Modern legal systems rest on a remarkably fragile premise: that every individual stands before the law as an autonomous agent – someone endowed with the ability to choose what they do. The courtroom, the prison, the entire architecture of guilt and punishment, all depend on the single – but false – assumption that human beings possess free-will, and therefore could always have acted otherwise.
But this assumption – so ingrained into the public psyche that few ever question it – is invalidated by even minimal inquiry. Contemporary neuroscience, behavioural psychology, and developmental studies converge on the same understanding: the mind/body system is not an independent self-governing entity directing its choices and decisions from some internal command centre. Instead, every decision arises from a web of causes; genetics, upbringing, trauma, social conditions, education, deprivation, fear, opportunity, experiences (collectively, our evosocionetics) – none of which are created by the individual, and none of which they can claim to control.*
Since our actions are dependent on these forces, then the standard legal binary – guilty or not – rests on a falsehood. To say someone ‘chose’ to commit a crime is to mistake that action for the entire process that actually produced it.
Yet we continue to speak as though wrong-doing were a simple matter of moral deficiency: a lack of integrity, a failure of conscience, a deliberate rejection of what is understood as ’right’. This language reassures us that order is preserved by punishing transgressions rather than confronting the societal landscape that produces them.
But morality – real morality – demands something different. It looks beyond the act and examines the conditions that made it necessary, or inevitable.
An impoverished mother who steals bread to feed her starving child has broken property law; the case is simple for the court. But morality sees something the law refuses to: that no just society allows a person to face starvation in the first place. The ‘crime’ is not hers, but society’s – the crime of designing a system that protects ownership more fiercely than human survival. And when ownership defines the structure of the law, morality becomes an inconvenience the law must routinely silence.
This is why law and morality so often diverge: one is engineered to uphold a hierarchy of power, the other to uphold a standard of humanity. One safeguards the privileges of those who possess; the other defends the needs of those who have none. And when these collide, legality wins – not because it is right, but because it is written.
A society rooted in morality would organise itself around compassion, empathy, and a recognition of shared vulnerability. Such a society would prevent suffering rather than punish it; support rather than condemn; treat suffering as a failure of collective responsibility, not an opportunity to assert authority. Law, by contrast, offers a simpler calculus – identify the culprit, declare guilt, impose penalty, close the case.
But if there is no free-will behind an act, then the entire structure of guilt collapses, and with it the illusion that punishment is justice. A moral society would not fear that reality, rather, it would welcome it as the first honest step towards building something humane.
what's legal, is killing us
If morality is the instinct to protect life – human and non-human – then our legal systems fail that instinct spectacularly. Look at the world around us: the collapse of ecosystems, the poisoning of oceans, the desertification of huge land masses, irreversible deforestation, the heating of the atmosphere, the accelerating disappearance of species that make life possible. None of this is happening in the shadows. It is all done openly, proudly, and crucially, legally.
We can strip oceans bare until entire natural fisheries vanish. We can incinerate ancient forests just to ‘grow’ cheap beef. We can scorch the planet by burning fuels we know will destabilise everything. We can tear open whole landscapes to feed our appetite for minerals and machines. Millions already suffer wars, poverty, and mass displacement as predictable by-products of extraction.
And the law nods along, offering protection – not to the living world – but to the industries who profit from its destruction. Greed is lawful. Devastation is lawful. Ecocide is lawful. The only thing consistently deemed unlawful is resistance.
Morality would never permit any of this. But morality has no seat in the legislature. If anything reveals the bankruptcy of our legal foundations, it is this: that the behaviours most lethal to our future are not crimes, but business models.
A system that cannot distinguish harm from profit, or destruction from success, is not a guardian of society – it is an accomplice in our demise.
And this is the final, unavoidable conclusion: the law is not moral, and it is not on the side of humanity. Until we stop mistaking legality for legitimacy, we will continue to legalise our own extinction.
Oct 2025
* The article ‘no free-will’ explores in more detail the false idea of freedom of choice.
Oct 2025