Free Will is for the Elites, not the Lesser Beings

Sam Harris tweets that free will makes no sense.

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne is another free will denier:

Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.

Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, ...

And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.

Free will is in the backbone of our civilization. Our law, religion, morality, and justice system depend on it.

Everyone, except maybe for some schizophrenics, behave as it they have free will.

Coyne does indeed sound like someone who wants free will for the elites, but not the masses:

people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up. You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want.

So the elites have the free will to decide what kind of society they want, and how to provide incentives for the lower humans who lack free will.

Coyne's atheist-evolutionist beliefs come into play. He does not believe anything immaterial is possible, and does not believe that free will could have evolved.

Free will is a philosophical issue, so you can believe what you want, but he is wrong about this:

And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics.

No, physics has not proved determinism. There are recent physicist videos promoting free will here, here, and here.

Coyne's article has a good description of opposing views on free will. I do not understand why he tries so hard to convince us, if we have no free to make a decision about it.

A comment:

[Determinist and free will denier] Sapolsky says that a criminal is like a broken car that needs to be taken to the shop, not that we need to change the traffic rules to allow broken cars on the streets.

This illustrates the view. The elites have the free will to decide that they do not want criminals or broken cars on the street. The criminals have no such free will. They are just automatons that the elites want to fix for a more peaceful society.