Continued from 8 July 

I've just been listening to your podcast which was responding to a listener's question about the above. If I've got it right, I think your response was along the lines of our actions being beyond conscious control, with our perception of free will etc being an illusion. So how do we avoid slipping into determinism with this outlook? It's an old conundrum I know, but why have a penal system which punishes people for actions over which they had no conscious control? If nobody's responsible for anything, anything goes and that surely can't be right. We can go along with Hamlet and decide that "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so", but I can't accept that someone like Ian Huntley (the Soham murderer) thought that what he was doing was 'good'. If what he did was 'good' then I don't want to live in a 'good' world. To conclude that, in separating the action from the actor and to condemn the former but not the latter, removes any sense of agency from what we think human beings are. And that means we're all automatons. Well, do you think we are?