free will essays

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

F or centuries , philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope , American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

So what happens if this faith erodes?

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species . Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

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Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something .

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

In 2002, two psychologists had a simple but brilliant idea: Instead of speculating about what might happen if people lost belief in their capacity to choose, they could run an experiment to find out. Kathleen Vohs, then at the University of Utah, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of Pittsburgh, asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. Would differences in abstract philosophical beliefs influence people’s decisions?

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.

Another pioneer of research into the psychology of free will, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, has extended these findings. For example, he and colleagues found that students with a weaker belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate than were those whose belief in free will was stronger. Likewise, those primed to hold a deterministic view by reading statements like “Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion” were less likely to give money to a homeless person or lend someone a cellphone.

Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships. They found that when subjects were induced to believe that “all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” those subjects came away with a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance.

The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand. Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. “Imagine,” he told me, “that I’m deliberating whether to do my duty, such as to parachute into enemy territory, or something more mundane like to risk my job by reporting on some wrongdoing. If everyone accepts that there is no free will, then I’ll know that people will say, ‘Whatever he did, he had no choice—we can’t blame him.’ So I know I’m not going to be condemned for taking the selfish option.” This, he believes, is very dangerous for society, and “the more people accept the determinist picture, the worse things will get.”

Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. Only the initiated, behind those walls, should dare to, as he put it to me, “look the dark truth in the face.” Smilansky says he realizes that there is something drastic, even terrible, about this idea—but if the choice is between the true and the good, then for the sake of society, the true must go.

Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.

Illusionism is a minority position among academic philosophers, most of whom still hope that the good and the true can be reconciled. But it represents an ancient strand of thought among intellectual elites. Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism.

Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control . Luckily, he argues, we don’t need them. Belief in free will comes naturally to us. Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear. Most scientists “don’t realize what effect these ideas can have,” Smilansky told me. “Promoting determinism is complacent and dangerous.”

Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. Some simply don’t agree that these consequences might include the collapse of civilization. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his 2012 book, Free Will , set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

“We need our beliefs to track what is true,” Harris told me. Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things. But if we instead accept that “human behavior arises from neurophysiology,” he argued, then we can better understand what is really causing people to do bad things despite this threat of punishment—and how to stop them. “We need,” Harris told me, “to know what are the levers we can pull as a society to encourage people to be the best version of themselves they can be.”

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.

Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Holding people responsible for their actions might sound like a keystone of civilized life, but we pay a high price for it: Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment.

“Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina,” Harris suggested, with “the response to the 9/11 act of terrorism.” For many Americans, the men who hijacked those planes are the embodiment of criminals who freely choose to do evil. But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon—and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response.

Although the scale of the two catastrophes was similar, the reactions were wildly different. Nobody was striving to exact revenge on tropical storms or declare a War on Weather, so responses to Katrina could simply focus on rebuilding and preventing future disasters. The response to 9/11 , Harris argues, was clouded by outrage and the desire for vengeance, and has led to the unnecessary loss of countless more lives. Harris is not saying that we shouldn’t have reacted at all to 9/11, only that a coolheaded response would have looked very different and likely been much less wasteful. “Hatred is toxic,” he told me, “and can destabilize individual lives and whole societies. Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone.”

Whereas the evidence from Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues suggests that social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life—Harris thinks that social benefits will result from seeing other people’s behavior in the very same light. From that vantage point, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better.

What’s more, Harris argues, as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean “that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.” Certain kinds of action require us to become conscious of a choice—to weigh arguments and appraise evidence. True, if we were put in exactly the same situation again, then 100 times out of 100 we would make the same decision, “just like rewinding a movie and playing it again.” But the act of deliberation—the wrestling with facts and emotions that we feel is essential to our nature—is nonetheless real.

The big problem, in Harris’s view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism. Determinism is the belief that our decisions are part of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Fatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that our decisions don’t really matter, because whatever is destined to happen will happen—like Oedipus’s marriage to his mother, despite his efforts to avoid that fate.

When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference. But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives. If people better understood these fine distinctions, Harris believes, the consequences of losing faith in free will would be much less negative than Vohs’s and Baumeister’s experiments suggest.

Can one go further still? Is there a way forward that preserves both the inspiring power of belief in free will and the compassionate understanding that comes with determinism?

Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency.

Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will , he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.

For Waller, it simply doesn’t matter that these processes are underpinned by a causal chain of firing neurons. In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.

Waller believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.

Waller’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it. One 2010 study found that people mostly thought of free will in terms of following their desires, free of coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head). As long as we continue to believe in this kind of practical free will, that should be enough to preserve the sorts of ideals and ethical standards examined by Vohs and Baumeister.

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

February 5, 2020

Yes, Free Will Exists

Just ask Schopenhauer

By Bernardo Kastrup

Getty Images

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

At least since the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, one of the most central questions of human existence has been whether we have free will. In the late 20th century, some thought neuroscience had settled the question . However, as it has recently become clear , such was not the case. The elusive answer is nonetheless foundational to our moral codes, criminal justice system, religions and even to the very meaning of life itself—for if every event of life is merely the predictable outcome of mechanical laws, one may question the point of it all.

But before we ask ourselves whether we have free will, we must understand what exactly we mean by it. A common and straightforward view is that, if our choices are predetermined, then we don’t have free will; otherwise we do. Yet, upon more careful reflection, this view proves surprisingly inappropriate.

To see why, notice first that the prefix “pre” in “predetermined choice” is entirely redundant. Not only are all predetermined choices determined by definition, all determined choices can be regarded as predetermined as well: they always result from dispositions or necessities that precede them. Therefore, what we are really asking is simply whether our choices are determined .

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In this context, a free-willed choice would be an undetermined one. But what is an undetermined choice? It can only be a random one, for anything that isn’t fundamentally random reflects some underlying disposition or necessity that determines it. There is no semantic space between determinism and randomness that could accommodate choices that are neither. This is a simple but important point, for we often think—incoherently—of free-willed choices as neither determined nor random.

Our very notion of randomness is already nebulous and ambiguous to begin with. Operationally, we say that a process is random if we can’t discern a pattern in it. However, a truly random process can, in principle, produce any pattern by mere chance. The probability of this happening may be small, but it isn’t zero. So, when we say that a process is random, we are merely acknowledging our ignorance of its potential underlying causal basis. As such, an appeal to randomness doesn’t suffice to define free will.

Moreover, even if it did, when we think of free will we don’t think of mere randomness. Free choices aren’t erratic ones, are they? Neither are they undetermined: if I believe that I make free choices, it is because I feel that my choices are determined by me. A free choice is one determined by my preferences, likes, dislikes, character, etc., as opposed to someone else’s or other external forces.

But if our choices are always determined anyway, what does it mean to talk of free will in the first place? If you think about it carefully, the answer is self-evident: we have free will if our choices are determined by that which we experientially identify with. I identify with my tastes and preferences—as consciously felt by me—in the sense that I regard them as expressions of myself. My choices are thus free insofar as they are determined by these felt tastes and preferences.

Why, then, do we think that metaphysical materialism—the notion that our choices are determined by neurophysiological activity in our own brain—contradicts free will? Because, try as we might, we don’t experientially identify with neurophysiology; not even our own. As far as our conscious life is concerned, the neurophysiological activity in our brain is merely an abstraction. All we are directly and concretely acquainted with are our fears, desires, inclinations, etc., as experienced—that is, our felt volitional states . So, we identify with these, not with networks of firing neurons inside our skull. The alleged identity between neurophysiology and felt volition is merely a conceptual—not an experiential—one.

The key issue here is one that permeates the entire metaphysics of materialism: all we ever truly have are the contents of consciousness, which philosophers call “phenomenality.”’ Our entire life is a stream of felt and perceived phenomenality. That this phenomenality somehow arises from something material, outside consciousness—such as networks of firing neurons—is a theoretical inference, not a lived reality; it’s a narrative we create and buy into on the basis of conceptual reasoning, not something felt. That’s why, for the life of us, we can’t truly identify with it.

So, the question of free will boils down to one of metaphysics: are our felt volitional states reducible to something outside and independent of consciousness? If so, there cannot be free will, for we can only identify with contents of consciousness. But if, instead, neurophysiology is merely how our felt volitional states present themselves to observation from an outside perspective—that is, if neurophysiology is merely the image of conscious willing, not its cause or source—then we do have free will; for in the latter case, our choices are determined by volitional states we intuitively regard as expressions of ourselves.

Crucially, the question of metaphysics can be legitimately broached in a way that inverts the usual free will equation: according to 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, it is the laws of nature that arise from a transpersonal will, not the will from the laws of nature. Felt volitional states are the irreducible foundation of both mind and world. Although Schopenhauer’s views are often woefully misunderstood and misrepresented —most conspicuously by presumed experts—when correctly construed they offer a coherent scheme for reconciling free will with seemingly deterministic natural laws.

As elucidated in my concise new book, Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics , for Schopenhauer the inner essence of everything is conscious volition—that is, will. Nature is dynamic because its underlying volitional states provide the impetus required for events to unfold. Like his predecessor Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer thought of what we call the “physical world” as merely an image, a perceptual representation of the world in the mind of an observer. But this representation isn’t what the world is like in itself, prior to being represented.

Since the information we have about the external environment seems to be limited to perceptual representations, Kant considered the world-in-itself unknowable. Schopenhauer, however, argued that we can learn something about it not only through the sense organs, but also through introspection . His argument goes as follows: even in the absence of all self-perception mediated by the sense organs, we would still experience our own endogenous, felt volition.

Therefore, prior to being represented we are essentially will. Our physical body is merely how our will presents itself to an external vantage point. And since both our body and the rest of the world appear in representation as matter, Schopenhauer inferred that the rest of the world, just like ourselves, is also essentially will.

In Schopenhauer’s illuminating view of reality, the will is indeed free because it is all there ultimately is . Yet, its image is nature’s seemingly deterministic laws, which reflect the instinctual inner consistency of the will. Today, over 200d years after he first published his groundbreaking ideas, Schopenhauer’s work can reconcile our innate intuition of free will with modern scientific determinism.

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Critical Essays Free Will and Fate

The Classical tragedians appreciated the conflict between fate and free will. At the heart of every great tragedy lies the universal struggle between the human inclination to accept fate absolutely and the natural desire to control destiny. Both Sophocles and Shakespeare would agree that the forces of destiny and choice continually vie for control of human life. Yet, each of these great playwrights espouses a perspective on the struggle born of his specific time and culture. For the Greek Sophocles, fate far overpowers human will; the harder a man works to avoid his fate, the more surely he catapults forth into that very fate. Sophocles' characters ultimately surrender, after resistance, recognition, and reversal, to their destinies; Sophocles' plays warn against the pride that deceives us into believing we can alter fate through human intervention. For Shakespeare — a Christian — the choice between good and evil represents man's basic dilemma; for him, the human will is indomitable. Though fate may ultimately win, a man must fight to the death, if necessary, in order to remain the master of his own choices — choices that ultimately decide if and how his fate defeats him. The contrast between the two points of view is a note-worthy feature of any comparison between Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

In his book The Poetics, Aristotle based the definition of tragedy on Oedipus Rex, making Sophocles' play the archetype of the genre . The notion that a hero must be a man of stature who is undone by some flaw in himself entirely governs Oedipus, the play's protagonist. While Oedipus only nominally controls his life,  Hamlet 's choices direct and ultimately destroy him. Oedipus, the prototypical Greek tragic hero, can see nothing until he blinds himself, thereby breaking free of the human compulsion to understand forces that one should simply obey. Introspection is only possible for Oedipus when his blindness forces him to stop examining the world around him. Sophocles' hero is stoic, strong, and stubborn; he seeks to bully fate and then gives in to self-destruction. Only then can he recognize his shortcomings and failures.

By contrast, Hamlet remains painfully aware of himself, his shortcomings, and his powerlessness to right what he perceives to be great wrongs. Poetic, thoughtful, and philosophical, he seeks to thwart his fate through intellectual maneuvering. Hamlet sees all too clearly the varying shades of gray that muddy his vision and blur his choices. He resembles the modern tragic hero — the common man tossed in a turbulent sea of social ills who loses his battle to correct them. He is bound inside himself, imprisoned by the words in his head that allow him no sleep, and no rest. " . . . There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," he says, surrendering to his obsessive thoughts. Hamlet is the quintessential Shakespearean hero, born of stature but not necessarily powerful, and undone by external forces as much as by internal ones. The struggle to live between opposing expectations and to assuage a throbbing conscience constitutes the battle Hamlet cannot win. No one force determines the outcome for Hamlet. God asks of him one thing, and man demands another.

Oedipus, however, remains at the singular mercy of the gods. Having learned from the oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus has blundered into his own fate. Despite his best efforts to thwart the prophecy, dramatic irony prevails. Liberating Thebes from the tyranny of the Sphinx, Oedipus completes the first part of the dreaded prophecy. Flattered that the people choose him to be their king, Oedipus blindly accepts their offer of Jocasta's hand in marriage. Thus he completes the second phase of the prophecy by marrying his natural mother. Oedipus finalizes his destruction by attempting to escape it. By exerting his free will, he submits himself to the whim of destiny.

Oedipus eventually resigns himself to his failure by saying, "Oh G-d! It has come true. Light let this be the last time I see you." Having accepted his powerlessness, the only recourse left to him is to blind himself so that he may symbolically escape his failure. Unlike the Christian tragic hero, nothing motivates Oedipus to change the course of his life or make amends. He has disobeyed the gods by exhibiting too much pride, and he must now acquiesce to the will of the gods and accept his punishment. He travels to Colonnus and dies in exile, satisfied that he deserves such an end. In Oedipus Rex, man loses the battle for control of life and must surrender to the inescapable whims of fortune. The gods sit on Mount Olympus and manipulate humanity as though they were clay dolls to be moved about, discarded, and broken — like chess pieces. After Oedipus willingly acknowledges his insignificance, he attains the freedom to live beyond his pain and to die in peace.

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Foreknowledge and Free Will

Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

Fatalism seems to be entailed by infallible foreknowledge by the following informal line of reasoning:

For any future act you will perform, if some being infallibly believed in the past that the act would occur, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed what he believed since nobody has any control over past events; nor can you make him mistaken in his belief, given that he is infallible. Therefore, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed in a way that cannot be mistaken that you would do what you will do. But if so, you cannot do otherwise than what he believed you would do. And if you cannot do otherwise, you will not perform the act freely.

The same argument can be applied to any infallibly foreknown act of any human being. If there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future, no human being has any control over the future.

This theological fatalist argument creates a dilemma for anyone who thinks it important to maintain both (1) there is a deity who infallibly knows the entire future, and (2) human beings have free will in the strong sense usually called libertarian. But it has also fascinated many who have not shared either of these commitments, because taking the argument’s full measure requires rethinking some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, especially ones concerning time, truth, and modality. Those philosophers who think there is a way to consistently maintain both (1) and (2) are called compatibilists about infallible foreknowledge and human free will. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Incompatibilists accept the incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and human free will and deny either infallible foreknowledge or free will in the sense targeted by the argument.

1. The argument for theological fatalism

2.1 the denial of future contingent truth, 2.2 god’s knowledge of future contingent truths, 2.3 the eternity solution, 2.4 god’s forebeliefs as “soft facts” about the past, 2.5 the dependence solution, 2.6 the transfer of necessity, 2.7 the necessity and the causal closure of the past.

• 2.8 The rejection of Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

3. Incompatibilist responses to the argument for theological fatalism

4. logical fatalism.

• 5. Beyond fatalism

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Related entries.

There is a long history of debate over the soundness of the argument for theological fatalism, so its soundness must not be obvious. Nelson Pike (1965) gets the credit for clearly and forcefully presenting the dilemma in a way that produced an enormous body of work by both compatibilists and incompatibilists, leading to more careful formulations of the argument.

A precise version of the argument can be formulated as follows: Choose some proposition about a future act that you think you will do freely, if any act is free. Suppose, for example, that the telephone will ring at 9 am tomorrow and you will either answer it or you will not. So it is either true that you will answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow or it is true that you will not answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow. The Law of Excluded Middle rules out any other alternative. Let T abbreviate the proposition that you will answer the phone tomorrow morning at 9, and let us suppose that T is true. (If not- T is true instead, simply substitute not- T in the argument below).

Let “now-necessary” designate temporal necessity, the type of necessity that the past is supposed to have just because it is past. This type of necessity plays a central role in the argument and we’ll have more to say about it in sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.7 , and 5 , but we can begin with the intuitive idea that there is a kind of necessity that a proposition has now when the content of the proposition is about something that occurred in the past. To say that it is now-necessary that milk has been spilled is to say nobody can do anything now about the fact that the milk has been spilled.

Let “God” designate a being who has infallible beliefs about the future, where to say that God believes p infallibly is to say that God believes p and it is not possible that God believes p and p is false. It is not important for the logic of the argument that God is the being worshiped by any particular religion, but the motive to maintain that there is a being with infallible beliefs is usually a religious one.

One more preliminary point is in order. The dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and human free will does not rest on the particular assumption of fore knowledge and does not require an analysis of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist, which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge. She has knowledge just in case what she believes is true and she satisfies the other conditions for knowledge, such as having sufficiently strong evidence. Ordinary knowledge does not require that the belief cannot be false. For example, if I believe on strong evidence that classes begin at my university on a certain date, and when the day arrives, classes do begin, we would normally say I knew in advance that classes would begin on that date. I had foreknowledge about the date classes begin. But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge because events could have proven me wrong even though as events actually turned out, they didn’t prove me wrong. Ordinary foreknowledge does not threaten to necessitate the future because it does not require that when I know p it is not possible that my belief is false. The key problem, then, is the infallibility of the belief about the future, and this is a problem whether or not the epistemic agent with an infallible belief satisfies the other conditions required by some account of knowledge, such as sufficient evidence. As long as an agent has an infallible belief about the future, the problem arises.

Using the example of the proposition T , the argument that infallible foreknowledge of T entails that you do not answer the telephone freely can be formulated as follows:

Basic Argument for Theological Fatalism

This argument is formulated in a way that makes its logical form as perspicuous as possible, and there is a consensus that this argument or something close to it is valid. That is, if the premises are all true, the conclusion follows. The compatibilist about infallible foreknowledge and free will must therefore find a false premise. There are four premises that are not straightforward substitutions in definitions: (1), (2), (5), and (9). All four of these premises have come under attack in the history of discussion of theological fatalism. Aristotle’s concern about future contingent truth has motivated an increasing number of compatibilists to challenge premise (1). Boethius and Aquinas also denied premise (1), but on the grounds that God and his beliefs are not in time, a solution that has always had some adherents. William of Ockham rejected premise (2), arguing that the necessity of the past does not apply to the entire past, and God’s past beliefs are in the part of the past to which the necessity of the past does not apply. This approach to the problem was revived early in the debate stirred up by Pike’s article, and has probably attracted more attention, in its various incarnations, than any other solution. There are more radical responses to (2) as well. Premise (5) has rarely been disputed and is an analogue of an axiom of modal logic, but it may have been denied by Duns Scotus and Luis de Molina. Although doubts about premise (9) arose relatively late in the debate, inspired by contemporary discussions of the relation between free will and the ability to do otherwise, the denial of (9) is arguably the key to the solution proposed by Augustine. In addition to the foregoing compatibilist solutions, there are two incompatibilist responses to the problem of theological fatalism. One is to deny that God (or any being) has infallible foreknowledge. The other is to deny that human beings have free will in the libertarian sense of free will. These responses will be discussed in section 3 . The relationship between theological fatalism and logical fatalism will be discussed in section 4 . In section 5 we will consider whether the problem of theological fatalism is just a theological version of a more general problem in metaphysics that isn’t ultimately about God, or even about free will.

2. Compatibilist responses to theological fatalism

One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will is to deny that the proposition T can be true, on the grounds that no proposition about the contingent future is true: such propositions are either false (given Bivalence), or neither true nor false. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up. Since God wouldn’t believe a proposition unless it were true, premise (1) is, on this account, a non-starter. The idea behind this response is usually that propositions about the contingent future become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of De Interpretatione IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers have used Aristotle’s move to solve the dilemma we are addressing here.

This approach to the problem had already been endorsed, three years before Pike’s seminal article, by A.N. Prior (1962), but it received little initial attention. John Martin Fischer’s first anthology of essays on the problem (1989) does not contain a single paper advocating this solution. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when it was defended by Joseph Runzo (1981), Richard Purtill (1988), and J.R. Lucas (1989), that it began to gain traction in the debate. More recently, Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt (2006) have argued for the “Peircean” semantics favored by Prior (1967, 113–36), on which the predictive use of the word ‘will’ carries maximal causal force and all future contingents turn out false, while Dale Tuggy (2007) has defended the position that future contingents are neither true nor false. A critique of both Rhoda et al . and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Another supporter of the all-future-contingents-are-false solution to the problem of theological fatalism is Patrick Todd (2016a), whose recent book (2021) offers a vigorous defense of this approach against various objections. Many (but not all) of those who reject future contingent truth base their position, at least in part, on presentism, according to which only the present exists. Statements about the future, especially the contingent future, would then arguably lack the grounding necessary for truth. D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both logical and theological fatalism, as has Dean Zimmerman (2008). A measure of how much the debate has shifted in this direction is that Fischer’s second anthology (Fischer and Todd 2015) contains an entire section on “The Logic of Future Contingents.” The connection between this solution and “open theism” will be discussed in section 3 .

While there is considerable prima facie appeal to the idea that statements about the contingent future aren’t yet true, and that they become true only when the future arrives, both the semantic and the metaphysical justifications for this idea can be challenged. A semantics that collapses truth into necessity and falsehood into impossibility, at least for propositions about the future, may appear insufficiently attentive to people’s actual use of the predictive ‘will’, not to mention logically problematic. The true futurist theory (“the thin red line”), allowing for future contingent truth, is defended by Øhrstrøm (2009) and by Malpass and Wawer (2012). Presentist opponents of future contingent truth, for their part, need to explain how there can be contingent truths about the past but not about the future, given that, on presentism, the past is no more real than the future. (This is not a problem on the growing block theory.) Rhoda (2009) and Zimmerman (2010), for example, have independently suggested that truths about the past could be grounded in God’s present beliefs about the past; but if this move is allowed, it would seem just as legitimate to assume God has present beliefs about the future and use this to ground truths about the contingent future. The semantic and metaphysical issues surrounding future contingent truth are complex and highly contested, so it isn’t possible to do more than note them here.

It is not clear, however, that the denial of future contingent truth is sufficient to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. Hunt (2020) suggests that future contingents that fail to be true for presentist reasons alone might nevertheless qualify as “quasi-true” (Sider 1999, Markosian 2004), and argues that the quasi-truth of God’s beliefs about the future is enough to generate the problem. The following consideration tends in the same direction. According to the definition of infallibility used in the basic argument, if God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is false. But there is a natural extension of the definition of infallibility to allow for the case in which T lacks a truth value but will acquire one in the future: If God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is either false or becomes false. If so, and if God believes T , we get an argument for theological fatalism that parallels our basic argument. Premise (4) would need to be modified as follows:

(6) becomes:

The modifications in the rest of the argument are straightforward.

It is open to the defender of this solution to maintain that God has no beliefs about the contingent future because he does not infallibly know how it will turn out, and this is compatible with God’s being infallible in everything he does believe. It is also compatible with God’s omniscience if omniscience is the property of knowing the truth value of every proposition that has a truth value. But clearly, this move restricts the range of God’s knowledge, so it has religious disadvantages in addition to its disadvantages in logic.

If T is true, there is still the question how God could come to believe T rather than not- T , and believe it without any possibility of error, given that T concerns the contingent future. T is contingent only insofar as it is still possible for you to refrain from answering the phone at 9 tomorrow morning, though we’re supposing for the sake of argument that you will answer the phone at 9. But then it’s still possible for T to turn out false (though it won’t), and still possible for the belief that T to be incorrect (though it isn’t). This is hard to square with the claim in premise (1) that God’s belief that T was infallible.

This problem for infallible belief about a contingent future parallels a problem for God’s knowledge of a contingent future. Though the argument for theological fatalism rests only on divine belief rather than knowledge (since the additional conditions for knowledge, beyond true belief, don’t play any role in the argument), God nevertheless wouldn’t believe without knowing. But it’s unclear what could have been cognitively available to God yesterday, when your answering the phone at 9 am tomorrow was still future and contingent, to raise his belief that T from a correct guess to genuine knowledge. Prior (1962) held this to be a further problem for premise (1), beyond the nonexistence of future contingent truths. For William Hasker (1989, 186–88), Richard Swinburne (2006, 22–26), and Peter van Inwagen (2008), who maintain (contrary to Prior) that there are future contingent truths, the impossibility of foreknowing them is the problem with premise (1). This “limited foreknowledge” view has been critiqued by Arbour (2013) and Todd (2014a), among others.

Defenders of divine foreknowledge need something to say in response to skeptical questions about how such knowledge could be available to God. One possible response is that it’s a conceptual truth that God is omniscient, and his knowledge, including his knowledge of future contingent truths, is simply innate (Craig 1987). Skeptics might regard this response as closer to a non-response. But others have offered detailed if speculative proposals. These include Ryan Byerly (2014), whose book-length treatment of the issue grounds God’s infallible foreknowledge in a divine “ordering of times” that is supposed to leave human free will intact.

It is relatively easy to see how God can know what is (contingently) “going to” happen if this refers to the present tendency of things. All it takes is exhaustive knowledge of the present. But what is “going to” happen can change, as the present tendency of things changes, and what God foreknows on this basis (his knowledge of what is going to happen ) will change along with this change in present tendencies. This “mutable future” position, defended by Peter Geach, has been revived by Patrick Todd (2011, 2016b). On the “Geachian” view, God’s beliefs about the contingent future constitute genuine knowledge, because they track the changing truth about where the future is headed. What this view doesn’t provide is the infallibility required by premise (1).

Fischer (2016, 31–45) tries to fill the gap with his “boot-strapping” account of divine foreknowledge. Even human beings are sometimes in a “knowledge-conferring situation,” or KCS, with respect to the contingent future. Since God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, God is in a position to know (some) future contingents in the same way that human beings can know them: by being in the appropriate KCS. But this presupposes a fallibilist theory of knowledge. What accounts for the infallibility of God’s beliefs? Fischer argues that God can “bootstrap” his way to certainty by combining his beliefs about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own infallibility. Hunt (2017b) objects that the account is circular, and that it couldn’t support anything close to exhaustive foreknowledge, since most future contingent truths will lack KCS’s at any given time. Fischer (2017, and forthcoming) elaborates and defends the view.

The most straightforward account of the matter, accommodating the infallibility of God’s beliefs, is that he simply “sees” the future. If God is in time, this requires that he be equipped with something like a “time telescope” that allows him to view what is temporally distant. A hurdle faced by time telescopes is that they probably involve retrocausation. If God is not in time, however, he wouldn’t need a time telescope to view the future along with the present and past. This brings us to the next solution.

A third challenge to premise (1), independent of the first two, is that it misrepresents God’s relation to time. What is denied according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and not that God believes the content of proposition T , but that God believed T yesterday . This solution probably originated with the 6 th century philosopher Boethius, who maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before the mind of God at once. To say “at once” or “simultaneously” is to use a temporal metaphor, but Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of temporal reality as being before God’s mind in a single temporal present. It is an atemporal present in which God has a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.

Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius. One is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the center of a circle is present to each and every point on its circumference ( SCG I, 66). In contemporary philosophy an important defense of the Boethian idea that God is timeless was given by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who applied it explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991). Recently it has been defended by Katherin Rogers (2007a, 2007b), Kevin Timpe (2007), Michael Rota (2010), Joseph Diekemper (2013), and Ciro De Florio (2015).

Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself, arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling, such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121–129; Wolterstorff 1975; Swinburne 1977, 221). Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 2 and 2011) that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be reformulated as follows:

Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as God’s timeless knowing are now -necessary, yet we have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowing. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows T . The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do about what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything about the future.

The Boethian solution does not solve the problem of theological fatalism by itself, but since the nature of the timeless realm is elusive, the intuition of the necessity of the timeless realm is probably weaker than the intuition of the necessity of the past. The necessity of the past is deeply embedded in our ordinary intuitions about time; there are no ordinary intuitions about the realm of timelessness. One possible way out of this problem is given by K.A. Rogers, who argues (2007a, 2007b) that the eternal realm is like the present rather than the past, and so it does not have the necessity we attribute to the past.

If God’s timeless knowledge doesn’t threaten free will, there’s still the question whether it can be confined to the timeless realm; if not, it might still cause trouble for free will. Van Inwagen (2008) argues against the Boethian solution on the grounds that a timeless deity could still bring about the existence in time of a “Freedom-denying Prophetic Object,” for example, a stone slab on which are inscribed the words, “Peter van Inwagen will answer the phone at 9:00 am on May 27, 2034.” An interesting puzzle for Christian defenders of the Boethian solution is the problem of whether the knowledge of Jesus Christ during his time on earth was infallible. The problem here is that the incarnate Christ was in time even if God is timeless. A particular problem discussed by Timothy Pawl (2014a, 2014b) is whether Christ had infallible foreknowledge of his own future choices, and if so, whether his created will was free. Pawl defends the compatibility of Christ’s infallible foreknowledge and the freedom of his created will.

The next solution is due to the fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham, and was revived in the contemporary literature by Marilyn Adams (1967). This solution rejects premise (2) of the basic argument in its full generality. Following Ockham, Adams argues that premise (2) applies only to the past strictly speaking, or the “hard” past. A “soft” fact about the past is one that is in part about the future. An example of a soft fact about the past would be the fact that it was true yesterday that a certain event would occur a year later, or the fact that you saw Paris for the last time. Adams argues that God’s existence in the past and God’s past beliefs about the future are not strictly past because they are facts that are in part about the future.

Adams’s argument was unsuccessful since, among other things, her criterion for being a hard fact had the consequence that no fact is a hard fact (Fischer 1989, introduction), but it led to a series of attempts to bolster it by giving more refined definitions of a “hard fact” and the type of necessity such facts are said to have—what Ockham called “accidental necessity” (necessity per accidens ). The resulting formulations became so refined and elaborate, in an effort to avoid possible counterexamples, that they risked becoming detached from the simple intuition they were intended to capture. Recent discussions of the hard fact/soft fact distinction may be found in Todd (2013) and Pendergraft and Coates (2014). Plantinga (1986) argued that a successful Ockhamist response to theological fatalism needn’t await the definitive formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for soft facthood, because paradigm examples of soft facts--facts that are surely soft, if any facts are soft--are enough for the job. It’s clear that proposition T , for example--that you will answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am--does not express a hard fact about the past. (It doesn’t express a fact about the past at all.) But if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient, this fact about what you will do tomorrow both entails, and is entailed by, God’s yesterday believing T . Assuming that hard and soft facthood are closed under logical equivalence, it follows that God’s having believed T is not a hard fact about yesterday, a conclusion that doesn’t rely on any particular answer to the general question how the hard fact/soft fact distinction is to be articulated. Responses to this defense of Ockhamism may be found in Brant (1997) and Hunt (2002).

There was considerable debate over Ockhamism in the eighties and nineties. Some of the defenses in this period appear in Freddoso (1983), Kvanvig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Wierenga (1989), and Craig (1990). Some of the criticisms appear in Fischer (1983, 1985a, 1991), Hasker (1989), Widerker (1990), Zagzebski (1991), and Pike (1993). The Ockhamist strategy, relying as it does on the distinction between facts about the past that are really about the past and facts about the past that are really (at least in part) about the future, is intertwined with work on the reality of the past and future. Finch and Rea (2008) have argued that the Ockhamist solution requires the rejection of presentism.

Perhaps the toughest obstacle confronting the Ockhamist solution is that it is very difficult to give an account of the necessity of the past that preserves the intuition that the past has a special kind of necessity in virtue of being past, but which has the consequence that God’s past beliefs do not have that kind of necessity. The problem is that God’s past beliefs seem to be as good a candidate for something that is strictly past as almost anything we can think of, such as an explosion that occurred last week. If God’s past beliefs about the future are soft facts, but the past explosion is a hard fact, that must be because of something special about God’s past beliefs that is intuitively plausible apart from the attempt to avoid theological fatalism. Perhaps God’s doxastic states are best understood in terms of “wide content” or a functionalist account of the mental (Zemach and Widerker 1987); perhaps divine omniscience is dispositional rather than occurrent (Hunt 1995), or doesn’t involve beliefs at all (Alston 1986). If God’s foreknowledge is special in any of these ways, premise (2) is arguably false. But there are theological costs to these conceptions of divine omniscience. The appeal to Putnam’s point that “meanings ain’t in the head” conflicts with the “incompatibilist constraint” in Fischer (1983); see also Hasker (1988) for a response to Alston, and Hughes (1997) for a response to Hunt. Since these accounts of divine foreknowledge aren’t independently plausible, however interesting they might be theoretically, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ockhamist solution is ad hoc .

One of the best-known Ockhamist proposals after Adams was made by Alvin Plantinga (1986), who defined the accidentally necessary in terms of lack of counterfactual power. For someone, Jones, to have counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs, the following must be true:

Plantinga argued that counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs about human free choices is coherent and if it occurs, these beliefs are not accidentally necessary; they do not have the kind of necessity the past is alleged to have in premise (2) of the basic argument.

Notice that counterfactual power over the past is not the same thing as changing the past. Under the assumption that there is only one time line, changing the past is incoherent since it amounts to there being one past prior to t 2 in which God has a certain belief at t 1 , and then Jones does something to make a different past. That requires two pasts prior to t 2 , and that presumably makes no sense. What (CPP) affirms instead is that there is only one actual past, but there would have been a different past if Jones acted differently at t 2 . (CPP) also does not require the assumption that what Jones does at t 2 causes God to have the belief he has at t 1 . There is much debate about the way to analyze the causal relation, but it is generally thought that causation does not reduce to a counterfactual dependency of an effect on its cause. The dependency of God’s belief on Jones’ act need not be a causal dependency. (CPP) is therefore weaker than the claim that Jones’ act at t 2 causes God’s belief at t 1 . A discussion of the counterfactual dependence of God’s past belief on human future acts is given in Zagzebski (1991, chap 4).

The idea that God’s past beliefs depend upon our future free acts has been enlivened by Trenton Merricks (2009), who argues that the idea appears in Molina (see section 2.6). There is some question how distinct Merricks’ approach is from classic Ockhamism: Fischer and Todd (2011, 2013) argue that Merricks’ solution is simply a form of Ockhamism and suffers from the same defects, while Merricks (2011) replies that the dependency relation between God’s past beliefs and human acts is different from the one at work in Ockham’s approach. The idea, in any case, is that the dependence of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents on the foreknown events themselves, including future exercises of human free will, along with the in dependence of human actions from God’s foreknowledge of them, is the key to defending the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This “Dependence Solution” has gained sufficient currency that it deserves a section of its own, regardless of its relationship to the original Ockhamist strategy.

The Ur -text for this approach is the following passage in Origen of Alexandria’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans:

it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by God before it happens.

The because-relationship in question is stronger than counterfactual dependence, because it can be absent even when counterfactual dependence is present, as in the case of divine foreknowledge. (Though you won’t answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am because God foreknew you would do so, your answering it at 9 tomorrow is nevertheless counterfactually dependent on God’s foreknowledge: were God to have believed yesterday that you won’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, you wouldn’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, and were God to have believed that you will answer at 9, you would answer at 9.) What’s needed is the stronger relationship of explanatory dependence.

Fischer and Tognazzini (2014), in a response to Merricks (2009, 2011), McCall (2011), and Westphal (2011), ask how the dependence point alone shows that the hard past isn’t fixed. That would require that the agent upon whose action the past depends really can act otherwise, and this is just asserted rather than argued. After all, this is the very point at issue, so simply assuming it is to beg the question. Cyr and Law (forthcoming) defend the dialectical appropriateness of the assumption that doing and refraining are both open to the agent.

Todd (2013) challenges the courage of dependence theorists’ convictions with a scenario in which, instead of simply foreknowing that you will perform a certain action tomorrow, God prepunished you for it yesterday. The explanatory relations are the same in the two cases, but your undergoing that punishment yesterday is surely a fixed fact about the past, and your performing that action tomorrow is surely unavoidable. We have no less reason to think that God’s foreknowledge belongs to the fixed past and that foreknown actions are unavoidable. Swenson (2016) and Law (2020) dispute the moral Todd draws from his prepunishment case, appealing to time travel scenarios in which some fact about the past depends on what might yet happen in the future, where our intuitions are supposedly more open to the possibility that the past isn’t entirely fixed.

Swenson (2016) argues that what’s fixed isn’t the past in toto , but so much of the past as isn’t dependent on the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past is fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most other defenders of the dependence solution. After reviewing modal, counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, Wasserman (2021) concludes that causal dependence is the best model for understanding how God can foreknow what you will do because you will do it, and in Wasserman (forthcoming) he argues that the defense of libertarian freedom against theological fatalism is best served by emphasizing the independence of future actions from God’s foreknowledge rather than the dependence of God’s foreknowledge on the foreknown actions.

The dependence solution redirects attention from the temporal to the explanatory order, in which divine foreknowledge depends on future events while future events do not depend on divine foreknowledge. It then proposes that what’s relevant to assessing libertarian agency is the explanatory order--the temporal order is relevant only insofar as it follows the explanatory order, and (when it does follow it) because it follows it. Thus a fact about the past, such as God’s believing yesterday that T , is irrelevant to the libertarian status of a future action if that fact does not explain, and is instead explained by, that future action. This much is consistent with the past’s being fixed and necessary in just the way that premise (2) requires, and consistent with the solution we’ll look at in 2.8 . What the dependence solution adds is that openness in the explanatory order overrides the necessity of the past: any facts about the past that aren’t yet explanatorily fixed, aren’t yet temporally fixed either. So (2) isn’t true in its full generality, and divine foreknowledge is one of the exceptions, blocking the inference to (3).

Whether this additional move is plausible depends on the strength of one’s intuitions about the necessity of the past. If the police are already on the way, summoned by the tachyonic alarm system the bank teller is about to activate, not everyone will share the intuition that the teller still has the option not to press the alarm button.

The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses the “transfer” of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4). Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future. Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment: □ p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ q . But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote 1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the argument for theological fatalism, is rule β (van Inwagen 1983). The necessity-operator featured in this principle is N , where N p is to be read, “ p , and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p .” Rule β states that, given N p and N ( p ⊃ q ), it follows that N q . Counterexamples to rule β were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument to rest on N p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ N q , and this principle appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for theological fatalism is □ t p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ t q , where □ t p is to be read, “p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer avoidable, etc., relative to time t .” This principle, too, seems to have no counterexample.

Duns Scotus (Kenny 1979, 56–58) appears to have challenged this principle. Fischer (1985b) responds to the challenge. But the theory of divine omniscience that has been most closely associated with the denial of (5) is the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. This doctrine was vehemently debated in the 16 th century, with the version of Luis de Molina, referred to as “Molinism,” getting the most attention in the contemporary literature. Recently the doctrine has received strong support by Thomas Flint (1998) and Eef Dekker (2000). Unlike the other compatibilist solutions we are considering, which aim only at showing that infallible foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible, Molinism provides an account of how God knows the contingent future, along with a strong doctrine of divine providence. Middle knowledge is called “middle” because it is said to stand between God’s knowledge of necessary truths and his knowledge of his own creative will. The objects of Middle Knowledge are so-called counterfactuals of freedom:

If person S were in circumstances C , S would freely do X .

Middle knowledge requires that there are true counterfactuals of this form corresponding to every possible free creature and every possible circumstance in which that creature can act freely. These propositions are intended to be contingent (a claim that has been disputed by some objectors), but they are prior to God’s creative will. God uses them in deciding what to create. By combining his Middle Knowledge with what he decides to create, God knows the entire history of the world.

There are a number of objections to Middle Knowledge in the contemporary literature. Robert Adams (1991) argues that Molinism is committed to the position that the truth of a counterfactual of freedom is explanatorily prior to God’s decision to create us. But the truth of a counterfactual to the effect that if I were in circumstance C I would do A is strictly inconsistent with my refraining from A in C , and so my refraining from A in C is precluded by something prior in the order of explanation to my act in C . This is inconsistent with my acting freely in C . Climenhaga and Rubio (forthcoming) clarify the nature of explanatory priority and in so doing affirm the essential correctness of Adams’ analysis. There are a number of other objections to Middle Knowledge in the literature, as well as replies by its defenders. William Hasker (1989, 1995, 1997, 2000) has offered a series of objections and replies to William Craig, who defends Middle Knowledge (1994, 1998). Yet other objections have been proposed by Walls (1990) and Gaskin (1993). Recent critical discussions of Molinism appear in Fischer (2008), Guleserian (2008), and Fales (2010). Defenses of Molinism appear in Brüntrup & Schneider (2011) and Kosciuk (2010), and a critique in Shieber (2009). Perszyk (2011) is a collection of essays examining Molinism and its future direction, while Perszyk (2013) provides a survey of the recent literature.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is defensible. How does that avoid the conclusion of the argument for theological fatalism? Middle Knowledge does not entail the falsehood of any premise of the basic argument. Freddoso (1988, 53–60) argues that Molina rejects the closure of accidental necessity under entailment, but for reasons closer to those inspiring the Dependence Solution (though Molina does not dispute the necessity of the past). Flint (1998) rejects some of the steps of the fatalist argument in addition to defending Middle Knowledge, and more recently blends of Ockhamism and Molinism have been defended (Kosciuk 2010), which suggests that even though the theory of Middle Knowledge is a powerful theory of divine knowledge and providence, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid theological fatalism by itself.

Doubts about premises (2) and (5) can be combined into a more radical critique of the argument. We have already discussed the Ockhamist response, which accepts (2) as applied to what is strictly past, but rejects it as applied to that part of the past that is not wholly or strictly past. It is worth asking, however, whether there is any such thing as the necessity of the past at all. What do we mean when we say that the past, the strict past, is necessary? When people say, “There is no use crying over spilled milk,” they presumably mean that there is nothing anybody can do now about the spilled milk; the spilling of the milk is outside the realm of our causal control. But it is not at all clear that pastness per se puts something outside the realm of our causal control. Rather, it is pastness in conjunction with the metaphysical law that causes must precede their effects. If we decided that effects can precede their causes, it’s quite possible that we would no longer speak of the necessity of the past.

So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future. But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are causally necessary. If a future event E is necessary, it is causable, and not E is not causable. But if the necessity of the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an allegedly distinct kind of necessity since some of the future has that same kind of necessity.

This leads to a deeper problem in the idea of the necessity of the past. Zagzebski (2014) argues that the interpretation of the necessity of the past as a purely temporal modality is confused. What people generally mean by the necessity of the past is that the past is causally closed, meaning the past is neither causable nor preventable. Understood that way, the necessity of the past is not a purely temporal modality, and it is not a form of necessity. The categories of causability and non-causability do not correspond to the standard modal categories of the necessary, possible, and impossible. The attempt to assimilate the causal categories to modal categories is a mistake.

Let us see what happens to the argument for theological fatalism if the necessity of the past is understood as the causal closure of the past.

Let us begin with a definition of causal closure :

E is causally closed = df There is nothing now that can cause E , and there is nothing now that can cause not E .

To use this principle in an argument for fatalism, the principle of the necessity of the past will need to be replaced with the following principle:

Principle of the Causal Closure of the Past : If E is an event in the past, E is causally closed.

We will then need to replace the transfer of necessity principle by the following:

Transfer of Causal Closure Principle : If E occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if E occurs then F occurs), then F is causally closed.

To recast the argument for theological fatalism, let us again consider the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am and call it T :

But (6) denies that there are causes of the future. Certainly we believe that something now, whether agents or events, can cause future events, and the fatalist does not deny that. What the fatalist denies is that we can cause something other than what we cause. So the relevant half of the principle of the causal closure of the past is as follows:

Principle of the Unpreventability of the Past : If E is an event in the past, nothing now can cause not E .

To use this principle in a fatalist argument, we need the following:

Transfer of Unpreventability Principle : If E occurs and it is not now causable that E does not occur, and necessarily (if E occurs, then F occurs), then it is not now causable that F does not occur.

This principle is virtually identical to the transfer of unpreventability principle proposed by Hugh Rice (2005), and is similar to a strengthened form of the well-known principle Beta first proposed by Peter van Inwagen (1983).

Using this principle, we get the following argument for theological fatalism:

From the Principle of the unpreventability of the past we get:

From the definition of divine infallibility we get:

From 2, 3, and the transfer of unpreventability principle we get:

From a variation of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, we get:

From (4) and (5), we get:

This argument for theological fatalism is better than the standard argument if a purely temporal necessity is problematic. The second premise of the above argument is only the principle that the past is unpreventable, not a questionable premise that the past has a special kind of necessity distinct from the causal structure of the universe simply in virtue of being past. But since the unpreventability of the past is not a form of necessity in the formal sense, then the transfer principle licensing the crucial inference to (4) is not a transfer of necessity. Unlike the transfer of temporal necessity principle in our original argument, it is not a variation of an axiom of logic, and is far from indisputable. This suggests that the idea of the necessity of the past may be confused. On the one hand, we have inherited from Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of necessity for which we can formulate an analogue of the formal principles of logical necessity. But the intuitions supporting such a form of necessity are largely intuitions about causability, and the modalities of causability/non-causability do not parallel necessity, possibility, and impossibility. If this is correct, then if there is a true transfer of causability or non-causability principle, it is not because it is like logical necessity in its formal structure. The problem, then, is that the fatalist argument needs a kind of necessity that the past has and which is also transferred to the future via a valid transfer of necessity principle. In section 5 we will look at how this is a general problem that extends beyond the issue of fatalism.

2.8 The rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

Compatibilists who hold that it’s possible for an agent to do otherwise, in the sense required for free will, even if her action is causally determined, will probably be untroubled by an argument purporting to show that no one can do otherwise, given divine foreknowledge. The relevant interlocutors for the argument for theological fatalism are those who endorse a libertarian conception of free will (Alston 1985).

With that in mind, let us now look at premise (9). This is a form of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a principle that has become well-known in the literature on free will ever since it was attacked by Harry Frankfurt (1969) in some interesting thought experiments. The point of Frankfurt’s paper was to drive a wedge between responsibility and alternate possibilities, and to thereby drive a wedge between responsibility and libertarian freedom. In general, those defending libertarian freedom also defend PAP, and those attacking PAP, like Frankfurt, defend determinism, but some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of an incompatibilist about free will and determinism can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Hunt (1999b), Zagzebski (1991, 2000), Pereboom (2000), and Shabo (2010). This view was originally called hyper-incompatibilism by John Martin Fischer, but has recently been called source incompatibilism. For a recent critique of this version of incompatibilism for solving the foreknowledge problem, see Werther (2005) and Talsma (2013).

Here is an example of a typical Frankfurt case intended to show that an agent can act freely even when she lacks alternate possibilities:

Black, an evil neurosurgeon , wishes to see Smith dead but is unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also despises Smith and will have a single good opportunity to kill him, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain that enables Black to monitor and to control Jones’s neurological activity. If the activity in Jones’s brain suggests that she is on the verge of deciding not to kill Smith when the opportunity arises, Black’s mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder Smith on her own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the occasion arises, Jones decides to kill Smith without any “help” from Black’s mechanism. In the judgment of Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act. Nonetheless, it appears that she is unable to do otherwise since if she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by Black’s device.

Most commentators on examples like this agree that the agent is both morally responsible for her act and acts freely in whatever sense of freedom they endorse. They differ on whether she can do otherwise at the time of her act. Determinists generally interpret the case as one in which she exercises compatibilist free will and has no alternate possibilities. Most libertarians interpret it as one in which she exercises libertarian free will and has alternate possibilities, contrary to appearances. As mentioned above, some philosophers have interpreted it as a case in which she exercises libertarian free will but does not have alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt cases can be successfully interpreted in this third way, then they can be used to show the compatibility of infallible foreknowledge and libertarian freedom. Hunt (1999a) argues that this is essentially the solution put forward by Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will III.1–4, though Augustine’s own considered position on free will was not libertarian.

But there is another way Frankfurt cases can be used to argue for the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. There is an important disanalogy between a Frankfurt case and infallible foreknowledge that might lead one to doubt whether an agent really lacks alternate possibilities when her act is infallibly foreknown. A crucial component of the standard Frankfurt case is that the agent is prevented from acting freely in close possible worlds. That aspect of the case is not in dispute. Black’s device is counterfactually manipulative even if it is not actually manipulative. In contrast, infallible foreknowledge is not even counterfactually manipulative. There is no close possible world in which foreknowledge prevents the agent from acting freely. Of course, if theological fatalism is true, nobody ever acts freely, but the point is that there is no manipulation going on in other possible worlds in the foreknowledge scenario. The relation between foreknowledge and human acts is no different in one world than in any other. But it is precisely the fact that the relation between the Frankfurt machine and Mary’s act differs in the actual world from what it is in other close worlds that is supposed to make the Frankfurt example work in showing the falsity of PAP.

To make this point clear, let us look at how the standard Frankfurt case would have to be amended to make it a close analogy to the situation of infallible foreknowledge. As Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 6, sec. 2.1), the device implanted in Mary’s brain would have to be set in such a way that no matter what Mary did, it never intervened. It is not even true that it might have intervened. Any world in which Mary decides to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to make her commit the murder should she not decide to do it, and any world in which she does not decide to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to prevent her from deciding to do it if she is about to decide to do it. Now of course this might be an impossible device, but it would have to be as described to be a close analogy to the foreknowledge scenario. And our reactions to this amended Frankfurt case are very different from typical reactions to the standard Frankfurt case. In the standard case it at least appears to be true that the agent cannot do otherwise, whereas in the case amended to be parallel to the foreknowledge case there is a very straightforward sense in which the agent can do otherwise because her will is not thwarted by Black in any reasonably close possible world. The machine is ready to manipulate her, but it does not manipulate her, nor might it have manipulated her since it does not even manipulate her in counterfactual circumstances. We might think of the machine as a metaphysical accident—an extraneous addition to the story that plays no part in the sequence of events in any possible world. Possibly it is not clear in the amended story whether or not Mary has alternate possibilities. What the story shows, then, is that alternate possibilities are not always relevant to the possession of libertarian freedom.

Disanalogies between the cases are relevant, however, only if the prospects for exempting divine foreknowledge from PAP depend on how closely it mimics Frankfurt-type counterexamples. That assumption may be unwarranted. Augustine’s counterexample to PAP was divine foreknowledge itself, not a proto-Frankfurtian thought experiment featuring a counterfactual intervener. Since God infallibly believed yesterday that you will answer the phone at 9:00 am tomorrow, there is no alternative possibility on which you fail to answer the phone at 9:00 tomorrow morning; but since “a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin” ( CG V.10) and, more generally, “God’s foreknowledge does not force the future to happen” ( FCW III.4), we can still regard your action as free, even in the libertarian sense. So PAP is false, for the same reasons Frankfurt pronounced it false in his story about Black, Smith and Jones: God’s foreknowledge, no less than Black’s mechanism, played no role at all in leading the agent to perform the action, could have been subtracted from the situation without making any difference to what happened or why it happened, and is completely irrelevant to understanding why the agent acted as she did (Frankfurt 1969, 836–7). Divine foreknowledge constitutes its own counterexample to PAP (Hunt 2003).

If this is correct, the following dilemma critique of theological fatalism becomes available (Hunt 2017a). Either the argument fails somewhere along the way to (8), or it succeeds up through (8). If it fails at one of these earlier steps, it fails full stop. That’s the obvious horn of the dilemma. But if it reaches step (8) successfully, and reaches it for those reasons , we have a case in which you cannot do otherwise than answer the phone tomorrow morning, but you are presumptively free in doing so, since you are acting on your own, and the circumstances that deprive you of alternatives do not in any way explain your action. So (9) is false, and it’s falsified by (8). Whether (1)-(8) succeeds or fails, then, the fatalistic inference to (10) is blocked.

Note that this solution shares an intuition with the dependence response surveyed in 2.5, namely, that God’s foreknowledge is explanatorily dependent on future events, and not the other way around. The difference is that the Dependence Solution retains PAP by denying the general necessity of the past, while the Augustinian/Frankfurtian approach is to abandon PAP and stick with the necessity of the past.

Ever since the dilemma of this article was identified, there have been philosophers who thought that something like our basic argument succeeds in demonstrating that infallible foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. If they are incompatible, one of them must be given up. It’s possible to give up both, of course, but that’s more than the argument requires, and one reason the dilemma has attracted so much attention in the history of philosophy is that both the belief in a being with infallible foreknowledge and belief in the existence of libertarian free will are strongly entrenched in the world view of many philosophers. To give up either of these beliefs is difficult and often has many ramifications for one’s other beliefs.

The denial of libertarian freedom has always had many supporters. The idea of making causal determinism the focal point of discussions of free will is modern in origin, and some philosophers think that the modern framing of the issue is confused. Philosophers who deny libertarian freedom may affirm a type of free will compatible with determinism, or they may instead simply accept the consequence that human beings lack free will. It is worth noting, however, that theists who deny libertarian freedom are typically theological determinists rather than fatalists; it’s primarily considerations of divine omnipotence or sovereignty, rather than foreknowledge, that motivate them. When Augustine, for example, rejected human freedom apart from divine control—“I tried hard to maintain the free decision of the human will, but the grace of God was victorious” ( Retractationes 2.1)—it wasn’t because of the fatalist argument from divine foreknowedge, which (as we’ve seen) he regarded as a complete failure. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, based his Calvinist denial of libertarian freedom, in part, on a sophisticated version of the argument for theological fatalism ( FW II.12).

The other incompatibilist position is to affirm libertarian free will along with the principle of alternate possibilities (premise 9), and to deny the possibility of infallible foreknowledge. This position has recently come into prominence through its association with “open theism” (Pinnock et al . 1994). Open theists reject divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible foreknowledge, arguing that not only should foreknowledge be rejected because of its fatalist consequences, but the view of a God who takes risks, and can be surprised and even disappointed at how things turn out, is more faithful to Scripture than the classical notion of an essentially omniscient and foreknowing deity (Sanders 1998, Boyd et al 2001, 13–47). See Rhoda et al (2006) for an argument that the key issue in the open theism debate is the nature of the future, and Tuggy (2007) for an overview of the different positions open theists can take on this question. A reply to both Rhoda et al. and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Fischer, Todd and Tognazzini (2009) offers a wide-ranging appraisal of responses to Pike's argument, paying special attention to open theism and issues in the philosophy of time. For an argument that open theism necessitates the view that propositions about the future lack truth value, see Arbour (2013). Todd disagrees on behalf of the open theist, defending (but without endorsing) the mutability of the future (2016a), and arguing that future contingents are all false rather than truth-valueless (2016b). Boyd (2015) attempts to turn the tables against critics on the grounds that the openist God’s knowledge of all the ways the future might go represents more knowledge than the classical theistic God’s knowledge of the way the future will go. Arbour (2019) is a recent collection of commisioned essays criticizing open theism on philosophical grounds.

One influential argument that open theists use against defenders of foreknowledge who do not also accept Molinism is that foreknowledge without middle knowledge is useless for divine providence. In a number of papers (1993, 1997, 2009), David Hunt has defended the providential utility of foreknowledge without middle knowledge, describing cases in which foreknowledge enhances God’s providential prospects without generating the “metaphysical problem” of explanatory circles, and arguing that the “doxastic problem” of agential impotence when one already knows what one is going to do rests on a principle that is in fact false. Responses to Hunt include Kapitan (1993), Basinger (1993), Robinson (2004a, 2004b), and Hasker (2009). Zimmerman (2012) is friendlier to Hunt’s position.

A related objection to foreknowledge without middle knowledge is that prophecy requires middle knowledge. See Pruss (2007) for a defense of a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. Another issue related to divine providence is the efficacy of past-directed prayers. Kevin Timpe (2005) argues that adherents of simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge and Molinists have the resources to explain the efficacy of prayers about the past, but open theism does not.

A form of fatalism that is even older than theological fatalism is logical fatalism, the thesis that the past truth of a proposition about the future entails fatalism. Aristotle discusses this form of fatalism in his famous Sea Battle Argument, mentioned in section 2.1 above. A clearer and more sophisticated form of the argument was proposed by Diodorus Cronus, whose argument is remarkably similar in form to our basic argument for theological fatalism. The logical fatalist argument parallels our basic argument as follows:

Argument for logical fatalism

Let S = the proposition that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Unlike the argument for theological fatalism, the argument for logical fatalism has few defenders. One reason is that (2L) is less plausible than (2). (3L) is a soft fact about the past, if anything is. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Susan Haack (1974) and William Lane Craig (1987), have maintained that theological fatalism is just a gussied up version of logical fatalism, and that the former is no more impressive than the latter once one looks past the theological window-dressing. This seems to be Merricks’ (2009) position as well, since he holds that theological fatalism fails for essentially the same reason as logical fatalism. Warfield (1997) has argued for the equivalence of the two forms of fatalism if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient. Responses have been given by Hasker (1998) and Brueckner (2000), and Warfield (2000) offers a rejoinder to both. Hunt (2002) links Warfield’s argument with Plantinga’s (1986), discussed in 2.4 , inasmuch as both exploit the logical equivalence of propositions about the contingent future with God’s believing those propositions, and argues that they both fall prey to the same reductio: the closure principles they invoke (closure of consistency under logical equivalence for Warfield, closure of hard/soft facthood under logical equivalence for Plantinga) would equally support the compatibility of free will with divine determinism, an unacceptable result for a libertarian. Peter Graham (2008) argues that the consensus about consistency to which Warfield appeals emerged against the backdrop of an assumption that there is no necessarily existent being, and is therefore question-begging.

5. Beyond theological fatalism

There’s more at stake here than the coherence of libertarian theism, as evidenced by the many non-libertarians and non-theists who have contributed to the debate. A comparison might be helpful. There’s more at stake in Zeno’s Achilles paradox than the fleetness of Achilles and the torpidity of tortoises. If that’s all there was to it, the discovery that Achilles was actually a quadraplegic, or that the tortoises of ancient Greece were as fast as jack rabbits, would resolve the puzzle. But that would simply exempt Achilles and/or the tortoise from complicity in the problem; it would do nothing to address the real issues presented by Zeno’s argument. The situation is arguably the same when it comes to the argument for theological fatalism (Hunt 2017a). If the argument gets God wrong by assuming that he’s in time when he isn’t, the problem possibly goes away for God, once the mistake is corrected, but it’s easily reinstated by replacing God with Gud, an infallibly omniscient being who exists in time. If the argument gets human beings wrong by assuming that they have (libertarian) free will when they don’t, the problem can be reformulated in terms of Gud’s infallible beliefs about the future actions of Eleutherians, a race of extraterrestrials stipulated to possess libertarian freedom. This is to understand the argument for theological fatalism as a thought experiment. Whether or not divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are real, we’re being asked, what if? Could libertarian freedom really be incompatible with divine foreknowledge for the reasons given in the argument ? The answer to this question may involve rethinking more than God and free will.

Zagzebski has argued that the dilemma of theological fatalism is broader than a problem about free will. The modal or causal asymmetry of time, a transfer of necessity principle, and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge are mutually inconsistent. (1991, appendix). If there is a distinct kind of necessity that the past has qua past, and which is not an implicit reference to the lack of causability of the past, then it is temporally asymmetrical. The past has it and the future does not. The necessity of the past and the contingency of the future are two sides of the same coin. To say that the future is contingent in the sense of temporal modality does not imply that we have causal control over the entire future, of course. We lack control over part of the future because part (or even all) of it is causally necessary. But if the necessity of the past is distinct from the lack of causability, and is a type of necessity the past has just because it is past, the future must lack that particular kind of necessity.

The idea that there is temporally asymmetrical modality is inconsistent with the transfer of necessity principle and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge of an essentially omniscient deity. The inconsistency can be demonstrated as follows:

Dilemma of Foreknowledge and Modal Temporal Asymmetry

Again, let T = the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am.

(1f) and the Principle of the Necessity of the Past tells us that

From (1f) and the definition of an EOF it follows that

By the Transfer of Necessity Principle (TNP), (2f) and (3f) entail

(4f) is logically equivalent to

From the Principle of the Contingency of the Future we get

But (6f) contradicts (5f).

The inconsistency shown in this argument has nothing to do with free will or fatalism. In fact, the problem is even more general than this argument illustrates. The reason essential omniscience conflicts with temporal modality and the transfer principle is that the existence of an EOF requires that a proposition about the past entails a proposition about the future. But it straightforwardly follows from TNP that a proposition that is now-necessary cannot entail a proposition that is not now-necessary. So if the past is now-necessary and the future is not, a proposition about the past cannot entail a proposition about the future. The conclusion is that if asymmetrical temporal modality is coherent, it can obey TNP, or it can permit a proposition about the past to entail a proposition about the future, but not both.

The root of the problem, then, is that it is impossible for there to be a type of modality that has the following features:

So the problem of the alleged incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and free will is a special case of a more general problem about time and necessity. It was suggested in section 2.6 that the problem may be (a) above. There is no temporally asymmetrical necessity. But regardless of what one thinks of fatalist arguments, the general problem in the logic of time and causation needs to be addressed. Both the alleged modal asymmetry of time and the causal asymmetry should be examined in more detail.

The problem of foreknowledge and fatalism has been around for a long time, but the amount of philosophical attention it has attracted since 1965 is truly remarkable. The literature on this problem is enormous, and it continues to grow.

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• Zemach, Eddy M., and David Widerker, 1987, “Facts, Freedom, and Foreknowledge,” Religious Studies , 23 (March): 19–28.
• Zimmerman, Dean, 2008, “The Privileged Present: Defending an ‘A-Theory’ of Time,” in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics , Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 211–25.
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Aristotle | Augustine of Hippo | Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus | fatalism | freedom: divine | free will | God: and other ultimates | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | Ockham [Occam], William | voluntarism, theological

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Two Philosophers . Original painting of Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett by Andrea Ventura .

Just deserts

Can we be held morally responsible for our actions yes, says daniel dennett. no, says gregg caruso. reader, you decide.

by Daniel C Dennett & Gregg D Caruso   + BIO

Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility. I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and that because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions, in a particular but pervasive sense – the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. While these two views appear to be at odds with each other, one of the things I would like to explore in this conversation is how far apart we actually are. I suspect that we may have more in common than some think – but I could be wrong. To begin, can you explain what you mean by ‘free will’ and why you think humans alone have it?

Dennett: A key word in understanding our differences is ‘control’. [Gregg,] you say ‘the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’ and that is true of only those unfortunates who have not been able to become autonomous agents during their childhood upbringing. There really are people, with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious, once you divorce the idea of control from the idea of causation. Your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.

In fact, if your past is roughly normal, it contains the causal chains that turned you into an autonomous, self-controlling agent. Lucky you. You weren’t responsible for becoming an autonomous agent, but since you are one, it is entirely appropriate for the rest of us to hold you responsible for your deeds under all but the most dire circumstances. As [the American country singer] Ricky Skaggs once put it: ‘I can’t control the wind, but I can adjust the sails.’ To suppose that some further condition should be met in order for you or anyone else to be ‘truly deserving’ is to ignore or deny the manifest difference in abilities for self-control that we can observe and measure readily. In other words, the rationale or justification for excusing someone, holding them not deserving of criticism or punishment, is their deficit in this competence. We don’t try to reason with bears or babies or lunatics because they aren’t able to respond appropriately. Why do we reason with people? Why do we try to convince them of conclusions about free will or science or causation or anything else? Because we think – for good reason – that in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them. There is something indirectly self-refuting in arguing that people are not moved by reasons! And that is the key to the kind of self-control which we are justified in treating as our threshold for true desert.

Caruso: I don’t disagree with you that there are important differences between agents who have the kind of rational control you highlight and those who lack it. Such a distinction is undeniable. A normal adult who is responsive to reasons differs in significant ways from one who is suffering from psychopathy, Alzheimer’s or severe mental illness. I have no issue, then, with acknowledging various degrees of ‘control’ or ‘autonomy’ – in fact, I think you and other compatibilists have done a great job highlighting these differences. My disagreement has more to do with the conditions required for what I call ‘basic desert’ moral responsibility. As a free-will skeptic, I maintain that the kind of control and reasons-responsiveness you point to, though important, is not enough to ground basic-desert moral responsibility – the kind of responsibility that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward in a purely backward-looking sense.

Consider, for example, the various justifications one could give for punishing wrongdoers. One justification, the one that dominates our legal system, is to say that they deserve it. This retributive justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that he/she deserves something bad to happen to them just because they have knowingly done wrong. Such a justification is purely backward-looking. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations that try to maximise good outcomes in the future, nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. I contend that retributive punishment is never justified since agents lack the kind of free will and basic-desert moral responsibility needed to ground it.

While we may be sensitive to reasons, and this may give us the kind of voluntary control you mention, the particular reasons that move us, along with the psychological predispositions, likes and dislikes, and other constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. And this remains true whether those factors include determinism, indeterminism, chance, or luck. This is not to say that there are not other conceptions of responsibility that can be reconciled with determinism, chance or luck. Nor is it to deny that there may be good forward-looking reasons for maintaining certain systems of punishment and reward. For instance, free-will skeptics typically point out that the impositions of sanctions serve purposes other than punishment of the guilty: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating and deterring offenders. My question, then, is whether the kind of desert you have in mind is enough to justify retributive punishment? If not, then it becomes harder to understand what, if anything, our disagreement truly amounts to since forward-looking justifications of punishment are perfectly consistent with the denial of free will and basic-desert moral responsibility. And if you are willing to reject retributivism, as I think you might be, then I’m curious to know exactly what you mean by ‘desert’ – since it’s debatable whether talk of giving agents their just deserts makes any sense devoid of its backward-looking, retributive connotations.

D ennett: You grant that the distinction I make between people who are autonomous and those who are not (because of various limits on their abilities to control themselves) is important, but then say that it is not enough for ‘the kind of desert’ that would ‘justify retributive punishment’. I too reject retributivism. It’s a hopeless muddle, and so is any doctrine of free will that aspires to justify it. But that doesn’t mean there is no ‘backward-looking’ justification of punishment.

It’s quite straightforward. On Monday you make me a promise, which I accept in good faith, and rely on when I adjust my own activities. On Friday, I discover you have broken your promise, with no excuse (what counts as an excuse has been well-explored, so I will take that on without further notice). I blame you for this. My blaming you is of course backward-looking: ‘But you promised me! ’ Autonomous people are justly held responsible for what they did because all of us depend on being able to count on them. It is for this reason that among their responsibilities is preserving their status as autonomous agents, guarding against the usurpation or manipulation of their own powers of discernment and decision. So we can blame them for being duped, for getting drunk, etc. When we blame them, we are not just diagnosing them, or categorising them; we are holding them deserving of negative consequences. If this isn’t ‘basic desert’ then so much the worse for basic desert. What is it supposed to add to this kind of desert?

The fact is – and I invite you to consider whether it is a fact – that autonomous people understand that they will be held to account and have tacitly accepted this as a condition for their maintaining their freedom in the political sense. I take this to be all the grounds we need for justifying the imposition of negative consequences (under all the usual conditions). The difference between the madman who is physically restrained and removed to quarantine for the sake of public safety, and the deserving culprit who is similarly restrained and then punished, is large, and it is a key feature of any defensible system of government. The culprit has the kind of desert that warrants punishment (but not ‘retributive’ punishment, whatever that is).

There is no incompatibility between determinism and self-control

As I have argued before, we can see this rationale in a simpler domain of human activity: sport. The penalty kicks and red cards of soccer, the penalty box of ice hockey, the ejection of players for flagrant fouls, etc, all make sense; the games they enable would not survive without them. The punishment (consider the etymology of ‘ penalty’ ) is relatively mild because ‘it’s only a game’, but if the transgression is serious enough, large fines can be assessed, or banishment from the game, and, of course, criminal prosecution for assault or cheating also lurks in the wings. Free-will skeptics should consider if they would abolish all these rules because the players don’t have real free will. And if they would grant a special exemption for such penalties in sport, what principle would they cite for not extending the same policies to the much more important game of life?

You also say ‘the particular reasons that move us, along with the psychological predispositions, likes and dislikes, and other constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’. So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc. Yes, a great deal of luck is involved, but then a great deal of luck is involved in just being born, in being alive. We human beings are well designed to take advantage of the luck we encounter, and to overcome or deflect or undo the bad luck we encounter, to the point where we are held responsible for not taking foolish chances (for instance) that might lead to our losing control. There is no incompatibility between determinism and self-control.

C aruso: Well, I’m glad to know that you reject retributivism along with ‘any doctrine of free will that aspires to justify it’. This point of agreement is significant since it entails that major elements of the criminal justice system are unjustified. I’m curious to know, however, what exactly you would replace retributive legal punishment with, and to what extent you reject the status quo. I ask because, though you claim to reject retributivism, you go on to defend a backward-looking conception of blame and punishment grounded in the idea that offenders are ‘ deserving of negative consequences’. Isn’t this just retributivism by another name?

Retributivism is the view that we ought to punish offenders because they deserve to be punished. Punishment is justified, for the retributivist, solely by the fact that those receiving it deserve it. And while punishment may deter future crime, incapacitate dangerous criminals, educate citizens, and the like, for a retributivist these are a happy surplus that punishment produces, and form no part of what makes punishment just – ie, we are justified in punishing deserving offenders even if the punishment produces none of these other surplus good effects. How does your view differ from this? Do you think the forward-looking benefits of punishment are what justified it? If so, then what role does desert play? If not, aren’t we left with the retributivist claim that backward-looking desert is sufficient to justify blame and punishment?

As for your sports example, I don’t see why this would be a problem for free-will skeptics. There are good instrumentalist and forward-looking reasons for maintaining penalties even if we reject free will and basic-desert moral responsibility. First and foremost, penalties deter players from breaking the rules. This keeps the game fair, prevents injuries, and serves all kinds of non-punitive purposes. The 24-second clock in basketball, for instance, was introduced to make the game more exciting. Without it, the game was dull, all too often played at a snail’s pace with one team opening up a lead and freezing the ball until time ran out. The only thing the trailing team could do was foul, thus games became rough, ragged, boring free-throw contests. Penalties for unnecessarily aggressive physical play, on the other hand, protect players, reduce injuries, and deter future bad behaviour. All of this can be explained without appeal to free will and just deserts .

Lastly, you say that ‘autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc’. You acknowledge that ‘a great deal of luck is involved’ in this, but I would go further and argue that ‘luck swallows everything’ (to borrow a phrase from [the British analytic philosopher] Galen Strawson ). Consider the significant role luck plays in our lives. First, there is the initial ‘lottery of life’ or ‘luck of the draw’, over which we have no say. Whether we are born into poverty or affluence, war or peace, abusive or loving homes, is simply a matter of luck. It is also a matter of luck what natural gifts, talents, predispositions, and physical traits we are born with. Beyond this initial lottery of life, there is also the luck of what breaks one encounters during one’s period of self-formation, and what environmental influences are most salient to us.

Combined, these matters of luck determine what Thomas Nagel famously calls constitutive luck – luck in who one is and what character traits and dispositions one has. Since our genes, parents, peers and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are, and since we have no control over these, it seems that who we are is at least largely a matter of luck. And since how we act is partly a function of who we are, the existence of constitutive luck entails that what actions we perform depends on luck.

In Elbow Room (1984), your first book on free will, you acknowledge all this, but then go on to say that luck in initial conditions need not ‘lead to something hideously unfair’. You proceed to give the example of a footrace where some are given a head start based on when they were born (an arbitrary fact). You argue that this would be unfair if the race were a 100-yard dash but not if it’s a marathon. ‘In a marathon,’ you write, ‘such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.’ You conclude: ‘A good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he is really good enough to deserve winning, will probably have plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage.’ On your analogy, then, since life is more like a marathon than a sprint, ‘luck averages out in the long run’.

It’s a mistake to think that luck averages out in the long run – it does not

While this example has folksy appeal, it is demonstrably false. Luck does not average out in the long run. Those who start from a disadvantaged position of genetic abilities or early environment do not always have offsetting luck later in life. The data clearly shows that early inequalities in life often compound over time rather than average out, affecting everything from differences in health and incarceration rates to success in school and all other aspects of life. To use another sports example, in his book Outliers (2008), [the Canadian journalist] Malcolm Gladwell documents the rather strange fact that there are more players in the National Hockey League born in January, February and March than any other months. His explanation is that in Canada, where children start playing hockey at a very young age, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey programmes is January 1. At the ages of six and seven, being 10 or 11 months older gives one a distinct advantage over one’s competitors. Since the older players tend to do better, they end up getting more playing time, and as they progress through the ranks they are selected for better teams and more elite programmes, receive better coaching, and play more games against better competition. What begins as a small advantage, a mere matter of luck, snowballs and leads to an ever-widening gap of achievement and success.

This kind of phenomenon can be found throughout society. Studies show, for instance , that low socioeconomic status in childhood can affect everything from brain development to life expectancy, education, incarceration rates and income. The same is true for educational inequity, exposure to violence, and nutritional disparities. It’s a mistake, then, to think that luck averages out in the long run – it does not.

In addition to constitutive luck, there is also present luck – luck at or around the moment of a putatively free and morally responsible action or decision. Present luck can include an agent’s mood, what reasons happen to come to her, situational features of the environment, how aware she is of the morally significant features of her surroundings, and the like. It is a matter of present luck, for instance, whether our attention wanders at just the right/wrong moment or whether chance features of the environment prime our deliberation. I contend, following my friend [the British neuroethicist] Neil Levy, that the one-two punch of constitutive luck (luck that causes relevant properties of agents, such as their beliefs, desires and predispositions) and present luck completely undermine basic-desert moral responsibility.

The problem with constitutive luck is that an agent’s endowments (ie, traits and dispositions) result from factors beyond the agent’s control. Now, I’m sure you will say that as long as an agent takes responsibility for her endowments, dispositions and values, over time she will become morally responsible for them (and perhaps even gain some control over them). The problem with this reply, however, is that the series of actions through which agents shape and modify their endowments, dispositions and values are themselves significantly subject to luck – and, as Levy puts it: ‘We cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck’. Hence the very actions to which compatibilists point, the actions whereby agents take responsibility for their endowments, either express that endowment (when they are explained by constitutive luck) or reflect the agent’s present luck, or both. Either way, responsibility is undermined.

D ennett: The sense of ‘deserve’ that I defend is the everyday sense in which, when you win the race fair and square, you deserve the blue ribbon or gold medal; and if you wrote the novel, you deserve the royalties, and if you plagiarised it, you don’t; and if you knowingly parked in a ‘No Parking’ zone, you deserve a parking ticket; and if you refuse to pay it, you deserve some escalated penalty; and if you committed premeditated murder, you deserve to go to prison for a very long time – provided, in all cases, that you are a responsible agent, a member in the Moral Agents Club, as I have called it. Of course it is the ‘forward-looking benefits’ of the whole system of desert (praise and blame, reward and punishment) that justifies it, but it justifies the system while ruling out case-by-case consideration of the specific benefits or lack thereof accruing to any particular instance of blame or punishment – which is not true of therapy, for instance. The system specifically prohibits even raising the issue of whether, in this instance, more good than harm would result from abandoning the verdict and the penalty.

People understand that. They would be incensed by a baseball umpire who took it upon himself to call strikes balls in order to bolster the ego of the depressed batter whose dying mother was watching from the stands, and they would be incensed – and properly so, I claim – by a judge who set aside damning evidence because the defendant had suffered enough already. Jury nullification is, of course, an example of the sort of bending of the rules which we all understand, and we understand it should be reserved for very special circumstances in which the laws, as they are written, fail to treat defendants fairly. The reason is that upholding the law and respect for the law is a key ‘forward-looking’ policy. It is the maintenance of the credibility of the law and support for its provisions that governs all adjustments and limits all exemptions, for a straightforward reason: people are not angels, and will be clever (rational) and self-interested enough to explore for loopholes and ways of gaming the system. That is why the burden of proof of moral incompetence must rest on the defendant.

So is the concept I am defending any kind of desert? It is not ‘basic desert’ – a chimera fantasised by philosophers, apparently. Praise (or royalties, or your paycheck) is not just encouragement or reinforcement, and blame (or fines or incarceration) is not just deterrence or therapy. You are entitled to the praise you get for your good deeds and to the paycheck you get for your doing your job; and the criticism, the shame, the blame you get if you offend common decency or violate the laws is quite justly and properly placed at your doorstep. That is not ‘retributive’ punishment, I guess, but it hurts, and so it should.

You think my parallel with rules in sports ‘can all be explained without appeal to free will and just deserts ’. I disagree. The rules of sports have exclusionary clauses for events outside the control of the players, and also rules obliging players to maintain self-control. (There are cases where a player gets excused if he ‘could not have done otherwise’, and cases where this is no excuse, in exact parallel to the moral cases. No player has ever raised the issue of being exempt from blame because of the truth of determinism!) Players must be capable of understanding the rules, and agreeing to play by them, so they are considered to be autonomous, reasoning agents. Rules are composed to make games fair, and as [the American political philosopher] John Rawls noted long ago, justice is a kind of fairness.

You claim that adopting my non-retributive defence of punishment would require that ‘major elements of the criminal justice system’ would need to be abandoned. I don’t see it. What would be jeopardised? I myself have urged all along that we need major reform of our penal policies, drastically reducing sentences, eliminating the death penalty, and instituting many programmes to help prisoners prepare for the resumption of their full rights of citizenship, but it would still be a system of punishment, not just enforced rehabilitation processes or quarantine. If a magic pill were invented that would turn any convict into a safe honest citizen, it would not obviate the need for punishment, for instance.

When we screw up, we’d rather be punished than institutionalised as morally incompetent

Strawson may have said that ‘luck swallows everything’ but, if so, he was wrong. Luck sets the stage, but even you note that – according to Nagel – ‘who we are is at least largely a matter of luck’. Largely, not all. Yes, what actions we perform depend (trivially) on luck, but not entirely on luck. Skill comes into it (and, yes, as I discussed in Elbow Room, how good you are at acquiring skill is itself largely – not entirely – a matter of luck). (See the discussion in [my 2003 book] Freedom Evolves, pp276ff, where I deal with the marathon case and your objection.) When I said that luck averages out in the long run, I was speaking of those of us who (lucky us) are competent moral agents. There are manifest differences, of course, between those of us who barely make the grade and those who are fortunate enough to find being moral quite easy, all things considered, and our policies and practices allow for this by setting a ‘ceiling effect’ ( FE, p291). We also take steps to improve the moral competence of all, with practices that amount to compensatory ‘special ed’ instruction and therapy.

In effect, you are stuck on the wrong side of a sorites puzzle: if I am born without moral responsibility, utterly dependent on the luck of genes and environment, then how can adding a smidgen of competence ever lead me to be responsible? When does a pile become a heap? When does a man lose enough hair to be bald? The gradual accumulation of the grounds for being held responsible, and holding oneself responsible, has no natural moment when ‘a bell rings’ and you acquire free will, but we have devised defensible and adjustable thresholds that measure what matters. Since the benefits of political freedom in a well-governed state are so great, most people aspire to moral competency, and for good reasons. And when they screw up, they would rather be punished than institutionalised as morally incompetent. ‘Thanks, I needed that!’

C aruso: I don’t doubt that the sense of ‘desert’ you defend is the everyday sense. Keep in mind, though, that it is exactly this sense of desert that is used to justify retributivism. And nothing you have said suggests that you reject either of the two main tenets of retributivism – its backward-looking-ness (at least internal to the moral responsibility system) and its appeal to just deserts. Quite the opposite, you explicitly state that the premeditated murderer really does ‘deserve to go to prison for a very long time’, irrespective of future consequences in specific instances. I’m confused, then, why you continue to deny that you are a retributivist. It seems to me that your view is indistinguishable from retributivism. Yes, you support sentence reform and eliminating the death penalty, but that’s doesn’t make you a non-retributivist. But rather than get into a debate over your membership in the Retributivist Party, I think it would be more helpful to focus on specifics.

I disagree with you that people deserve to be praised and blamed in the everyday cases you discuss. Consider the case of Albert Einstein. He too was a free-will skeptic who believed that his scientific accomplishments were not of his own making. In a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post , he said : ‘I do not believe in free will … I believe with Schopenhauer: we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.’ He goes on to add: ‘My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but by various factors over which I have no control.’ He concludes by rejecting the idea that he deserves praise or credit for his scientific achievements: ‘I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.’

Side note: my own free-will skepticism is agnostic about determinism. I maintain that whether or not the Universe is governed by deterministic laws, Einstein’s general point remains true, since indeterminate events are no more within our control than determined ones. This is why, following [the Dutch-born moral philosopher] Derk Pereboom, I call myself a hard-incompatibilist rather than a hard-determinist .) Of course we can attribute various accomplishments to Einstein – free-will skepticism is perfectly consistent with attributability. We can also say that Einstein was extremely intelligent, gifted and creative. What we cannot say, if we are free-will skeptics, is that Einstein deserves praise (in the ‘basic desert’ sense) for his attributes and accomplishments.

For the free-will skeptic, it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but that’s only because internal to the moral responsibility system , desert-based praise and blame, punishment and reward come naturally. The problem with appealing to our everyday practices, however, is that it takes for granted the very thing in need of justification. To paraphrase my friend and fellow skeptic [the American ethicist] Bruce Waller, if we start from the assumption of the moral responsibility system, then the denial of moral responsibility is absurd and self-defeating. But the universal denial of moral responsibility does not start from the assumption that under normal circumstances we are morally responsible, and it does not proceed from that starting point to enlarge and extend the range of excuses to cover everyone (so that everyone is profoundly flawed). That is indeed a path to absurdity. Rather, those who reject moral responsibility reject the basic system which starts from the assumption that all minimally competent persons are morally responsible. For the free-will skeptic, it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible, no matter how reasonable, competent, self-efficacious, strong-willed and clear-sighted that person may be. Since skeptics like myself, who globally challenge moral responsibility, do not accept the rules of that system, it is question-begging to assume our ordinary moral responsibility practices are justified without refuting the various arguments for global skepticism.

Now, in fairness, you do provide a forward-looking justification for backward-looking blame and punishment. That is, you argue that the whole moral responsibility system is justified in terms of its forward-looking benefits, but once we adopt the ‘system of desert’ we need to reject case-by-case judgments of what would produce the best outcomes. Internal to the system , you maintain, we need to adopt backward-looking, desert-based practices and policies. But I see at least two problems with this. First, it’s an open question whether the moral responsibility system has the forward-looking benefits you maintain. The notion of just deserts , for instance, is too often used to justify punitive excess in criminal justice, to encourage treating people in severe and demeaning ways, and to excuse and perpetuate social and economic inequalities. Additionally, resentment, indignation, moral anger and blame are often counterproductive on the interpersonal level when it comes to the goals of safety, moral formation and reconciliation.

Rather than argue the point further here, however, I will simply note that it remains an empirical question whether, on balance, we would be better off without a system of desert. I believe we would be. My second concern is that blame and punishment, especially legal punishment, can cause severe harm. If you want to justify the harm caused by blame and punishment on the assumption that agents are free and morally responsible, hence justly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done, then it would seem you need good epistemic reasons for thinking agents actually are free and morally responsible in the sense required. But I don’t see how a pragmatic or consequentialist justification of the ‘whole system of desert’ can provide such a justification. Pointing to the benefits of adopting a system of desert seems orthogonal to the core question.

Lastly, regarding luck, I go further than Nagel, and maintain that every morally significant act is either constitutively lucky, presently lucky, or both. Your antidote to luck seems to be skill or moral competency. But, as I argued earlier, the series of actions through which agents develop various skills and competencies are themselves either the result of constitutive luck (when they stem from an agent’s endowments), present luck, or both.

D ennett: You find my view ‘indistinguishable from retributivism’. This baffles me, since I have all along stressed the ‘forward-looking’ justification I have presented. There are non-retributive, non-deontological, consequentialist justifications of punishment. See, for instance, the excellent entry on punishment in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by my late friend and [Tufts University] colleague Hugo Bedau. The ‘liberal justification’ of punishment he offers there is one with which I, along with many others, concur. As Bedau notes, after making proper hash of retributivism: ‘But the basic insights of retributivism cannot be merely brushed aside. There is a role for desert in a liberal theory of punishment, but its scope needs careful restriction.’

A key feature of that careful restriction is an appreciation of its role in preserving and enhancing respect for the law. You describe my view as holding that ‘once we adopt the “system of desert we need to reject case-by-case judgments of what would produce the best outcomes’. Not quite right; you must add ‘in the immediate circumstances’. The point is that a policy of case-by-case judgments of what would produce the ‘best outcome’ considered locally would threaten both the effective administration of justice (by inviting special pleading on behalf of either the perpetrator or the injured party or society as a whole) and respect for the law. That is the point of my examples of the biased umpire and the judge who suppresses evidence. Accepting bad outcomes in specific cases is only justified by the long-run protection of respect for the law, and whenever evidence mounts for adjustments to general policies, laws can be revised, a demonstrably better policy than ‘taking the law into your own hands’.

Bedau usefully lists four requirements for any justification of punishment:

Accordingly, to justify punishment we must specify, first, what our goals are in establishing (or perpetuating) the practice itself. Second, we must show that when we punish we actually achieve these goals. Third, we must show that we cannot achieve these goals unless we punish (and punish in certain ways and not in others) and that we cannot achieve them with comparable or superior efficiency and fairness by nonpunitive interventions. Fourth, we must show that striving to achieve these goals by way of the imposition of deprivations is itself justified.

You say ‘it’s an open question whether the moral responsibility system has the forward-looking benefits you maintain’ (Bedau’s point two) and ‘it remains an empirical question whether, on balance, we would be better off without a system of desert. I believe we would be’ (Bedau’s point three). Indeed, these are open empirical questions, but not very open! I cannot see how you can think we would be better off without a system of desert – unless you are granting me my kind of desert and merely saying we’d be better off without some as yet undescribed sort of ‘basic’ desert (and I am quite sure we are better off without that). For without my kind of desert, no one would deserve to receive the prize they competed for in good faith and won, no one would deserve to be blamed for breaking solemn promises without excuse, no one would deserve to have their driver’s licence revoked for drunk-driving, no one would deserve punishment for lying under oath, and so forth. There would be no rights, no recourse to authority to protect against fraud, theft, rape, murder. In short, no morality.

I was astonished by your sentence: ‘For the free-will skeptic, it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible, no matter how reasonable, competent, self-efficacious, strong-willed and clear-sighted that person may be.’ Do you really want to return humanity to [the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas] Hobbes’s state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short? If you have some other vision of how a stable, secure and just state can thrive without appeal to moral responsibility, you owe us the details. Waller, in The Injustice of Punishment (2018), makes a brave attempt to do that, but even he concedes that you cannot have such a society without punishment, as announced by the title of his Chapter 2: ‘The Unjust Necessity of Punishment’. Well, if punishment is a necessity, it isn’t a logical or physical necessity; it’s a necessity for a viable state in which as much justice as practically possible might be achieved. In what way would such a necessity be ‘unjust’? In the same way, it seems to me, that it is ‘unfair’ that everyone can’t be above average – in beauty, strength, intelligence, whatever. Life is tough, but not ipso facto unjust, and we can use our reason to make life, and its institutions, more and more just, more and more fair, a better world for all.

C aruso: Thank you for clearing some things up for me. You say that my confusion over whether you reject retributivism ‘baffles’ you, since you ‘have all along stressed the “forward-looking” justification [you] have presented’. I guess my confusion stemmed from the fact that earlier in the conversation you said that rejecting retributivism ‘doesn’t mean there is no “backward-looking” justification of punishment’. You then went on to defend what looked to be a backward-looking justification of blame and punishment grounded in desert. If, instead, you adopt a forward-looking consequentialist account of punishment, then I’m happy to retract my earlier charge that you are a retributivist in all but name. That said, by adopting a forward-looking consequentialist justification, your view comes much closer to that of the skeptic. The main difference, it seems, is that you want to retain the language of desert while the skeptic wants to consign it to the flames – along with libertarian free will, retributivism, and the idea of being self-made men and women (all of which you reject as well).

You go on to say: ‘I cannot see how you can think we would be better off without a system of desert.’ Well, for me, the notion of basic desert, which has been my target all along, is a pernicious one that does more harm than good. If that is not the sense of desert you have in mind, then so be it. But my claim is that basic-desert moral responsibility, and with it the notion of just deserts , is too often used to justify punitive excess in criminal justice, to encourage treating people in severe and demeaning ways, and to excuse and perpetuate social and economic inequalities. Consider, for example, punitiveness. Researchers have found that stronger belief in free will is correlated with increased punitiveness. They also found that weakening one’s belief in free will makes them less retributive in their attitudes about punishment (for details, see here .)

These empirical findings concern me.

Who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control

There are additional concerns as well. As I argue in my Public Health and Safety (2017), the social determinants of criminal behaviour are broadly similar to the social determinants of health. In that work, and elsewhere, I advocate adopting a broad public-health approach for identifying and taking action on these shared social determinants. I focus on how social inequities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and criminal behaviour, how poverty affects brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental-health issues), how homelessness and education affects health and safety outcomes, how environmental health is important to both public health and safety, how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, and how a public-health approach can be successfully applied within the criminal justice system. I argue that, just as it is important to identify and take action on the social determinants of health if we want to improve health outcomes, it is equally important to identify and address the social determinants of criminal behaviour. My fear is that the system of desert you want to preserve leads us to myopically focus on individual responsibility and ultimately prevents us from addressing the systemic causes of criminal behaviour .

Consider, for example, the crazed reaction to [the then US president Barack] Obama’s claim that, ‘if you’ve got a [successful] business, you didn’t build that’ alone. The Republicans were so incensed by this claim that they dedicated the second day of the 2012 Republican National Convention to the theme ‘We Built it!’ Obama’s point, though, was simple, innocuous, and factually correct. To quote him directly: ‘If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.’ So, what’s so threatening about this? The answer, I believe, lies in the notion of just deserts . The system of desert keeps alive the belief that if you end up in poverty or prison, this is ‘just’ because you deserve it. Likewise, if you end up succeeding in life, you and you alone are responsible for that success. This way of thinking keeps us locked in the system of blame and shame, and prevents us from addressing the systemic causes of poverty, wealth-inequality, racism, sexism, educational inequity and the like. My suggestion is that we move beyond this, and acknowledge that the lottery of life is not always fair, that luck does not average out in the long run, and that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control.

Finally, I do not agree that rejecting free will and basic-desert moral responsibility will ‘return humanity to Hobbes’s state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short’. You write: ‘If you have some other vision of how a stable, secure and just state can thrive without appeal to moral responsibility, you owe us the details.’ First, let me reiterate that the kind of moral responsibility I reject is basic-desert moral responsibility. Of course, there are other conceptions of moral responsibility that are perfectly consistent with free-will skepticism – such as Waller’s notion of take-charge responsibility , the attributability responsibility I referenced in the Einstein example, and Pereboom’s forward-looking notion of responsibility that focuses on three nondesert-invoking desiderata: future protection, future reconciliation, and future moral formation. Second, I agree that I owe you and others an account of how to maintain a stable, secure and just society without basic-desert moral responsibility. Fortunately, my good friend Derk Pereboom has already provided most of the details for such an account in his two books Living Without Free Will (2001) and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014). And I have further developed a detailed account of how to address criminal behaviour without basic-desert moral responsibility – it’s called the public health-quarantine model . While I wish we could debate the merits of it here, it unfortunately looks like we have run out of time. The details of my account, however, are readily available for anyone who is interested (see here , here , and here ).

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Five Arguments for Free Will

None of them are compelling..

Posted March 11, 2018 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

I'll bear as lightly as I can what fate decreed for me. I know full well no power can stand against Necessity. — Prometheus Bound

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does . — Sartre, Jean-Paul

If you think, like Sartre, that you have free will , how might you demonstrate it? Consider these five arguments (and then some).

First, you can dismiss the challenge, claiming that it is outlandish on the face of it. The experience of free will is so embedded in consciousness that it would be foolish to attempt a demonstration. Trying to demonstrate the capacity of free will would be as bizarre as trying to prove that you see the color red when looking at a rose.

This is not a good response. There is no alternative to seeing the rose as red lest you mess with the physical input or the constitution of your perceptual system. There are, however, alternatives to the idea that your behavior is caused by a will that is itself uncaused. There is necessity (i.e., the totality of the natural causal forces in play) and chance (random variation not reducible to causes). Since we model everything we study as the product of some combination of necessity and chance, we shall approach human experience and behavior in the same way. Necessity and chance are everywhere; they are exhaustive in our efforts to explain phenomena. The doctrine of free will denies this. It claims a special region for human behavior that is not occupied by either necessity or chance. The analogy of seeing the red in the rose and having free will is thus poor. If it were clear that the subjective experience of free will could not possibly be an illusion, then nothing we are subjectively sure of could be an illusion. But illusions are possible, aren’t they?

Second, you can follow John Searle’s (2013) example and announce that you will raise your arm and then do it. Voilà . Free will has been revealed! Or has it? What has been revealed is your ability to plan and execute a behavior. Your conscious awareness of this plan is not in dispute, and it may in fact be part of the causal chain. I have suggested that it can be (Krueger, 2004) when responding to Dan Wegner’s (2002) claim that conscious will is not only not free, but not even part of the causal chain leading to behavior. Your will to raise your arm is free in the sense that it is not constrained by shackles or heckles. The will can at times be free from interference from others; and that should be welcome news. But the will is not free from all antecedent conditions and causes. Consider again your conscious decision to raise your arm. The fact that your conscious awareness — by definition — begins with the appearance of conscious mental content does not prove that there is no unconscious , and causally relevant, mental content preparing the conscious experience. The absence of consciousness does not prove the absence of mind.

One way to put this is that your ability to act out of free will is easily confused with your ability to act with volition (i.e., to act with a will). Many non-human species of animal can act with or without volition. The dog running after the stick wants to get the stick. The sick dog twitching in a seizure does not want to twitch. You might insist to identify free will with voluntary action, but then you are just talking about will , not free will in the libertarian sense, that is, the will that arises uncaused in the mind.

Third, you might consider a simple choice task, such as an opportunity to drink a pinot or a cabernet. You pick the pinot and ask rhetorically, "How free was that?" Notice that this is a version of the Searle argument. Searle had a choice between raising his arm and not raising it. The claim that you could have chosen the cabernet proves nothing — because you didn’t chose it. The wind blowing from the East might say it could have blown from the West — but it didn’t. To say “I could have chosen differently” has no evidentiary value because it begs the question it is supposed to answer. It attempts to prove free will by asserting its reality; it attempts to refute determinism by asserting its falsity. Now suppose it’s a long night and you have many opportunities to sip a pinot or a cab, and you do so in an unpredictable order. You have succeeded in meeting an important condition of free will, but unpredictability is also a defining condition of chance. Was your random walk through the open bar free-willed? Chance wins because we already know it’s a feature within the universe. Free will still needs to carve out a niche.

Fourth, some religions (e.g., Judaism and Catholicism) insist on free will as a foundation of morality . God gave man free will so he may turn away from his evil inclinations and toward his good inclinations. In contemporary psychology, Roy Baumeister (2008) champions this view. Your free will, he suggests, shines when you resist temptation and do what is in your own long-term interest (salvation) or in the interest of the group ( conformity , obedience). This view appeals to intuition . You feel the desire to have another glass of pinot, and then — after some internal struggle — you declare that you will stop because you have to drive home or because you have a bad liver. It seems — and is often portrayed as such — that you have won a victory over yourself. This of course is nonsense. Both inclinations, to drink and not to drink, are motives within your psychological system. The latter motive is grounded in fears (e.g., of others’ censure or sickness), whereas the former is grounded in desire (e.g., for a buzz). When you break an approach-avoidance conflict by acting one way or another, you reveal to yourself which will is stronger. You do not learn whether the "free" will has won the battle.

The religious argument ("resist temptation") intersects with the issue of predictability in an interesting way. Suppose you are at your freest and vanquish every temptation. Your behavior is now perfectly predictable as unfailingly socially desirable. How can a perfectly predictable person be free? This is a question that contributed to Nietzsche’s view that Christian morality is a slave morality, and to Dostoyevsky’s assertion that man’s desire for freedom is so great that he will eventually act in a self-destructive way lest he be enslaved by convention and predictability. Dostoyevsky’s man is still not free in the libertarian sense because his hatred of being fully rational is itself a will that wells up from the deep.

Fifth, you can ask rhetorically what would happen to you and the world if you didn’t have the free will that you think you have. Those who raise this question imply that free will stands between you and total anarchy. Without free will, you’d be roaming the streets, raping, pillaging, and burning. What is the evidence for that? There are some data suggesting that people cheat more if induced with ideas of determinism (Vohs & Schooler, 2008), but it’s a far cry from the break-down of social order free will enthusiasts have in mind (the replicability of this finding has come into doubt; Open Science Collaboration , 2015). It’s a cliché to think that without free will there can be no responsibility and no punishment . In fact, punishment makes more sense if you can attribute a deed to a preference, inclination, or attitude (a stable will) within the perpetrator than if you figure the perpetrator could have acted differently — and might act differently next time. The very idea of deterrence requires the rejection of free will; fear of punishment is a potent cause of good behavior.

And then some. Ken Miller, a biologist who believes that evolution begot free will and that this free will can now override the logic of evolution itself (see Krueger, 2018), granted in conversation with a theist that the belief in free will might be an illusion, but if so, it is a self-fulfilling one. I confess (I was not that theist at the table) that I was unable to follow the logic of this argument. Then again, it was a roundtable discussion and there was a bit of pinot.

Some have argued that any skeptical discussion of free will proves its existence. But those who argue for free will also feel that they are doing so out of free will. In other words, anyone discussing the topic contributes to the case for free will. The question of free will is thus begged and the skeptical imagination is beggared. A version of this argument is that skeptics attempt to persuade others of their position and it is implied that persuasion is granted only by an audience freely deciding to accept the message. Persuasion works in many ways, as a brief look at a social psychology textbook will confirm; the point is that when a communicator brings about an attitude change in the recipients of the message, we have a nice case for a causal story.

Ken Miller has suggested that the very existence of science, that is, the search for an understanding of necessity and chance in nature, is only possible if the scientists engage in research out of their free will. Science, then, cannot be understood in terms of necessity and chance. It follows that science cannot study itself. Therefore, science cannot comprehend itself, which means we cannot understand it.

If you think you have free will, you cannot produce a coherent set of explanations for your own behavior. To say that "I chose the pinot" is a perfectly comprehensible statement if you refer to the will. Your desire for pinot is greater than your desire for cab, and that may be so for myriad psychological reasons and causes that one might explore. To say "I had no preference that might direct my choice; I then freely created such a preference in the moment," explains nothing. If you truly look at yourself along these lines, tell us: Who are you?

Professor Lloyd’s Turing test. Any denial of free will is met with vigorous and heartfelt opposition (see some of the commentaries). Why? One reason is that people are horrified by the imagined prospect of losing their moral foundation. But there is a more direct, psychological reason. If free will is a psychological illusion on par with an optical illusion such as the Ponzo or the Poggendorf illusions, then no rational talk will change the illusory perception itself (Sloman, 1996). Lloyd (2012), elaborating ideas introduced by Gödel, Popper, and Turing, shows that the psychology of human decision-making makes the illusion of free will necessary (see also his taped lecture ). Lloyd taps into quantum probability and recursive thought. The argument can be summarized thus: As you sit trying to reach a decision (e.g., what to order for dinner), your brain/mind works to find a solution. Unless this is a very simple decision, for example, because you always order the same thing and you know it, your brain/mind has to perform computations. By definition, the decision is reached only when all these operations have been executed. Therefore, and again by necessity, you and your brain/mind cannot foretell the final outcome. If you could, there would be a quicker way to reach a decision, but we are already assuming that the fastest route is being taken. Stated differently, if you are to run (in your brain/mind) a simulation of your brain/mind activity, then this simulation must contain itself, which reveals the recursive nature of this attempt and its intractability. One might say a mind trying to represent itself gets caught in a version of Russell's paradox (a set cannot contain itself).

Now, when you reach a decision, you have the accurate impression that you were not able to anticipate its outcome. You had to do the work of decision-making. This accurate sense of unforeseeability entails the inaccurate conclusion of freedom, that is, the idea that the decision could have been a different one. However, the process of decision-making was fully accounted for by necessity or perhaps quantum chance, but it cannot be predicted without cheating, that is, without violating its own assumptions. In short, Lloyd shows how the will is not free but must be perceived as such.

There is a hitch, and Professor Lloyd gets to it in the appendix. Here, he recalls how he, time and again, scrutinized the menu of his favorite Santa Fé haunt only to end up ordering the same dish of chicken rellenos every time. The issue here is that he failed to create a representation of a stable preference. Some people do, and they walk into the restaurant asking for “the usual.” Intriguingly, Lloyd’s wife was able to do the math and predict her husband’s choice. It is important to note that she did not simulate his mental decision-making processes, but abstracted historical data of the outcome. The wise husband sits down in the restaurant and asks his wife, “Honey, what will I have?”

A neuropsychologist chimes in . I want to give the last word to Elkhonon Goldberg, who, in his 2018 book on creativity states that "I have felt that the infatuation with the subject of consciousness both among neuroscientists and among the general public was an epistemological cop-out, which basically represented a reluctance to completely let go of the Cartesian dualism; that consciousness was soul in disguise; and that "like many recent converts we continue to honor the old gods in secret — the god of soul in the guise of consciousness'" (p. 64). Ditto for the god of free will.

Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Free will in scientific psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 , 14-19.

Goldberg, E. (2018). Creativity: The human brain in the age of innovation . New York: Oxford University Press.

Krueger, J. I. (2004). Experimental psychology cannot solve the problem of conscious will (yet we must try). Review of ‘The illusion of conscious will’ by Daniel M. Wegner. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27 , 668-669.

Krueger, J. I. (2018). The drama of human exceptionalism. Review of ‘The human instinct: How we evolved to have reason, consciousness, and free will’ by Kenneth R. Miller. American Journal of Psychology . https://psyarxiv.com/bmzek/

Lloyd, S. (2012). A Turing test for free will. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 370 , 3597-3610. DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2011.0331

Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349 , aac4716. doi:10.1126/science.aac4716

Searle, J. (2013). Our shared condition – consciousness . TED talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousnes…

Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3-22.

Vohs, K.D., & Schooler, J. W. (2008). The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychological Science, 19 , 49-54.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Joachim I. Krueger, Ph.D. , is a social psychologist at Brown University who believes that rational thinking and socially responsible behavior are attainable goals.

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van Inwagen: An Essay on Free Will - 1986

Related Papers

Marco Hausmann

According to Peter van Inwagen, free will " is a mystery because […] there are good arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism and good arguments for [the] incompatibility of free will and indeterminism, and […] no one has ever identified a very plausible candidate for the flaw in any of the arguments in either class. " The aim of my paper is to identify what might be a flaw in van Inwagen's arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to van Inwagen's arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, nobody is able to do anything about the truth of a complete description of a past state of the world. In my view, this is the assumption that might well be a flaw in van Inwagen's argument. However, I do not argue directly against this assumption. Instead, I develop three arguments to the conclusion that van Inwagen's attempt to justify this assumption fails. I argue that van Inwagen's attempt to justify this assumption is, first, incompatible with a theory of propositions according to which necessarily equivalent propositions are identical, second, incompatible with a description theory of proper names according to which proper names are merely abbreviations for definite descriptions and, third, incompatible with a metaphysical theory according to which there is no such thing as the past. At the end of my paper, I sketch an independent argument to the conclusion that van Inwagen's attempt to justify his crucial assumption fails. I conclude that van Inwagen has given us no reason to believe that nobody is able to do anything about the truth of a complete description of a past state of the world. Further, I show that the argument of my paper not only applies to van Inwagen's argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, but also to a famous argument for the incompatibility of free will and divine foreknowledge. In my appendix, I discuss the validity of van Inwagen's argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism.

Philosophical Studies

Jean-Baptiste Guillon

Streit um die Freiheit

Randolph Clarke

Open Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 11, 482-498

Richard Startup

Progress may be made in resolving the tension between free will and determinism by analysis of the necessary conditions of freedom. It is of the essence that these conditions include causal and deterministic regularities. Furthermore, the human expression of free will is informed by understanding some of those regularities, and increments in that understanding have served to enhance freedom. When the possible character of a deterministic system based on physical theory is considered, it is judged that, far from implying the elimination of human freedom, such a theory might simply set parameters for it; indeed knowledge of that system could again prove to be in some respects liberating. On the other hand, it is of the essence that the overarching biological framework is not a deterministic system and it foregrounds the behavioural flexibility of humans in being able to choose within a range of options and react to chance occurrences. Furthermore, an issue for determinism flows from the way in which randomness (e.g. using a true random number generator) and chance events could and do enter human life. Once the implications of that issue are fully understood, other elements fit comfortably together in our understanding of freely undertaken action: the contribution of reasons and causes; the fact that reasons are never sufficient to account for outcomes; the rationale for the attribution of praise and blame.

New Waves in Philosophy of Action

Manuel Vargas

International Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, (IJHSSE), volume 10, Issue 6, pp. 25-29

Elena Ene Draghici-Vasilescu (see also Elena Ene D-Vasilescu)

As we know, there is a difference between a simple wish and the will of an individual. Not only a concrete action is required in order to alleviate the impact of various factors that inhibit the former before it becomes ‘will’, but also a deep level of human consciousness. It implies conscientious motivation, clear goals, etc. My paper introduces some of the elements instrumental in the leap from the wish to the human will. As the issue of Free Will shall be central to the paper because when I say ‘human will’ I refer to ‘free will’, I have to mention that I adopt a pragmatic perspective on this notion. I. e. even though, as quantum physics tell us, any decision we make is conditioned by realities pertaining to it, we do not think of this state of affair when we carry out our activities – at least not always. Because of that we feel free – free enough to be able to function according to social norms.

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Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will

John Martin Fischer, Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will , Oxford University Press, 2016, 243pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199311293.

Reviewed by Martijn Boot, Waseda University

Contemporary debates about free will are dominated by two questions: ‘Is causal determinism true?’ and ‘Is free will compatible with causal determinism?’ These issues are important with respect to the question of to what extent we are morally responsible for our choices and actions. Moral responsibility cannot be detached from some form of free will and self-determination. Parallel to the issue of (in)compatibilism of free will and causal determinism is the question of whether free will and moral responsibility are compatible with divine foreknowledge.

John Martin Fischer investigates the relationship between divine foreknowledge, human freedom and moral responsibility. His book is a collection of eleven previously published essays. Fischer starts with a new introductory article in which he summarizes, extends and applies elements of the analyses presented in the other essays.

Fischer mainly concentrates on the question of whether God’s foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom to do otherwise. But he also pays attention to the still more important question about the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human moral responsibility.

Fischer tries to show that the answer to the first question is negative: God’s foreknowledge excludes human freedom to do otherwise. This seems to imply that the answer to the second question is negative as well: God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with human moral responsibility. However, Fischer believes that this doesn’t follow, because, according to him, moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise. I will describe and discuss some of the main arguments Fischer adduces in his book to support these views.

Are divine foreknowledge and freedom to do otherwise reconcilable?

Fischer points out that the arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise are in important ways similar to arguments for the incompatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise. Both kinds of arguments are related to ideas about the “fixity of the past”. Still there are also relevant differences, which have to be taken into account because the conclusions of the two kinds of arguments with respect to moral responsibility may differ.

Fischer discusses different families of arguments for the incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise (‘the Arguments for Incompatibilism’), which are largely based on the premise of ‘the fixity of the past’ and on the so-called Transfer Principle. This principle shows circumstances in which doing X means doing Y , so that if we cannot do Y , we cannot do X . The incompatibilist uses the Transfer Principle by showing that we cannot do X (e.g. we cannot do otherwise) because we cannot do Y (e.g. we cannot bring it about that God held a false belief) . Fischer investigates several challenges to the Arguments for Incompatibilism, such as

• ‘Scotism’: counterexamples to the Transfer Principle, attributed to Duns Scotus and developed by Anthony Kenny;
• ‘Ockhamism’: based on ideas of William of Ockham who made a distinction between ‘hard’ (temporally nonrelational) and ‘soft’ (temporally relational) facts about the past;
• ‘Molinism’: inspired by doctrines of the Jesuit philosopher Luis de Molina about God’s ‘middle knowledge’ — knowledge of what free agents would do in various situations.

Fischer defends the Arguments for Incompatibilism against these challenges. He argues that some versions of these Arguments are vulnerable to some challenges, while these challenges do not affect other versions. For instance, Kenny’s counterexamples to one of the versions of the Transfer Principle do not apply to another version. Besides, the Arguments for Incompatibilism do not exclusively depend on the Transfer Principle. So, one could reject some specific Arguments for Incompatibilism without thereby having to reject others. According to Fischer, Molinism provides an interesting model of divine providence but is not a response to the Arguments for Incompatibilism. He shows that, with respect to the issue of incompatibilism, it begs the question and doesn’t help with the specific problem of reconciling God’s foreknowledge with human freedom.

In addition to the previously published articles, Fischer offers some new reflections on related issues. He defends the theological incompatibilist’s argument against the challenge that it begs the question. Further he tries to show that a rejection of Ockhamism does not depend on the claim that God’s beliefs concern hard instead of soft facts about the past. Finally, he argues (against William Hasker, Patrick Todd and others) that, even in a causally indeterministic world (a world in which events are not causally determined), God can know with certainty that some future event will occur. A causally indeterministic world does not prevent an ordinary human being from having a justified and more or less certain belief in what a particular person, given his personal characteristics, will do in a future choice situation. God’s foreknowledge may be partly conceived in a similar way. But unlike a human being, whose beliefs are fallible, God knows that what He believes is true, because he knows that He is omniscient. God can thus ‘bootstrap’ his first-order belief to a second order of certain knowledge (Fischer calls this approach of God’s foreknowledge the Bootstrapping View). In this perspective God’s foreknowledge may be compatible with a causally indeterministic world. This is important with respect to the question of whether God’s foreknowledge can be reconciled with human moral responsibility. Indeed, if God’s foreknowledge would be inextricably bound up with a causally deterministic world, it would probably exclude human moral responsibility. Still, Fischer recognizes that, also if God’s foreknowledge is unrelated to causal determinism, it may be problematic to reconcile it with human moral responsibility, if it excludes the freedom to do otherwise. This problem forms the second main question to which the book pays attention.

Are God’s foreknowledge and moral responsibility reconcilable?

For a detailed discussion and defense of his theory of moral responsibility Fischer refers to previous publications. Many philosophers believe that the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted differently (the argument of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities). This would mean that incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and the freedom to do otherwise implies that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with moral responsibility. However, Fischer tries to make plausible that incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise — a freedom that he calls ‘regulative control’ — does not imply that God’s foreknowledge is irreconcilable with human moral responsibility. Moral responsibility requires another kind of freedom than regulative control, namely ‘guidance control’. An individual exhibits guidance control to the extent that he acts from his own mechanism of practical reasoning and human deliberation, as a response to divergent reasons for alternative choices. An agent’s mechanism becomes his own when he ‘takes responsibility’. Thus guidance control consists of two important components: ownership and reasons-responsiveness .

Fischer adduces the following example — inspired by examples given by Harry Frankfurt — to demonstrate that somebody can be held morally responsible for his choice, although he could not have chosen otherwise.

Black has secretly inserted a chip in Jones’s brain. This enables Black to monitor and control Jones’s activities. If, in the presidential election, Jones were to show any inclination to vote for anyone other than the Democrat candidate, then the chip in Jones’s brain would intervene to ensure that he actually decides to vote for the Democrat. But if Jones decides on his own to vote for the Democrat, the chip does nothing. Suppose that Jones decides to vote for the Democrat on his own, just as he would have if Black had not inserted the chip in his head. It seems, upon first thinking about this case, that Jones can be held morally responsible for his choice, although he could not have done otherwise.

Fischer uses this Frankfurt-like approach to support his semicompatibilist view: he believes that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free choices between alternative possibilities, but compatible with moral responsibility, because moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise.

Some other philosophers, including Derk Pereboom, also do not believe that moral responsibility requires freedom to do otherwise, but they nevertheless hold that moral responsibility requires that the agent be the ‘ultimate source’ of his behavior. Causal determination is incompatible with the agent being the ultimate source of his behavior. Therefore, even if moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise, causal determination seems incompatible with moral responsibility if the ultimate source requirement is right.

However, according to Fischer, his semicompatibilism is not vulnerable to the challenge of source-incompatibilism because, unlike causal determinism, the conception of divine foreknowledge does not exclude that the agent remains the source of his behavior, insofar as God’s foreknowledge is not conceived as causing human action. Still, Fischer points out that, also in the context of God’s foreknowledge and the Frankfurt Cases, something entirely external to the agent and out of his control is sufficient for his behavior. In this sense the source of his behavior is external to him. If, as Fischer believes, this is still compatible with guidance control — and, therefore, with moral responsibility — then this may mean that likewise the external source of the agent’s behavior in the case of causal determinism need not imply that moral responsibility is excluded. Therefore, Fischer argues, his Frankfurt-like approach casts doubt not only on the requirement of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility, but also on the requirement that, to be morally responsible, the agent must be the ultimate source of his behavior.

In sum, Fischer argues that it is at least plausible that, if God knows everything about our future, it follows that we are never free to do otherwise. But he further argues that it does not follow from this lack of regulative control that we lack guidance control of our future. If guidance control is the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility, then we can be morally responsible for our behavior, even if God knows everything we will ever do in advance.

Robert Kane notices in the Introduction of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will that contemporary debates about free will in the light of God’s foreknowledge “surpassed even medieval discussions in labyrinthine complexity.” Also Fischer’s profound analyses are complicated and not easily to follow for readers who are not specialized in the relevant issues. Therefore, the book is relevant and important mainly for specialists. Fischer’s argument is interesting not only for specialists who are interested in the (in)compatibility of God’s foreknowledge , the freedom to choose otherwise and moral responsibility but also for specialists who are interested in the (in)compatibility of causal determinism , the freedom to choose otherwise and moral responsibility. The reason is that the two issues have much ground in common, while there are also relevant differences, which Fischer elucidates.

Fischer’s approach consists of subtle conceptual analyses and rigorous evaluations of premises and the logical validity of arguments adduced in the free will debate. For instance, he discusses and defends the premise of the fixity of the past against challenges; he shows that the distinction between hard and soft facts may both reveal and conceal something, and that this distinction should be distinguished from the distinction between fixed and nonfixed facts; he points at confusions about the meaning of concepts such as various senses of ‘can’; he reveals logical fallacies such as equivocation and begging-the-question; he uncovers the fallacy of moving from one ‘language game’ to another (warned against by Wittgenstein).

Fischer recognizes that Frankfurt-type examples (which he adduces to make plausible that moral responsibility does not depend on freedom to do otherwise) are contentious and that he offers only a sketch of his theory of moral responsibility without a thorough defense. This may be one of the reasons why Fischer’s distinction between regulative and guidance control does not take away the doubt whether guidance control — in the absence of the possibility to do otherwise — is sufficient to make the agent morally responsible for his actions. The doubt especially applies to his suggestion that guidance control may be sufficient for moral responsibility even if causal determinism is true (causal determinism obtains if the initial state of the world together with the laws of nature entails every truth about what happens in the future).

Suppose Peter murders John, while he has guidance control (he ‘acts from his own suitably reasons-responsive mechanism’) but not regulative control. Not having regulative control means that Peter is not free to do otherwise and, thus, that it is impossible that Peter does not murder John. It is true that Peter acts from his own reasons-responsive mechanism and that he deliberately murders John. However, if causal determinism is true, then not only Peter’s actions but also his guidance control (and ‘every truth’ related to it, for instance, whether and how and with what results he exercises this control) are entirely determined by factors outside of him. The conditions sufficient for the necessary outcome of his deliberation and choice were already in place long before he even existed. As Fischer recognizes, the fixity of the past means that “the past is like the dog’s tail, and it is the tail that wags the dog”, not the other way round. Therefore, guidance control seems insufficient for rescuing moral responsibility, if the latter requires at least a minimum of self-determination. It seems inappropriate to blame somebody and hold him morally responsible for something entirely caused by external factors, which he, despite his guidance control, could not possibly influence, change or remove.

It is true that the unavoidability with respect to causal determinism differs from the unavoidability with respect to divine foreknowledge, insofar as God’s foreknowledge is not conceptualized as bringing about human action. However, as Fischer points out, it is questionable whether this difference makes a difference . Besides, Fischer admits that his ‘bootstrapping’ argument (which detaches God’s foreknowledge from causal determinism) is controversial. If we take into account these uncertainties, the conclusion seems justified that, if we are not free to do otherwise, it is implausible that divine foreknowledge and causal determinism are compatible with human moral responsibility.

Kane refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost , in which the angels, debating their freedom in the light of God’s foreknowledge, were lost in “endless mazes”. As he notices, this is “not a comforting thought for us mortals.” Fischer does not pose the question whether human beings are sufficiently capable of understanding the relationship between an omniscient God and human freedom, but he recognizes that every major view about God’s knowledge of the future “has at least a mystery associated with it, if not a significant problem.” This may mean that the problems under consideration are irresolvable, even in principle, due to a fundamental incompleteness of human knowledge with respect to the relation between God and man.

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Sample essay on free will and moral responsibility.

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Free will is a fundamental aspect of modern philosophy. This sample philosophy paper explores how moral responsibility and free will represent an important area of moral debate between philosophers. This type of writing would of course be seen in a philosophy course, but many people might also be inclined to write an essay about their opinions on free will for personal reasons.

History of free will and moral responsibility

In our history, free will and moral responsibility have been longstanding debates amongst philosophers. Some contend that free will does not exist while others believe we have control over our actions and decisions. For the most part, determinists believe that free will does not exist because our fate is predetermined. An example of this philosophy is found in the Book of Genisis .

The biblical story states God created man for a purpose and designed them to worship him. Since God designed humans to operate in a certain fashion and he knew the outcome, it could be argued from a determinist point of view that free will didn't exist. Because our actions are determined, it seems that we are unable to bear any responsibility for our acts.

Galen Strawson has suggested that “in order to be truly deserving, we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving.”

However, Strawson also has implied that we are unable to be responsible. We are unable to be responsible because, as determinists suggest, all our decisions are premade; therefore, we do not act of our own free will. Consequently, because our actions are not the cause of our free will, we cannot be truly deserving because we lack responsibility for what we do.

Defining free will

Free will implies we are able to choose the majority of our actions ("Free will," 2013). While we would expect to choose the right course of action, we often make bad decisions. This reflects the thinking that we do not have free will because if we were genuinely and consistently capable of benevolence, we would freely decide to make the ‘right’ decisions.

In order for free will to be tangible, an individual would have to have control over his or her actions regardless of any external factors. Analyzing the human brain's development over a lifetime proves people have the potential for cognitive reasoning and to make their own decisions.

Casado has argued “the inevitability of free will is such that if one considers freedom an illusion, the internal perspective – and one’s own everyday life – would be totally contradictory” ( 2011, p. 369).

On the other hand, while we can determine whether or not we will wake up the next day, it is not an aspect of our free will because we cannot control this. Incidentally, determinism suggests everything happens exactly the way it should have happened because it is a universal law ("Determinism," 2013). In this way, our free will is merely an illusion.

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The determinism viewpoint

For example, if we decided the previous night that we would wake up at noon, we are unable to control this even with an alarm clock. One, we may die in our sleep. Obviously, as most would agree, we did not choose this. Perhaps we were murdered in our sleep. In that case, was it our destiny to become a victim of violent crimes, or was it our destiny to be murdered as we slept? Others would mention that the murderer was the sole cause of the violence and it their free will to decide to kill.

Therefore, the same people might argue that the murderer deserved a specific punishment. The key question, then, is the free will of the murderer. If we were preordained to die in the middle of the night at the hand of the murderer, then the choice of death never actually existed. Hence, the very question of choice based on free will is an illusion.

Considering that our wills are absolutely subject to the environment in which they are articulated in, we are not obligated to take responsibility for them as the product of their environment. For example, if we were born in the United States, our actions are the result of our country’s laws. Our constitutional laws allow us the right to bear arms and have access to legal representation. In addition, our constitutional laws allow us the freedom to express our thoughts through spoken and written mediums and the freedom to believe in a higher power or not. We often believe we are free to act and do what we want because of our free will.

Harris (2012) has agreed that “free will is more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot even be rendered coherent” conceptually.

Moral judgments, decisions, and responsibility for free will

Either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are a product of chance, and we are not responsible for them” (p. 46). This being the case, can we be deserving if we can so easily deflect the root of our will and actions? Perhaps, our hypothetical murder shot us. It could be argued that gun laws in the United States provided them with the mean to commit murder.

Either the murderer got a hold of a gun by chance or he or she was able to purchase one. While the purchase is not likely, one would have to assume that someone, maybe earlier, purchased the weapon. Therefore, it was actually the buyer’s action that allowed this particular crime to take place. Essentially, both would ‘deserve’ some sort of punishment.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary (2001), the word “deserving” means "Worthy, as of reward or praise” (p. 236), so it regards to punishments, it seems deserving has a positive meaning.

Free will and changing societal views

However, the meanings will change depending on our position. For example, some would suggest that the murderer acted with his or her own free will. However, once they are caught and convicted, they are no longer free in the sense that they can go wherever they want. On the other hand, they are free to think however they want.

If they choose to reenact their crimes in their thoughts, they are free to do so. Some many say, in the case of the murderer, he or she is held responsible for his or her crime, thus he or she deserves blame. However, if the murderer had a mental illness and was unaware he or she committed a crime, should we still consider that the murderer acted with his or her free will? With that in mind, it seems that Strawson’s argument is valid because the murderer was not acting of his or her free will.

Many would consider Strawson to be a “free will pessimist” (Timpe c. Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Pessimism, 2006, para. 5). Strawson does not believe we have the ability to act on our own free will. However, he does not believe our actions are predetermined either.

Specifically, in his article “Luck Swallows Everything,” Strawson (1998) has claimed that “One cannot be ultimately responsible for one's character or mental nature in any way at all” (para. 33).

Determining when free will is not applicable

While some would agree young children and disabled adults would not hold any responsibility, others would claim that criminals should bear responsibility when they commit a crime. What if the actions are caused by both nature and nurturing of the parents ? Or, what if they're caused by prior events including a chain of events that goes back before we are born, libertarians do not see how we can feel responsible for them. If our actions are directly caused by chance, they are simply random and determinists do not see how we can feel responsible for them (The Information Philosopher Responsibility n.d.).

After all, one would not argue that murderers are worthy of a positive reward; however, Strawson has argued that we, whether good or evil, do not deserve any types of rewards. Instead, our actions and their consequences are based on luck or bad luck. In order to have ultimate moral responsibility for an action, the act must originate from something that is separate from us.

We consider free will the ability to act or do as we want; however, there is a difference between freedom of action and freedom of will. Freedom of action suggests we are able to physically act upon our desire. In a way, some believe that freedom of will is the choice that precedes that action. In addition to freedom of act or will, free will also suggests we have a sense of moral responsibility. This moral responsibility, however, is not entirely specified. For example, is this responsibility to ourselves or those around us? While this is a question that may never be answered, no matter how many essays are written on the subject, it is one that many consider important to ask, nonetheless.

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Home / Essay Samples / Life / Fate / Fate vs. Free Will in Macbeth: A Tragic Dilemma

Fate vs. Free Will in Macbeth: A Tragic Dilemma

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• Topic: Fate , Free Will , Macbeth

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Macbeth: fate vs free will (essay)

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