“The noble soul has reverence for oneself.”
— Nietzsche
Splayed out in bed on a cold November morning with my elbows propped like the Sphinx, this week’s New Yorker under my eyes, I came across a mind-bending book review on free will by journalist Nikhil Krishnan.
Two months later, reading the magazine, I was brought back to the rhythm of his writing, chancing across his latest piece: “How Free Will Affects a Person’s Morality.”
A little more on the author: Krishnan, a 38-year-old journalist from Bangalore, India, graduated from Oxford University and is now a philosophy fellow at Cambridge. Obviously he knows his stuff. (When does he have time to write for The New Yorker?)
Join The Discussion
If you want to join the conversation, please read his essays below, skim my thoughts, and send your thoughts here: aem2317@columbia.edu. I am very interested to hear them.
- “How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will” (Nov. 2023)
- “Does Morality Do Us Any Good?” (Dec. 2024)
Sorry, We Have No Free Will
Context to keep in mind: The first story was published a month after Oct. 7 2023.
Our thoughts and most of our actions are essentially automatic, no matter if we like to think so or not — meaning: we have no free will. Krishnan comes to this point reviewing Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will in his first essay.
He agrees with the author—human behavior is determined by biology and environment. “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environments, their interactions,” Krishnan writes.
Like laws governing Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, the book shows how humans operate under invisible, omnipresent systems that dictate what we do: the law, capitalism, democracy, family tradition, morality, our economic caste, and so on. Sometimes we get trapped in ineffable situations, which can lead to an existential crisis.
What is Morality?
In his latest piece this month, Krishnan took a look at Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality. The book argues that morality is a product of evolution. For instance, when early humans hunted on the African plains, they had to learn to work together, be humble (a trait Christianity later co-opted), and act for the good of the community rather than the individual.
“Morality is a human invention, a cultural artifact that has changed over time,” Krishnan writes.
So if we all share the same history of morality, why is there so much division in the world? Sauer says it’s because humans — due to space, distance, and class — forget that we share the same moral origins. My take: it’s not that people forget the fundamentals; it’s that they’ve never learned them.
“It is simply not true that, at the most fundamental level, different cultures have different values,” Sauer says.
How Humans Grew So Polarized
Krishnan then calls to mind Nietzsche, who focused on the shift from antiquity, when a “master morality” reigned supreme, to the Middle Ages and Christianity, when a “slave morality” emerged centered on compassion, humility, and sin. It’s a striking comparison: monarchs ruling the world popularized “master morality” while Christianity soothed the masses with “slave morality.”
As societies grew larger, class divides emerged. The elites with wealth perpetuate “master morality,” while the plebeian class adheres to “slave morality.” Over time, this divide has only widened, leaving our world more polarized than ever.
Any Hope For Moral Unity?
Sauer believes the answer is yes. “There is an underestimated potential for reconciliation that is hard for us to see,” he writes, but it may be sustained by “a silent majority of reasonable people” who reject ideological extremes.
I love this idea: being part of an unspoken heroic majority of “reasonable people” who exemplify stoic traits, see beyond hate, and focus on what brings us together rather than what divides us. We are the ones who can create change. Social progress comes from us.
Which brings Nietzsche back to mind. He said great leaders should be fearless, unique, and unafraid to be different. How? Through self-respect.
“The noble soul has reverence for itself,” Nietzsche tells us in Beyond Good and Evil.
Ashley Elizabeth Miller 
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