes Inc. in selling lots of margarine.  Dr. Shariff, what would you think (not feel, not act, but think) if your personnel committee came up to you after you turned in your application for tenure and they said, "Well, Azim, we were going to grant you tenure, but hey, we were talking and discovered that we're all determinists and it doesn't matter what we do, so to save money, we're going to let you go instead."  And Dr. Vohs, what if the people in charge of the Land O' Lakes Endowment or whatever it is that pays your salary sent you a letter saying, "Dear Dr. Vohs, reading your article in Scientific American convinced us of the truth of determinism, so being freed of the burden of responsibility for our actions, we're taking the endowment that pays your salary and are all going on an extended vacation to the French Riviera." 

I am fairly confident that both injured parties in these situations would think that their supervisors made wrong decisions, and would appeal to rules that apply to their jobs.  These rules spell out responsibilities for both professors and administrators.  You can take the position that, as a practical matter, societies have to pretend that things like free will and the responsibility of moral agents exist, because otherwise we'd degenerate into a state of anarchy and chaos, like Somalia is today. 

But there is a problem here.  I thought science was the search for truth.  Not pretense, not convenient fictions that we live by in order to survive, but truth.  The sense I get from the Scientific American essay (I'm reading between the lines here) is that the authors don't personally believe in free will, but recognize that if we didn't act like it existed, we'd all be in a lot of trouble, both individually and collectively. 

There are two related lessons here for the engineer, and anyone else for that matter, who is looking to behave ethically, both on the job and elsewhere. 

First of all, be careful what you read.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't read articles on brain science, but be sure your reading is at least a balanced diet of a variety of viewpoints, because your reading may influence your actions even if you don't think it does. 

Next, guess what?  Free will exists.  I'm not just pretending that it exists, but it really does.  I'm not enough of a philosopher to trot out all the arguments in favor of it, but I can point to people like Aristotle and Aquinas who were, as well as plenty of modern philosophers.  And while it is technically what theologians call a "mystery," meaning we can understand some of it but never all of it, free will is compatible with the idea that God is in ultimate control of the universe.  Why, there are even some philosophers, called compatibilists, who argue that free will is compatible with atheistic determinism!  So you really can decide to do the right thing in your work, in your personal life, and in deciding what you think of a couple of professors who won't even say whether they believe in free will, even though they spend years researching it.

Sources:  The essay "The World Without Free Will" appeared on pp. 76-79 of the June 2014 issue of Scientific American.  I referred to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu on free will, and to Wikipedia for articles on Flip Wilson and dendrites.  Also, I found out that Land O' Lakes (www.landolakesinc.com) makes other things besides margarine—Purina animal feeds, for example.