Such details might begin to give us pause. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was “different” from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack. When asked by the police why he hadn’t untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, “It just didn’t cross my mind.” The girls died of smoke inhalation. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.Īt this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her-which he did. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do.
While Hayes and the girls’ mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband’s injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed. At 9:30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.Īt 7:00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters-Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11-still asleep. The two then bound Petit’s hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense.
Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment-most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will, that can be read in a single sitting. I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments.
I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape.