argumentative essay on free will

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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Why the Classical Argument Against Free Will Is a Failure

In the last several years, a number of prominent scientists have claimed that we have good scientific reason to believe that there’s no such thing as free will — that free will is an illusion. If this were true, it would be less than splendid. And it would be surprising, too, because it really seems like we have free will. It seems that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make.

We need to look very closely at the arguments that these scientists are putting forward to determine whether they really give us good reason to abandon our belief in free will. But before we do that, it would behoove us to have a look at a much older argument against free will — an argument that’s been around for centuries.

The older argument against free will is based on the assumption that determinism is true. Determinism is the view that every physical event is completely caused by prior events together with the laws of nature. Or, to put the point differently, it’s the view that every event has a cause that makes it happen in the one and only way that it could have happened.

If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled. Every event that’s ever occurred was already predetermined before it occurred. And this includes human decisions. If determinism is true, then everything you’ve ever done — every choice you’ve ever made — was already predetermined before our solar system even existed. And if this is true, then it has obvious implications for free will.

Suppose that you’re in an ice cream parlor, waiting in line, trying to decide whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream. And suppose that when you get to the front of the line, you decide to order chocolate. Was this choice a product of your free will? Well, if determinism is true, then your choice was completely caused by prior events. The immediate causes of the decision were neural events that occurred in your brain just prior to your choice. But, of course, if determinism is true, then those neural events that caused your decision had physical causes as well; they were caused by even earlier events — events that occurred just before they did. And so on, stretching back into the past. We can follow this back to when you were a baby, to the very first events of your life. In fact, we can keep going back before that, because if determinism is true, then those first events were also caused by prior events. We can keep going back to events that occurred before you were even conceived, to events involving your mother and father and a bottle of Chianti.

If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled.

So if determinism is true, then it was already settled before you were born that you were going to order chocolate ice cream when you got to the front of the line. And, of course, the same can be said about all of our decisions, and it seems to follow from this that human beings do not have free will.

Let’s call this the classical argument against free will . It proceeds by assuming that determinism is true and arguing from there that we don’t have free will.

There’s a big problem with the classical argument against free will. It just assumes that determinism is true. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. But it’s actually not a commonsense truism. One of the main lessons of 20th-century physics is that we can’t know by common sense, or by intuition, that determinism is true. Determinism is a controversial hypothesis about the workings of the physical world. We could only know that it’s true by doing some high-level physics. Moreover — and this is another lesson of 20th-century physics — as of right now, we don’t have any good evidence for determinism. In other words, our best physical theories don’t answer the question of whether determinism is true.

During the reign of classical physics (or Newtonian physics), it was widely believed that determinism was true. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists started to discover some problems with Newton’s theory, and it was eventually replaced with a new theory — quantum mechanics . (Actually, it was replaced by two new theories, namely, quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But relativity theory isn’t relevant to the topic of free will.) Quantum mechanics has several strange and interesting features, but the one that’s relevant to free will is that this new theory contains laws that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. We can understand what this means very easily. Roughly speaking, deterministic laws of nature look like this:

If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then you will get outcome O.

But quantum physics contains probabilistic laws that look like this:

If you have a physical system in state S, and if you perform experiment E on that system, then there are two different possible outcomes, namely, O1 and O2; moreover, there’s a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O1 and a 50 percent chance that you’ll get outcome O2.

It’s important to notice what follows from this. Suppose that we take a physical system, put it into state S, and perform experiment E on it. Now suppose that when we perform this experiment, we get outcome O1. Finally, suppose we ask the following question: “Why did we get outcome O1 instead of O2?” The important point to notice is that quantum mechanics doesn’t answer this question . It doesn’t give us any explanation at all for why we got outcome O1 instead of O2. In other words, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it could be that nothing caused us to get result O1 ; it could be that this just happened .

Now, Einstein famously thought that this couldn’t be the whole story. You’ve probably heard that he once said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” What he meant when he said this was that the fundamental laws of nature can’t be probabilistic. The fundamental laws, Einstein thought, have to tell us what will happen next, not what will probably happen, or what might happen. So Einstein thought that there had to be a hidden layer of reality , below the quantum level, and that if we could find this hidden layer, we could get rid of the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics and replace them with deterministic laws, laws that tell us what will happen next, not just what will probably happen next. And, of course, if we could do this — if we could find this hidden layer of reality and these deterministic laws of nature — then we would be able to explain why we got outcome O1 instead of O2.

But a lot of other physicists — most notably, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr — disagreed with Einstein. They thought that the quantum layer of reality was the bottom layer. And they thought that the fundamental laws of nature — or at any rate, some of these laws — were probabilistic laws. But if this is right, then it means that at least some physical events aren’t deterministically caused by prior events. It means that some physical events just happen . For instance, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then nothing caused us to get outcome O1 instead of O2; there was no reason why this happened; it just did .

The debate between determinists like Einstein and indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr has never been settled.

The debate between Einstein on the one hand and Heisenberg and Bohr on the other is crucially important to our discussion. Einstein is a determinist. If he’s right, then every physical event is predetermined — or in other words, completely caused by prior events. But if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then determinism is false . On their view, not every event is predetermined by the past and the laws of nature; some things just happen , for no reason at all. In other words, if Heisenberg and Bohr are right, then indeterminism is true.

And here’s the really important point for us. The debate between determinists like Einstein and indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr has never been settled. We don’t have any good evidence for either view. Quantum mechanics is still our best theory of the subatomic world, but we just don’t know whether there’s another layer of reality, beneath the quantum layer. And so we don’t know whether all physical events are completely caused by prior events. In other words, we don’t know whether determinism or indeterminism is true. Future physicists might be able to settle this question, but as of right now, we don’t know the answer.

But now notice that if we don’t know whether determinism is true or false, then this completely undermines the classical argument against free will. That argument just assumed that determinism is true. But we now know that there is no good reason to believe this. The question of whether determinism is true is an open question for physicists. So the classical argument against free will is a failure — it doesn’t give us any good reason to conclude that we don’t have free will.

Despite the failure of the classical argument, the enemies of free will are undeterred. They still think there’s a powerful argument to be made against free will. In fact, they think there are two such arguments. Both of these arguments can be thought of as attempts to fix the classical argument, but they do this in completely different ways.

The first new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a scientific argument — starts with the observation that it doesn’t matter whether the full-blown hypothesis of determinism is true because it doesn’t matter whether all events are predetermined by prior events. All that matters is whether our decisions are predetermined by prior events. And the central claim of the first new-and-improved argument against free will is that we have good evidence (from studies performed by psychologists and neuroscientists) for thinking that, in fact, our decisions are predetermined by prior events.

The second new-and-improved argument against free will — which is a philosophical argument, not a scientific argument — relies on the claim that it doesn’t matter whether determinism is true because in determinism is just as incompatible with free will as determinism is. The argument for this is based on the claim that if our decisions aren’t determined, then they aren’t caused by anything, which means that they occur randomly . And the central claim of the second new-and-improved argument against free will is that if our decisions occur randomly, then they just happen to us , and so they’re not the products of our free will.

My own view is that neither of these new-and-improved arguments succeeds in showing that we don’t have free will. But it takes a lot of work to undermine these two arguments. In order to undermine the scientific argument, we need to explain why the relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies don’t in fact show that we don’t have free will. And in order to undermine the philosophical argument, we need to explain how a decision could be the product of someone’s free will — how the outcome of the decision could be under the given person’s control — even if the decision wasn’t caused by anything.

So, yes, this would all take a lot of work. Maybe I should write a book about it.

Mark Balaguer is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, including “ Free Will ,” from which this article is adapted.

Chapter 5: The problem of free will and determinism

The problem of free will and determinism

Matthew Van Cleave

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”

-Leo Tolstoy

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

-Arthur Shopenhauer

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The term “freedom” is used in many contexts, from legal, to moral, to psychological, to social, to political, to theological. The founders of the United States often extolled the virtues of “liberty” and “freedom,” as well as cautioned us about how difficult they were to maintain. But what do these terms mean, exactly? What does it mean to claim that humans are (or are not) free? Almost anyone living in a liberal democracy today would affirm that freedom is a good thing, but they almost certainly do not all agree on what freedom is. With a concept as slippery as that of free will, it is not surprising that there is often disagreement. Thus, it will be important to be very clear on what precisely we are talking about when we are either affirming or denying that humans have free will. There is an important general point here that extends beyond the issue of free will: when debating whether or not x exists, we must first be clear on defining x, otherwise we will end up simply talking past each other . The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of whether or not free will exists in light of determinism. Thus, it is crucial to be clear in defining what we mean by “free will” and “determinism.” As we will see, these turn out to be difficult and contested philosophical questions. In this chapter we will consider these different positions and some of the arguments for, as well as objections to, them.

Let’s begin with an example. Consider the 1998 movie, The Truman Show . In that movie the main character, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), is the star of a reality television show. However, he doesn’t know that he is. He believes he is just an ordinary person living in an ordinary neighborhood, but in fact this neighborhood is an elaborate set of a television show in which all of his friends and acquaintances are just actors. His every moment is being filmed and broadcast to a whole world of fans that he doesn’t know exists and almost every detail of his life has been carefully orchestrated and controlled by the producers of the show. For example, Truman’s little town is surrounded by a lake, but since he has been conditioned to believe (falsely) that he had a traumatic boating accident in which his father died, he never has the desire to leave the small little town and venture out into the larger world (at least at first). So consider the life of Truman as described above. Is he free or not? On the one hand, he gets to do pretty much everything he wants to do and he is pretty happy. Truman doesn’t look like he’s being coerced in any explicit way and if you asked him if he was, he would almost certain reply that he wasn’t being coerced and that he was in charge of his life. That is, he would say that he was free (at least to the same extent that the rest of us would). These points all seem to suggest that he is free. For example, when Truman decides that he would rather not take a boat ride out to explore the wider world (which initially is his decision), he is doing what he wants to do. His action isn’t coerced and does not feel coerced to him. In contrast, if someone holds a gun to my head and tells me “your wallet or your life!” then my action of giving him my wallet is definitely coerced and feels so.

On the other hand, it seems clear the Truman’s life is being manipulated and controlled in a way that undermines his agency and thus his freedom. It seems clear that Truman is not the master of his fate in the way that he thinks he is. As Goethe says in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, there’s a sense in which people like Truman are those who are most helplessly enslaved, since Truman is subject to a massive illusion that he has no reason to suspect. In contrast, someone who knows she is a slave (such as slaves in the antebellum South in the United States) at least retains the autonomy of knowing that she is being controlled. Truman seems to be in the situation of being enslaved and not knowing it and it seems harder for such a person to escape that reality because they do not have any desire to (since they don’t know they are being manipulated and controlled).

As the Truman Show example illustrates, it seems there can be reasonable disagreement about whether or not Truman is free. On the one hand, there’s a sense in which he is free because he does what he wants and doesn’t feel manipulated. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which he isn’t free because what he wants to do is being manipulated by forces outside of his control (namely, the producers of the show). An even better example of this kind of thing comes from Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopia, Brave New World . In the society that Huxley envisions, everyone does what they want and no one is ever unhappy. So far this sounds utopic rather than dystopic. What makes it dystopic is the fact that this state of affairs is achieved by genetic and behavioral conditioning in a way that seems to remove any choice. The citizens of the Brave New World do what they want, yes, but they seems to have absolutely no control over what they want in the first place. Rather, their desires are essentially implanted in them by a process of conditioning long before they are old enough to understand what is going on. The citizens of Brave New World do what they want, but they have no control over what the want in the first place. In that sense, they are like robots: they only have the desires that are chosen for them by the architects of the society.

So are people free as long as they are doing what they want to—that is, choosing the act according to their strongest desires? If so, then notice that the citizens of Brave New World would count as free, as would Truman from The Truman Show , since these are both cases of individuals who are acting on their strongest desires. The problem is that those desires are not desires those individuals have chosen. It feels like the individuals in those scenarios are being manipulated in a way that we believe we aren’t. Perhaps true freedom requires more than just that one does what one most wants to do. Perhaps true freedom requires a genuine choice. But what is a genuine choice beyond doing what one most wants to do?

Philosophers are generally of two main camps concerning the question of what free will is. Compatibilists believe that free will requires only that we are doing what we want to do in a way that isn’t coerced—in short, free actions are voluntary actions. Incompatibilists , motivated by examples like the above where our desires are themselves manipulated, believe that free will requires a genuine choice and they claim that a choice is genuine if and only if, were we given the choice to make again, we could have chosen otherwise . I can perhaps best crystalize the difference between these two positions by moving to a theological example. Suppose that there is a god who created the universe, including humans, and who controls everything that goes on in the universe, including what humans do. But suppose that god does this not my directly coercing us to do things that we don’t want to do but, rather, by implanting the desire in us to do what god wants us to do. Thus human beings, by doing what the want to do, would actually be doing what god wanted them to do. According to the compatibilist, humans in this scenario would be free since they would be doing what they want to do. According to the incompatibilist, however, humans in this scenario would not be free because given the desire that god had implanted in them, they would always end up doing the same thing if given the decision to make (assuming that desires deterministically cause behaviors). If you don’t like the theological example, consider a sci-fi example which has the same exact structure. Suppose there is an eccentric neuroscientist who has figured out how to wire your brain with a mechanism by which he can implant desire into you.

Suppose that the neuroscientist implants in you the desire to start collecting stamps and you do so. However, you know none of this (the surgery to implant the device was done while you were sleeping and you are none the wiser).

From your perspective, one day you find yourself with the desire to start collecting stamps. It feels to you as though this was something you chose and were not coerced to do. However, the reality is that given this desire that the neuroscientist implanted in you, you could not have chosen not to have started collecting stamps (that is, you were necessitated to start collecting stamps, given the desire). Again, in this scenario the compatibilist would say that your choice to start collecting stamps was free (since it was something you wanted to do and did not feel coerced to you), but the incompatibilist would say that your choice was not free since given the implantation of the desire, you could not have chosen otherwise.

We have not quite yet gotten to the nub of the philosophical problem of free will and determinism because we have not yet talked about determinism and the problem it is supposed to present for free will. What is determinism?

Determinism is the doctrine that every cause is itself the effect of a prior cause. More precisely, if an event (E) is determined, then there are prior conditions (C) which are sufficient for the occurrence of E. That means that if C occurs, then E has to occur. Determinism is simply the claim that every event in the universe is determined. Determinism is assumed in the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology (with the exception of quantum physics for reasons I won’t explain here). Science always assumes that any particular event has some law-like explanation—that is, underlying any particular cause is some set of law- like regularities. We might not know what the laws are, but the whole assumption of the natural sciences is that there are such laws, even if we don’t currently know what they are. It is this assumption that leads scientists to search for causes and patterns in the world, as opposed to just saying that everything is random. Where determinism starts to become contentious is when we move into the human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and economics. To illustrate why this is contentious, consider the famous example of Laplace’s demon that comes from Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Laplace’s point is that if determinism were true, then everything that every happened in the universe, including every human action ever undertaken, had to have happened. Of course humans, being limited in knowledge, could never predict everything that would happen from here out, but some being that was unlimited in intelligence could do exactly that. Pause for a moment to consider what this means. If determinism is true, then Laplace’s demon would have been able to predict from the point of the big bang, that you would be reading these words on this page at this exact point of time. Or that you had what you had for breakfast this morning. Or any other fact in the universe. This seems hard to believe, since it seems like some things that happen in the universe didn’t have to happen. Certain human actions seem to be the paradigm case of such events. If I ate an omelet for breakfast this morning, that may be a fact but it seems strange to think that this fact was necessitated as soon as the big bang occurred. Human actions seem to have a kind of independence from web of deterministic web of causes and effects in a way that, say, billiard balls don’t.

Given that the cue ball his the 8 ball with a specific velocity, at a certain angle, and taking into effect the coefficient of friction of the felt on the pool table, the exact location of the 8 ball is, so to speak, already determined before it ends up there. But human behavior doesn’t seem to be like the behavior of the 8 ball in this way, which is why some people think that the human sciences are importantly different than the natural sciences. Whether or not the human sciences are also deterministic is an issue that helps distinguish the different philosophical positions one can take on free will, as we will see presently. But the important point to see right now is that determinism is a doctrine that applies to all causes, including human actions. Thus, if some particular brain state is what ultimately caused my action and that brain state itself was caused by a prior brain state, and so on, then my action had to occur given those earlier prior events. And that entails that I couldn’t have chosen to act otherwise, given that those earlier events took place . That means that the incompatibilist position on free will cannot be correct if determinism is true. Recall that incompatibilism requires that a choice is free only if one could have chosen differently, given all the same initial conditions. But if determinism is true, then human actions are no different than the 8 ball: given what has come before, the current event had to happen. Thus, if this morning I cooked an omelet, then my “choice” to make that omelet could not have been otherwise. Given the complex web of prior influences on my behavior, my making that omelet was determined. It had to occur.

Of course, it feels to us, when contemplating our own futures, that there are many different possible ways our lives might go—many possible choices to be made. But if determinism is true, then this is an illusion. In reality, there is only one way that things could go, it’s just that we can’t see what that is because of our limited knowledge. Consider the figure below. Each junction in the figure below represents a decision I make and let’s suppose that some (much larger) decision tree like this could represent all of the possible ways my life could go. At any point in time, when contemplating what to do, it seems that I can conceive of my life going many different possible ways. Suppose that A represents one series of choices and B another. Suppose, further, that A represents what I actually do (looking backwards over my life from the future). Although from this point in time it seems that I could also have made the series of choices represented in B, if determinism is true then this is false. That is, if A is what ends up happening, then A is the only thing that ever could have happened . If it hasn’t yet hit you how determinism conflicts with our sense of our own possibilities in life, think about that for a second.

As the foregoing I hope makes clear, the incompatibilist definition of free will is incompatibile with determinism (that’s why it’s called “incompatibilist”). But that leaves open the question of which one is true. To say that free will and determinism are logically incompatible is just to say that they cannot both be true, meaning that one or the other must be false. But which one? Some will claim that it is determinism which is false. This position is called libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism, which is a totally different idea). Others claim that determinism is true and that, therefore, there is no free will. This position is called hard determinism. A third type of position, compatibilism , rejects the incompatibilist definition of freedom and claims that free will and determinism are compatible (hence the name). The table below compares these different positions. But which one is correct? In the remainder of the chapter we will consider some arguments for and against these three positions on free will and determinism.

Libertarianism

Both libertarianism and hard determinism accept the following proposition: If determinism is true, then there is no free will. What distinguishes libertarianism from hard determinism is the libertarian’s claim that there is free will. But why should we think this? This question is especially pressing when we recognize that we assume a deterministic view in many other domains in life. When you have a toothache, we know that something must have caused that toothache and whatever cause that was, something else must have caused that cause. It would be a strange dentist who told you that your toothache didn’t have a cause but just randomly occurred. When the weather doesn’t go as the meteorologist predicts, we assume there must be a cause for why the weather did what it did. We might not ever know the cause in all its specific details, but assume there must be one. In cases like meteorology, when our scientific predictions are wrong, we don’t always go back and try to figure out what the actual causes were—why our predictions were wrong. But in other cases we do. Consider the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Years later it was finally determined what led to that explosion (“O-ring” seals that were not designed for the colder condition of the launch). There’s a detailed deterministic physical explanation that one could give of how the failure of those O-rings led to the explosion of the Challenger. In all of these cases, determinism is the fundamental assumption and it seems almost nothing could overturn it.

But the libertarian thinks that the domain of human action is different than every other domain. Humans are somehow able to rise above all of the influences on them and make decisions that are not themselves determined by anything that precedes them. The philosopher Roderick Chisholm accurately captured the libertarian position when he claimed that “we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964). But why should we think that we have such a godlike ability? We will consider two arguments the libertarian makes in support of her position: the argument from intuitions and the argument from moral responsibility.

The argument from intuitions is based on the very strong intuition that there are some things that we have control over and that nothing causes us to do those things except for our own willing them. The strongest case for this concerns very simple actions, such as moving one’s finger. Suppose that I hold up my index finger and say that I am going to move it to the right or the to the left, but that I have not yet decided which way to move it. At the moment before I move my finger one way or the other, it truly seems to me that my future is open.

Nothing in my past and nothing in my present seems to be determining me to move my finger to the right or to the left. Rather, it seems to me that I have total control over what happens next. Whichever way I move my finger, it seems that I could have moved it the other way. So if, as a matter of fact, I move my finger to the right, it seems unquestionably true that I could have moved it to the left (and vice versa, mutatis mutandis ). Thus, in cases of simple actions like moving my finger to the right or left, it seems that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is met: we have a very strong intuition that no matter what I actually did, I could have chosen otherwise, were I to be given that exact choice again . The libertarian does not claim that all human actions are like this. Indeed, many of our actions (perhaps even ones that we think are free) are determined by prior causes. The libertarian’s claim is just that at least some of our actions do meet the incompatibilist’s definition of free and, thus, that determinism is not universally true.

The argument from moral responsibility is a good example of what philosophers call a transcendental argument . Transcendental arguments attempt to establish the truth of something by showing that that thing is necessary in order for something else, which we strongly believe to be true, to be true. So consider the idea that normally developed adult human beings are morally responsible for their actions. For example, if Bob embezzles money from his charity in order to help pay for a new sports car, we would rightly hold Bob accountable for this action. That is, we would punish Bob and would see punishment as appropriate. But a necessary condition of holding Bob responsible is that Bob’s action was one that he chose, one that he was in control of, one that he could have chosen not to do. Philosophers call this principle ought implies can : if we say that someone ought (or ought not) do something, this implies that they can do it (that is, they are capable of doing it). The ought implies can principle is consistent with our legal practices. For example, in cases where we believe that a person was not capable of doing the right thing, we no longer hold them morally or criminally liable. A good example of this within our legal system is the insanity defense: if someone was determined to be incapable of appreciating the difference between right and wrong, we do not find them guilty of a crime. But notice what determinism would do to the ought implies can principle. If everything we ever do had to happen (think Laplace’s demon), that means that Bob had to embezzle those funds and buy that sports car. The universe demanded it. That means he couldn’t not have done those things. But if that is so, then, by the ought implies can principle, we cannot say that he ought not to have done those things. That is, we cannot hold Bob morally responsible for those things. But this seems absurd, the libertarian will say.

Surely Bob was responsible for those things and we are right to hold him responsible. But the only we way can reasonably do this is if we assume that his actions were chosen—that he could have chosen to do otherwise than he in fact chose. Thus, determinism is incompatible with the idea that human beings are morally responsible agents. The practice of holding each other to be morally responsible agents doesn’t make sense unless humans have incompatibilist free will—unless they could have chosen to do otherwise than they in fact did. That is the libertarian’s transcendental argument from moral responsibility.

Hard determinism

Hard determinism denies that there is free will. The hard determinist is a “tough-minded” individual who bravely accepts the implication of a scientific view of the world. Since we don’t in general accept that there are causes that are not themselves the result of prior causes, we should apply this to human actions too. And this means that humans, contrary to what they might believe (or wish to believe) about themselves, do not have free will. As noted above, hard determininsm follows from accepting the incompatibilist definition of free will as well as the claim that determinism is universally true. One of the strongest arguments in favor of hard determinism is based on the weakness of the libertarian position. In particular, the hard determinist argues that accepting the existence of free will leaves us with an inexplicable mystery: how can a physical system initiate causes that are not themselves caused?

If the libertarian is right, then when an action is free it is such that given exactly the same events leading up to one’s action, one still could have acted otherwise than they did. But this seems to require that the action/choice was not determined by any prior event or set of events. Consider my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast this morning. The libertarian will say that my decision to make the cheese omelet was not free unless I could have chosen to do otherwise (given all the same initial conditions). But that means that nothing was determining my decision. But what kind of thing is a decision such that it causes my actions but is not itself caused by anything? We do not know of any other kind of thing like this in the universe. Rather, we think that any event or thing must have been caused by some (typically complex) set of conditions or events. Things don’t just pop into existence without being caused . That is as fundamental a principle as any we can think of. Philosophers have for centuries upheld the principle that “nothing comes from nothing.” They even have a fancy Latin phrase for it: ex nihilo nihil fir [1] . The problem is that my decision to make a cheese omelet seems to be just that: something that causes but is not itself caused. Indeed, as noted earlier, the libertarian Roderick Chisholm embraces this consequence of the libertarian position very clearly when he claimed that when we exercise our free will,

“we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964).

How could something like this exist? At this point the libertarian might respond something like this:

I am not claiming that something comes from nothing; I am just claiming that our decisions are not themselves determined by any prior thing. Rather, we ourselves, as agents, cause our decisions and nothing else causes us to cause those decisions (at least in cases where we have acted freely).

However, it seems that the libertarian in this case has simply pushed the mystery back one step: we cause our decisions, granted, but what causes us to make those decisions? The libertarian’s answer here is that nothing causes us. But now we have the same problem again: the agent is responsible for causing the decision but nothing causes the agent to make that decision. Thus we seem to have something coming from nothing. Let’s call this argument the argument from mysterious causes. Here’s the argument in standard form:

• The existence of free will implies that when an agent freely decides to do something, the agent’s choice is not caused (determined) by anything.
• To say that something has no cause is to violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• But nothing can violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• Therefore, there is no free will (from 1-3)

The hard determinist will make a strong case for premise 3 in the above argument by invoking basic scientific principles such as the law of conservation of energy, which says that the amount of energy within a closed system stays that same. That is, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Consider a billiard ball. If it is to move then it must get the required energy to do so from someplace else (typically another billiard ball knocking into it, the cue stick hitting it or someone tilting the pool table). To allow that something could occur without any cause—in this case, the agent’s decision—would be a violation of the conservation of energy principle, which is as basic a scientific principle as we know. When forced to choose between uphold such a basic scientific principle as this and believing in free will, the hard determinist opts for the former. The hard determinist will put the ball in the libertarian’s court to explain how something could come from nothing.

I will close this section by indicating how these problems in philosophy often ramify into other areas of philosophy. In the first place, there is a fairly common way that libertarians respond to the charge that their view violates basic principles such as ex nihilo nihil fit and, more specifically, the physical law of conservation of energy. Libertarians could claim that the mind is not physical—a position known in the philosophy of mind as “substance dualism” (see philosophy of mind chapter in this textbook for more on substance dualism). If the mind isn’t physical, then neither are our mental events, such our decisions.

Rather, all of these things are nonphysical entities. If decisions are nonphysical entities, there is at least no violation of the physical laws such as the law of conservation of energy. [2] Of course, if the libertarian were to take this route of defending her position, she would then need to defend this further assumption (no small task). In any case, my main point here is to see the way that responses to the problem of free well and determinism may connect with other issue within philosophy. In this case, the libertarian’s defense of free will may turn out to depend on the defensibility of other assumptions they make about the nature of the mind. But the libertarian is not the only one who will need to ultimately connect her account of free will up with other issues in philosophy. Since hard determinists deny that free will exists, it seems that they will owe us some account of moral responsibility. If, moral responsibility requires that humans have free will (see previous section), then in denying free will we seem to also be denying that humans have moral responsibility. Thus, hard determinists will face the objection that in rejecting free will they also destroy moral responsibility.

But since it seems we must hold individuals morally to account for certain actions (such as the embezzler from the previous section), the hard determinist

needs some account of how it makes sense to do this given that human being don’t have free will. My point here is not to broach the issue of how the hard determinist might answer this, but simply to show how hard determinist’s position on the problem of free will and determinism must ultimately connect with other issues in philosophy, such issues in metaethics [3] . This is a common thing that happens in philosophy. We may try to consider an issue or problem in isolation, but sooner or later that problem will connect up with other issues in philosophy.

Compatibilism

The best argument for compatibilism builds on a consideration of the difficulties with the incompatibilist definition of free will (which both the libertarian and the hard determinist accept). As defined above, compatibilists agree with the hard determinists that determinism is true, but reject the incompatibilist definition of free will that hard determinists accept. This allows compatbilists to claim that free will is compatible with determinism. Both libertarians and hard compatibilists tend to feel that this is somehow cheating, but the compatibilist attempts to convince us arguing that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is problematic and that only the weaker compatibilist definition of freedom—free actions are voluntary actions—will work. We will consider two objections that the compatibilist raises for the incompatibilist definition of freedom: the epistemic objection and the arbitrariness objection . Then we will consider the compatibilist’s own definition of free will and show how that definition fits better with some of our common sense intuitions about the nature of free actions.

The epistemic objection is that there is no way for us to ever know whether any one of our actions was free or not. Recall that the incompatibilist definition of freedom says that a decision is free if and only if I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose, given exactly all the same conditions. This means that if we were, so to speak, rewind the tape of time and be given that decision to make over again, we could have chosen differently. So suppose the question is whether my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast was free. To answer this question, we would have to know when I could have chosen differently. But how am I supposed to know that ? It seems that I would have to answer a question about a strange counterfactual : if given that decision to make over again, would I choose the same way every time or not? How on earth am I supposed to know how to answer that question? I could say that it seems to me that I could make a different decision regarding making the cheese omelet (for example, I could have decided to eat cereal instead), but why should I think that that is the right answer? After all, how things seem regularly turn out to be not the case—especially in science. The problem is that I don’t seem to have any good way of answering this counterfactual question of what I would choose if given the same decision to make over again. Thus the epistemic objection [4] is that since I have no way of knowing whether I would/wouldn’t make the same decision again, I can never know whether any of my actions are free.

The arbitrariness objection is that it turns our free actions into arbitrary actions. And arbitrary actions are not free actions. To see why, consider that if the incompatibilist definition is true, then nothing determines our free choices, not even our own desires . For if our desires were determining our choices then if we were to rewind the tape of time and, so to speak, reset everything— including our desires —the same way, then given those same desires we would choose the same way every time. And that would mean our choice was not free, according to the incompatbilist. It is imperative to remember that incompatibilism says that if an action is not free if it is determined ( including if it is determined by our own desires ). But now the question is: if my desires are not causing my decision, what is? When I make a decision, where does that decision come from, if not from my desires and beliefs? Presumably it cannot come from nothing ( ex nihilo nihil fit ). The problem is that if the incompatibilist rejects that anything is causing my decisions, then how can my decisions be anything but arbitrary?

Presumably an arbitrary decision—a decision not driven by any reason at all—is not an exercise of my freedom. Freedom seems to require that we are exercising some kind of control over my actions and decisions. If my action or decision is arbitrary that means that no reason or explanation of the action/decision can be given. Here’s the arbitrariness objection cast as a reductio ad absurdum argument:

• A free choice is one that isn’t determined by anything, including our desires. [incompatibilist definition of freedom]
• If our own desires are not determining our choices, then those choices are arbitrary.
• If a choice is arbitrary then it is not something over which we have control
• If a choice isn’t something over which we have control, then it isn’t a free choice
• Therefore, a free choice is not a free choice (from 1-4)

A reductio ad absurdum argument is one that starts with a certain assumption and then derives a contradiction from that assumption, thereby showing that assumption must be false. In this case, the incompatibilist’s definition of a free choice leads to the contradiction that something that is a free choice isn’t a free choice.

What has gone wrong here? The compatibilist will claim that what has gone wrong is incompatibilist’s idea that a free action must be one that isn’t caused/determined by anything. The compatibilist claims that free actions can still be determined, as long as what is determining them is our own internal reasons, over which we have some control, rather than external things over which we have no control. Free choices, according to the compatibilist, are just choices that are caused by our own best reasons . The fact that, given the exact same choices, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise doesn’t undermine what freedom is (as the incompatibilist claims) but defines what it is. Consider an example. Suppose that my goal is to spend the shortest amount of time on my commute home from work so that I can be on time for a dinner date. Also suppose, for simplicity, that there are only three possible routes that I can take: route 1 is the shortest, whereas route 2 is longer but scenic and 3 is more direct but has potentially more traffic, especially during rush hour. I am leaving early from work today so that I can make my dinner date but before I leave, I check the traffic and learn that there has been a wreck on route 1. Thus, I must choose between routes 2 and 3. I reason that since I am leaving earlier, route 3 will be the quickest since there won’t be much traffic while I’m on my early commute home. So I take route 3 and arrive home in a timely manner: mission accomplished. The compatibilist would say that this is a paradigm case of a free action (or a series of free actions). The decisions I made about how to get home were drive both by my desire to get home quickly and also by the information I was operating with. Assuming that that information was good and I reasoned well with it and was thereby able to accomplish my goal (that is, get home in a timely manner), then my action is free. My action is free not because my choices were undetermined, but rather because my choices were determined (caused) by my own best reasons—that is, by my desires and informed beliefs. The incompatibilist, in contrast, would say that an action is free only if I could have chosen otherwise, given all the same conditions again. But think of what that would mean in the case above! Why on earth would I choose routes 1 or 2 in the above scenario, given that my most pressing goal is to be able to get to my dinner date on time? Why would anyone knowingly choose to do something that thwarts their primary goals? It doesn’t seem that, given the set of beliefs and desires that I actually had at the time, I could have chosen otherwise in that situation. Of course, if you change the information I had (my beliefs) or you change what I wanted to accomplish (my desires), then of course I could have acted otherwise than I did. If I didn’t have anything pressing to do when I left work and wanted a scenic and leisurely drive home in my new convertible, then I probably would have taken route 2! But that isn’t what the incompatibilist requires for free will. As we’ve seen, they require the much stronger condition that one’s action be such that it could have been different even if they faced exactly the same condition over again. But in this scenario that would be an irrational thing to do. Of course, if one’s goal were to be irrational and to thwart one’s own desires, I suppose they could do that. But that would still seem to be acting in accordance with one’s desires.

Many times free will is treated as an all or nothing thing, either humans have it or they don’t. This seems to be exactly how the libertarian and hard determinist see the matter. And that makes sense given that they are both incompatibilists and view free will and determinism like oil and water—they don’t mix. But it is interesting to note that it is common for us to talk about decisions, action, or even whole lives (or periods of a life) as being more or less free . Consider the Goethe quotation at the beginning of this chapter: “none are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Here Goethe is conceiving of freedom as coming in degrees and claiming that those who think they are free but aren’t as less free than those who aren’t free and know it. But this way of speaking implies that free will and determinism are actually on a continuum rather than a black and white either or. The compatibilist can build this fact about our ordinary ways of speaking about freedom into an argument for their position. Call this the argument from ordinary language . The argument from ordinary language is that only compatibilism is able to accommodate our common way of speaking about freedom coming in degrees—that is, as actions or decisions being more or less free. The libertarian can’t account for this since the libertarian sees freedom as an all or nothing matter: if you couldn’t have done otherwise then your action was not truly free; if you could have done otherwise, then it was. In contrast, the compatibilist is able to explain the difference between more/less free action on the continuum. For the compatibilist, the freest actions are those in which one reasons well with the best information, thus acting for one’s own best reasons, thus furthering one’s interests. The least free actions are those in which one lacks information and reason poorly, thus not acting for one’s own best reasons, thus not furthering one’s interests. Since reasoning well, being informed, and being reflective are all things that come in degrees (since one can possess these traits to a greater or lesser extent) and since these attribute define what free will is for the compatibilist, it follows that free will comes in degrees. And that means that the compatibilist is able to make sense or a very common way that we talk about freedom (as coming in degrees) and thus make sense of ourselves, whereas the libertarian isn’t.

There’s one further advantage that compatibilists can claim over libertarians. Libertarians defend the claim that there are at least some cases where one exercises one’s free will and that this entails that determinism is false. However, this leaves totally open the extent of human free will. Even if it were true that there are at least some cases where humans exercise free will, there might not be very many instances and/or those decisions in which we exercise free will might be fairly trivial (for example, moving one’s finger to the left or right). But if it were to turn out that free will was relatively rare, then even if the libertarian were correct that there are at least some instances where we exercise free will, it would be cold comfort to those who believe in free will. Imagine: if there were only a handful of cases in your life where your decision was an exercise of your free will, then it doesn’t seem like you have lived a life which was very free. In other words, in such a case, for all practical purposes, determinism would be true.

Thus, it seems like the question of how widespread free will is is an important one. However, the libertarian seems unable to answer it for reasons that we’ve already seen. Answering the question requires knowing whether or not one could have acted otherwise than one in fact did. But in order to know this, we’d have to know how to answer a strange counterfactual—whether I could have acted differently given all the same conditions. As noted earlier (“the epistemic objection”), this raises a tough epistemological question for the libertarian: how could he ever know how to answer this question? And so how could he ever know whether a particular action was free or not? In contrast, the compatibilist can easily answer the question of how widespread free will is: how “free” one’s life is depends on the extent to which one’s actions are driven by their own best reasons. And this, in turn, depends on factors such as how well-informed, reflective, and reasonable a person is. This might not always be easy to determine, but it seems more tractable than trying to figure out the truth conditions of the libertarian’s counterfactual.

In short, it seems that compatibilism has significant advantages over both libertarianism and hard determinism. As compared to the libertarian, compatibilism gives a better answer to how free will can come in degrees as well as how widespread free will is. It also doesn’t face the arbitrariness objection or the epistemic objection. As compared to the hard determinist, the compatibilist is able to give a more satisfying answer to the moral responsibility issue. Unlike the hard determinist, who sees all action as equally determined (and so not under our control), the compatibilist thinks there is an important distinction within the class of human actions: those that are under our control versus those that aren’t. As we’ve seen above, the compatibilist doesn’t see this distinction as black and white, but, rather, as existing on a continuum. However, a vague boundary is still a boundary. That is, for the compatibilist there are still paradigm cases in which a person has acted freely and thus should be held morally responsible for that action (for example, the person who embezzles money from a charity and then covers it up) and clear cases in which a person hasn’t acted freely (for example, the person who was told to do something by their boss but didn’t know that it was actually something illegal). The compatibilist’s point is that this distinction between free and unfree actions matters, both morally and legally, and that we would be unwise to simply jettison this distinction, as the hard determinist does. We do need some distinction within the class of human actions between those for which we hold people responsible and those for which we don’t. The compatibilist’s claim is that they are able to do with while the hard determinist isn’t. And they’re able to do it without inheriting any of the problems of the libertarian position.

Study questions

• True or false: Compatibilists and libertarians agree on what free will is (on the concept of free will).
• True or false: Hard determinists and libertarians agree that an action is free only when I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose.
• True or false: the libertarian gives a transcendental argument for why we must have free will.
• True or false: both compatibilists and hard determinists believe that all human actions are determined.
• True or false: compatibilists see free will as an all or nothing matter: either an action is free or it isn’t; there’s no middle ground.
• True or false: compatibilists think that in the case of a truly free action, I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact did choose.
• True or false: One objection to libertarianism is that on that view it is difficult to know when a particular action was free.
• True or false: determinism is a fundamental assumption of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and so on).
• True or false: the best that support the libertarian’s position are cases of very simple or arbitrary actions, such as choosing to move my finger to the left or to the right.
• True or false: libertarians thinks that as long as my choices are caused by my desires, I have chosen freely.

For deeper thought

• Consider the Shopenhauer quotation at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views do you think this supports and why?
• Consider the movie The Truman Show . How would the libertarian and compatibilist disagree regarding whether or not Truman has free will?
• Consider the Tolstoy quote at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views does this support and why?
• Consider a child being raised by white supremacist parents who grows up to have white supremacist views and to act on those views. As a child, does this individual have free will? As an adult, do they have free will? Defend your answer with reference to one of the three views.
• Consider the eccentric neuroscientist example (above). How might a compatibilist try to show that this isn’t really an objection to her view? That is, how might the compatibilist show that this is not a case in which the individual’s action is the result of a well-informed, reflective choice?
• Actually, the phrase was originally a Latin phrase, not an English one because at the time in Medieval Europe philosophers wrote in Latin. ↵
• On the other hand, if these nonphysical decisions are supposed to have physical effects in the world (such as causing our behaviors) then although there is no problem with the agent’s decision itself being uncaused, there would still be a problem with how that decision can be translated into the physical world without violating the law of conservation of energy. ↵
• One well-known and influential attempt to reconcile moral responsibility with determinism is P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962). ↵
• The term “epistemic” just denotes something relating to knowledge. It comes from the Greek work episteme, which means knowledge or belief. ↵

Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © by Matthew Van Cleave is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It

Andrea lavazza.

Neuroethics, Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo, Italy

The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life. For centuries people have wondered how freedom is possible in a world ruled by physical determinism; however, reflections on free will have been confined to philosophy until half a century ago, when the topic was also addressed by neuroscience. The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. ( 1983 ), which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions taking place in decisions regarded as free and voluntary. Libet’s interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) seems to favor a sort of deflation of freedom (Soon et al., 2008 ). However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors (Schurger et al., 2016 ). This interpretation seems to bridge the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it (Roskies, 2010b ), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. The article therefore, proposes to start from an operationalizable concept of free will (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases. This new way to conceptualize free will should be linked to the idea of “capacity”: that is, the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without moment by moment conscious control. The capacity index, which is also able to take into account the differences of time scales in decisions, includes reasons-responsiveness and is related to internal control, understood as the agent’s ownership of the mechanisms that trigger the relevant behavior. Cognitive abilities, needed for one to have capacity, might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Subsequently, a free will index would allow for the search of the underlying neural correlates of the capacity exhibited by people and the limits in capacity exhibited by each individual.

Introduction—Free Will as a Problem (Not Only) for Science

The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life (Kane, 2005 ). Free will can be the reason why someone is not sent to jail during a trial upon appealing to insanity: the subject was not “free” when they committed the crime, not because someone was pointing a gun to their head, but because a psychiatric illness prevented them from controlling their actions. According to a long-standing philosophical tradition, if someone was not “free” when they did something, they cannot be held responsible for their deed (Glannon, 2015 ). And the freedom in question is both “social” freedom (linked to constraints imposed by our peers or by external factors), and the one indicated by the term free will .

Free will can be defined by three conditions (Walter, 2001 ). The first one is the “ability to do otherwise.” This is an intuitive concept: to be free, one has to have at least two alternatives or courses of action between which to choose. If one has an involuntary spasm of the mouth, for example, one is not in the position to choose whether to twist one’s mouth or not. The second condition is the “control over one’s choices.” The person who acts must be the same who decides what to do. To be granted free will, one must be the author of one’s choices, without the interference of people and of mechanisms outside of one’s reach. This is what we call agency, that is, being and feeling like the “owner” of one’s decisions and actions. The third condition is the “responsiveness to reasons”: a decision can’t be free if it is the effect of a random choice, but it must be rationally motivated. If I roll a dice to decide whom to marry, my choice cannot be said to be free, even though I will freely choose to say “I do”. On the contrary, if I choose to marry a specific person for their ideas and my deep love for them, then my decision will be free.

Thus defined, free will is a kind of freedom that we are willing to attribute to all human beings as a default condition. Of course there are exceptions: people suffering from mental illness and people under psychotropic substances (Levy, 2013 ). Nevertheless, the attribution of free will as a general trend does not imply that all decisions are always taken in full freedom, as outlined by the three conditions illustrated above: “We often act on impulse, against our interests, without being fully aware of what we are doing. But this does not imply that we are not potentially able to act freely. Ethics and law have incorporated these notions, adopting the belief that usually people are free to act or not to act in a certain way and that, as a result, they are responsible for what they do, with the exceptions mentioned above” (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ).

It is commonly experienced that the conditions of “ability to do otherwise”, “control” and “responsiveness to reasons” are very rarely at work all at once. Moreover, they would require further discussion, because there is wide disagreement on those conditions as regards their definition and scope (Kane, 2016 ). But for the purposes of this article, this introductory treatment should suffice. In fact, the description of free will that I have sketched here is the one that dominated the theoretical discourse on, and practical applications of, the evaluation of human actions. From a philosophical point of view, however, starting with Plato, the main problem has been that of the actual existence of freedom, beyond the appearances and the insights that guide our daily life. The main challenge to free will has been determinism: the view that everything that happens (human decisions and actions included) is the consequence of sufficient conditions for its occurrence (Berofsky, 2011 ). More specifically, “It is the argument that all mental phenomena and actions are also, directly or indirectly, causally produced—according to the laws of nature (such as those of physics and neurobiology)—by previous events that lie beyond the control of the agents” (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). Determinism was first a philosophical position; then, the birth of Galilean science—founded on the existence of immutable laws that are empirically verifiable—has increased its strength, giving rise to the concept of incompatibilism, namely the idea that free will and natural determinism cannot coexist. Only one of them can be true.

Throughout the centuries, despite its conceptual progress, philosophy hasn’t been able to solve this dilemma. As a result, today there are different irreconcilable positions about human free will: determinism is not absolute and free will exists; free will does not exist for a number of reasons, first of all (but not only) determinism; free will can exist even if determinism is true (Kane, 2011 ). A little more than 30 years ago, neuroscience and empirical psychology came into play. Although biological processes cannot be considered strictly deterministic on the observable level of brain functioning (nerve signal transmission), new methods of investigation of the brain, more and more precise, have established that the cerebral base is a necessary condition of behavior and even of mental phenomena. On the basis of these acquisitions, neuroscience has begun to provide experimental contributions to the debate on free will.

In order to better understand the neural bases of free will, provided that there are any, in this article I’ll review and integrate findings from studies in different fields (philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, experimental and clinical psychology, neuropsychology). Unlike previous reviews on free will and neuroscience (Haggard, 2008 , 2009 ; Passingham et al., 2010 ; Roskies, 2010a ; Brass et al., 2013 ), I have no claim of being exhaustive. My goal is to highlight a paradigm shift in the analysis and interpretation of the brain determinants preceding and/or causing free or voluntary action (Haggard, 2008 takes voluntary decision to be non-stimulus driven, as much as possible). Firstly, following Libet’s experiments, a widespread interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) went in the direction of a deflation of freedom (Crick, 1994 ; Greene and Cohen, 2004 ; Cashmore, 2010 ; Harris, 2012 ). Indeed, the discovery of the role of the RP has been taken as evidence of the fact that free will is an illusion, since it seems that specific brain areas activate before we are aware of the onset of the movement. However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors (Schurger et al., 2016 ). This interpretation seems to bridge, at least partially, the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it (Roskies, 2010b ), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. After analyzing the change of paradigm of these perspectives, I’ll propose to start from an operationalizable concept of free will (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases.

Neuroscience: Purporting to Explain Free Will

The discovery of the readiness potential.

As a preliminary consideration, it is important to underline that the idea of using an experiment (or a series of experiments) to establish whether the human being can be said to have free will implies accepting a direct link between a measurement of brain functioning and a pre-existing theoretical construct. This direct connection, as it is known, presents several problems and as we shall see, needs conceptual refinement to avoid simplifications and unfounded claims. What one can see and measure in brain activity may in fact only grasp a part of the idea of free will that we would like to test. This was one of the main criticisms to the experiments conducted so far (Mele, 2009 ; Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ). What is measured at the level of brain functioning in the laboratory does not match the concept of free will we refer to, for example, to determine whether someone who engaged in violent behavior could have done otherwise in that specific circumstance.

The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. ( 1983 ), which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions affecting decisions regarded as free and voluntary. It should be noted that the concepts involved—“conscious intentions”, “voluntary decisions”, “free decisions”—have no clear and shared definition (Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ), and the experiments themselves have been differently interpreted and often criticized (Lavazza and De Caro, 2010 ). In any case, Libet’s experiments and their variants have been repeated several times until very recently, confirming their findings with a sufficient degree of reliability.

Libet based his work on Kornhuber and Deecke’s ( 1965 ) discovery of the bereitschaftpotential : the RP, a slow build-up of a scalp electrical potential (of a few microvolts), mainly measured through electroencephalography (EEG), that precedes the onset of subjectively SVM (Kornhuber and Deecke, 1965 ). According to its discoverers, the RP is “the electro-physiological sign of planning, preparation, and initiation of volitional acts” (Kornhuber and Deecke, 1990 ). “The neurobiologist John Eccles speculated that the subject must become conscious of the intention to act before the onset of this RP. Libet had the idea that he should test Eccles’s prediction” (Doyle, 2011 ).

In his experiments, Libet invited the participants to move their right wrist and to report the precise moment when they had the impression that they decided to do so, thanks to a big clock they had in front of them (Libet et al., 1983 ). In this way, it was possible to estimate the time of awareness with respect to the beginning of the movement, measured using an electromyogram (which records the muscle contraction). During the execution of the task, brain electrical activity was recorded through electrodes placed on the participants’ scalps. The attention was focused on a specific negative brain potential, namely the RP, originated from the supplementary motor area (SMA): a brain area involved in motor preparation, which is visible in the EEG signal as a wave that starts before any voluntary movement, while being absent or reduced before involuntary and automatic movements.

When one compares the subjective “time” of decision and what appeared at a cerebral level, the result appears as a striking blow to the traditional view of free will (Libet, 1985 , 2004 ). In the experiment, the RP culminating in the execution of the movement starts in the prefrontal motor areas long before the time when the subject seems to have made the decision: participants became aware of their intention to take action about 350 ms after the onset of such potential. The volitional process is detected to start unconsciously 550 ms before the action is made in the case of non-preplanned acts and 1000 ms before in the case of preplanned acts. Thus these findings seem to show that our simple actions (and therefore, potentially, also more complex ones) are triggered by unconscious neural activity and that the awareness of those actions only occurs at a later time, when we think we are willing to act.

In the first phase of its intervention in the debate on free will, therefore, neuroscience seemed to argue for a deflation of freedom. Neuroscientists identified a specific aspect of the notion of freedom (the conscious control of the start of the action) and researched it: the experimental results seemed to indicate that there is no such conscious control, hence the conclusion that free will does not exist. However, it is important to highlight that this interpretation strongly depends on the idea that free choices or actions are fully internally generated, in the sense that they are not externally determined—where “external” means outside the subject’s conscience and the subject is something akin to the self. As we shall see, though, this distinction seems to be neither relevant nor truly informative when considering if and how choices are free.

In fact, Libet left the subject some time to veto: about 150 ms. This is the time needed for the muscles to flex in response to the command of the primary motor cortex (M2) through the spinal motor nerve cells. In the last 50 ms the action is realized with its external manifestations (bending the wrist) without any more possible intervention by the prefrontal brain areas (see “The Veto Power” Section). Libet thought there was a role for conscious will precisely in this situation: conscious will can let the action go to completion or it can block it with the explicit veto of the movement implemented by the prefrontal areas (Doyle, 2011 ). But the intentional inhibition of an action (a decision itself) is preceded by neural activity as well (Filevich et al., 2012 , 2013 ). So it cannot be a completely different decision from that to take a positive decision to act.

In their experiments, Haggard and Eimer ( 1999 ) used Libet’s method, but asked the participants to perform a different task. They had to move at will either the right index finger or the left in a series of repeated trials. The authors have compared the RP and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) in trials in which awareness appeared in shorter or longer time, that is, considering the latency of awareness compared to the RP. In their words, “the RP tended to occur later on trials with early awareness of movement initiation than on trials with late awareness, ruling out the RP as a cause of our awareness of movement initiation. However, the LRP occurred significantly earlier on trials with early awareness than on trials with late awareness, suggesting that the processes underlying the LRP may cause our awareness of movement initiation” (Haggard and Eimer, 1999 ). From this, one can deduce that the awareness of the intention to move one finger or the other comes after the decision was “taken by the brain”, as reflected in the LRP.

Sirigu et al. ( 2004 ) and Desmurget et al. ( 2009 ) have shown that, repeating Libet’s experiments on patients with parietal lesions, it appears that they become aware of their decision to take action only when the action itself is being carried out. In these subjects the awareness of the decision does not even come before the beginning of the movement, as it tends to coincide with the motor action. It seems that in such cases the brain alteration has reduced, if not cancelled altogether, the interval of consciousness preceding the actual implementation of the action. The authors proposed that when a movement is planned, activity in the parietal cortex, as part of a cortical sensorimotor processing loop, generates a predictive internal model of the upcoming movement. And this model might form the neural correlate of motor awareness.

Fried et al. ( 2011 ) recorded the activity of 1019 neurons as 12 subjects performed self-initiated finger movements. They found progressive neuronal recruitment, particularly in the SMA, over 1500 ms before subjects reported making the decision to move. A population of 256 SMA neurons was sufficient to predict in single trials the impending decision to move: 700 ms before the participants became aware of the decision, the accuracy of the prevision was higher than 80%. Fried et al. ( 2011 ) were also able to predict, “with a precision of a few 100 ms, the time point of that voluntary decision to move”, and they implemented a computational model thanks to which “volition emerged when a change in the internally generated firing rate of neuronal assemblies crossed a certain threshold”.

Unreliability of the Conscious Intention

A slightly different trend of research compared to Libet’s comprises studies suggesting that the conscious intention of an action is strongly influenced by events that occur after the action itself was performed. In this sense, intentions are therefore partially reconstructed according to a process of inference, based on elements that come after the action. For instance, a study by Lau et al. ( 2006 ) has produced results that empirically support this hypothesis. The authors have used transcranic magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the pre-supplementary motor (pre-SM) area, while the subjects were performing Libet’s task. The stimulation of the pre-SM through TMS happened at different time intervals, in relation to a simple voluntary movement. When the stimulation was applied 200 ms after the movement, the judgment W was moved back in time, indicating that the perception of the intention was influenced by the neural activity of the pre-SM after the motor action was made (cf. also Lau et al., 2004 ; Lau and Passingham, 2007 ).

In another experiment, Banks and Isham ( 2009 ) have set a slightly different version of Libet’s task: participants were asked to push a button whenever they wanted, and later they had to indicate the precise moment when they had the intention to do so. When they pushed the button, subject received an auditory feedback with a delay from 5 to 60 ms, so as to give them the impression that the response happened after they pushed the button. Even though the subjects weren’t aware of the delay between the action and the auditory feedback, the intention to press the button was reported as happening later in time, according to a linear function with the delay of the auditory signal feedback. The identification of the moment in which the subject had intended to press the button—measured by judgment W—was therefore largely determined by the apparent time of the subject’s response, and not the actual answer. This result indicates that the people evaluate the time when they have had the intention to take an action based on the consequences of their action and not just on the motor action itself.

Kühn and Brass ( 2009 ) conducted an experiment combining the paradigm of the stop signal (Logan et al., 1984 ) with an intentional action paradigm. The subjects had to react in the quickest possible way by pushing a button as soon as a stimulus (e. g., a letter) was displayed at the center of a computer screen. Sometimes, just after the presentation of the stimulus, either a stop signal or a decision signal was shown: in the first case, the subjects had to try to stop responding; in the second case they could decide whether to press the button or stop responding. In the decision trials in which subjects had provided an answer, the subjects were asked if it had actually been the result of a decision, or if it had been inhibited—that is, if they had not been able to stop before the decision signal was presented.

The results have shown that in some instances, the subjects judged as intentional responses—i.e., as the result of a decision—those answers that in reality, on the basis of reaction times, were failed inhibitions. In other words, sometimes the subjects had a subjective experience of having intentionally decided to perform an action that they had actually not decided to take. These studies have empirically supported the hypothesis that the intentions to take voluntary actions are strongly influenced by events occurring after the execution of the action. In addition, they seem to confirm that the brain motor system produces a movement as the final result of its inputs and outputs; consciousness would be “informed” of the fact that a movement is going to occur and this would produce the subjective perception that the movement was decided voluntarily (Hallett, 2007 ).

Predicting Choices

More recently, studying the activity of the frontal and parietal cortex, other neuroscientists of the group coordinated by Soon et al. ( 2008 , 2013 ) have managed to detect the “rise” of a behavioral or abstract choice/decision (to move either the right finger or the left one; to perform a mathematical operation or another with two numbers) a few seconds before the subject becomes aware of it. An unconscious brain process has already “decided” what to do when the subject still does not know what she would choose and thinks she still has the power to decide. More precisely, Soon et al. ( 2008 ) studied “free decisions” between many behavioral options using the multivariate pattern classification analysis (MVPA) which, combined with fMRI, allows one to identify specific contents of cognitive processes. “A pattern classifier, usually adopted from machine learning, can be trained on exemplars of neural patterns acquired when participants make different decisions and can learn to distinguish between these. If the activation patterns contain information about the decisions, the trained classifier can then successfully predict decision outcomes from independent data” (Bode et al., 2014 ).

In Soon et al.’s ( 2008 ) experiment, subjects carried out a freely paced motor-decision task (choosing to press a button with either the left or the right index finger) while their brain activity was being measured using fMRI. The subjects then had to report the moment of the decision, not by using a clock as in Libet’s experiment, but by selecting a letter in a stream that was being presented during the task. Soon et al. ( 2008 ) used fMRI signals to find local neural patterns and draw from such patterns all possible information decoded second by second thanks to the statistical techniques of pattern recognition. The brain areas that were mostly involved in the performance of the actions are the primary M2 and the SMA, while two other brain regions encoded the subject’s motor decision ahead of time and with high accuracy. Indeed, the frontopolar cortex (BA10) and a portion of the cingulate cortex can be monitored to understand what kind of choice will be made by the person before they are conscious of having taken a specific decision in the task they were given. The prediction can be made, with a relevant approximation (60% mean accuracy), up to 7 s before the conscious choice is experienced by the subject, thanks to the fMRI signals detected in the BA10 (one should take into account that the subjects are asked to think hard about the choice before making it, whereas usually simple choices do not require long subjective reflection). “The temporal ordering of information suggests a tentative causal model of information flow, where the earliest unconscious precursors of the motor decision originated in frontopolar cortex, from where they influenced the buildup of decision-related information in the precuneus and later in SMA, where it remained unconscious for up to 10 s” (Soon et al., 2008 ).

This seems to revive the old issue of God’s foreknowledge that forced theologians to wonder if man can be considered free, if someone already knows his future choices. Indeed, the authors speak of “free” decisions determined by brain activity ahead of time by placing “free” between inverted commas, as freedom is taken to be a commonsensical hypothesis. In this regard, the authors claim: “we found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness” (Soon et al., 2008 ).

Another interesting study is that conducted by Alexander et al. ( 2016 ): using a new experimental design, it found that the RP also occurs in the absence of movement. It suggests that “the RP measured here is unlikely to reflect preconscious motor planning or preparation of an ensuing movement, and instead may reflect decision-related or anticipatory processes that are non-motoric in nature” (Alexander et al., 2016 ). The experimental design used a modified version of Libet’s task. Subjects had to choose between four letters whenever they wanted, by taking note of the exact moment of their choice. Later, in half the trials, the subjects had to push a button as soon as they made the decision, whereas in the other half subjects had to do nothing to mark their choice. At the end of the task, all subjects had to report when they had made their decision. In this way, by EEG, electrooculography (EOG) and electromyography (EMG), it was possible to see the RP of the decision-making both in motor and non-motor contexts.

The authors did not find any strong differences between the two RPs, thereby affirming that there is a pure cognitive contribution to RP that does not reflect processes related to movement. They thus suggest that cognitive RP might reflect action preparation, general anticipation and spontaneous neural fluctuations. Interestingly, they exclude that the RP reflects action preparation since it is a non-motor processing. And as to anticipation they cannot exclude that RP may be specifically associated with free choice. So the RP could merely reflect the average of spontaneous fluctuations (see “Other Neuroscientific Hypotheses on Free Will” Section).

Free Will as an Illusion

All these experiments seem to indicate that free will is an illusion. Yet, these relevant experiments can be interpreted in many ways. A possible view is that, in some way, determinism can be observed directly within ourselves. This interpretation might lead to the conclusion that free will is just an illusion. In fact, if one considers as a condition of free will the fact that it should be causa sui (i.e., it should be able to consciously start new causal chains), such a condition is incompatible with determinism as it is usually defined. For it, in fact, all events are linked by casual relations in the form of natural laws, which started long before we were born and which we cannot escape.

However, determinism has generally been regarded as a metaphysical claim, not refutable by empirical findings. One could properly talk of automatism in the brain, not of determinism, based on the evidence available. (In any case, endorsing indeterminism might lead to consider our behavior as the causal product of choices that every time produce different results, as if we rolled a dice. This doesn’t seem to make us any freer than if determinism were overturned; cf. Levy, 2011 ). Most importantly, another feature of freedom seems to be a pure illusion, namely the role of consciousness. The experiments considered thus far heavily question the claim that consciousness actually causes voluntary behavior. Neural activation starts the decisional process culminating in the movement, while consciousness “comes after”, when “things are done”. Therefore, consciousness cannot trigger our voluntary decisions. But the role of consciousness in voluntary choices is part of the definition of free will (but the very definition of consciousness is a matter of debate, cf. Chalmers, 1996 ).

Empirical research in psychology also shows that our mind works and makes choices without our conscious control. As proposed by psychologist Wegner ( 2002 , 2003 , 2004 ) and Aarts et al. ( 2004 ), we are “built” to have the impression to consciously control our actions or to have the power to freely choose, even though all that is only a cognitive illusion. Many priming experiments show that people act “mechanically” (even when their behavior might appear suited to the environment and even refined). Automatic cognitive processes, of which we aren’t always aware, originate our decisions, and they were only discovered thanks to the most advanced scientific research. Ultimately, consciousness, which should exercise control and assess the reasons for a choice, is thus allegedly causally ineffective: a mere epiphenomenon, to use the terminology of the philosophy of mind. This is what has been called Zombie Challenge , “based on an amazing wealth of findings in recent cognitive science that demonstrate the surprising ways in which our everyday behavior is controlled by automatic processes that unfold in the complete absence of consciousness” (Vierkant et al., 2013 ).

These experiments have triggered a huge debate and led scientists, philosophers and intellectuals to claim (or insist even more, if they already denied free will) that free will doesn’t exist (Greene and Cohen, 2004 ; Cashmore, 2010 ; Harris, 2012 ). It seemed as though neuroscience had produced empirical evidence against free will, so that the century-long debate on it could be considered solved. However, Libet’s experiments have been also criticized. Much criticism was directed to the philosophical interpretation of these studies (Mele, 2014 ) or to their theoretical assumptions (Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ), which are important but not relevant here. Among the forms of criticism, one has to mention the theories of action that separate the deciding from the initiating (Gollwitzer, 1999 ; Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006 ). In that case, free and conscious deliberating could still have a relevant casual role, long before the actual performance of the action.

Other objections, more markedly neuroscientific, were made for instance by Trevena and Miller ( 2010 ). They argued that the RP is not an intention to move, but only indicates that an attentional process is in place in the brain, since when subjects “attended to their intention rather than their movement, there was an enhancement of activity in the pre-SMA” (Lau et al., 2004 ). In any case, “there was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation”, (Trevena and Miller, 2010 ). Others have noted that the introspective estimates of event timing are disputable or inaccurate, and measures in general are not sufficiently exact (Dennett, 1984a , b , 2003 ).

More than Explaining Away

Other studies using multivariate pattern analysis with EEG confirmed that the subjectively free decisions might be made in the brain in the same way as evidence-based perceptual decisions (Bode et al., 2012a , b , 2013 ). Indeed, Bode et al. ( 2012b ) wrote,

we directly decoded choice-predictive information from neural activity before stimulus presentation on pure noise trials on which no discriminative information was present. Choice behavior on these trials was shown to be primed by the recent choice history. Modelling of sequential effects in RT and accuracy confirmed that such choice priming biased the starting point of a diffusion process toward a decision boundary, as conceptualized in evidence accumulation models of perceptual decision making (Bode et al., 2012b ).

In other words, the authors found that internally (and maybe stochastically) generated neural activity can bias decisions that are expected to be stimulus-responsive or (possibly) reason-responsive. In this case, as in others that I will consider below, the understanding that we begin to have of the neuronal processes in play shows us that there is a complexity of factors at work. Some of these factors seem to be genuinely random, due to the pure noise produced by the default brain activity, while other factors can be traced back to the previous history of decisions taken in similar situations or related to the present one. Therefore, there is no “mysterious” start of the action as a linear process that, from the initial command, is then executed, as in Libet’s simplified model. Rather, this outcome is the result of a multiplicity of causal elements, which are homogeneous from the viewpoint of proximal mechanisms but of different relevance from the viewpoint of interpretation in terms of intentional psychology.

Another study has shown that attempts to account for (make sense of) insufficient perceptive clues use the same neural networks as those involved in “free” decision-making (Bode et al., 2013 ). An fMRI-based pattern classifier can be trained to differentiate between different perceptual guesses and try to predict the outcome of non-perceptual decisions, like those made by the participants in the experiments considered so far. Specific activation patterns detected in the medial posterior parietal cortex have allowed the authors to make correct predictions on the participants’ free choices based on the previously decoded perceptual guesses decoded, and the other way round.

The task was the following: the participants were given a masked stimulus and had to say what category the stimulus belonged to. They had to freely choose among many categories. Thanks to the multivariate pattern analysis it was possible to identify the model of “free decisions” to make correct predictions in the context of perceptual judgments and identify the model of the “guess decisions”, to make correct predictions in the context of “free decisions”. It thus seems that a similar neural code for both types of decision is present. In those cases one could say that guessing is similar to making a free decision, since the brain, in the absence of sufficient external cues, has to decide internally. So perceptual decisions can be predicted from specific preceding neural activity when the brain doesn’t have enough internal elements to reach the threshold of perceptive decision.

Studies and commentaries have nevertheless drawn attention to possible confounds and bias in those experiments, namely they might be affected by previous choices with a form of auto-correlation in spontaneous decisions. In particular, Lages and Jaworska ( 2012 ) “trained a linear classifier to predict “spontaneous decisions” and “hidden intentions” from responses in preceding trials and achieved comparable prediction accuracies as reported for multivariate pattern classification based on voxel activities in frontopolar cortex”. Lages et al. ( 2013 ) have stressed a possible sequential information processing between trials that can introduce a confound, and recommended that “rather postulating a 50% chance level, prediction should be tested with a permutation test and/or separate multivariate classification analyses conditional on the previous response”.

The prediction of perceptual decisions from specific preceding neural activity is linked to what is defined “evidence accumulator model for free choice” (Bode et al., 2014 ). The explanation starts with the fact that predictive activation patterns preceding decisions become increasingly similar to the patterns detected when the decision is consciously experienced by the subject. This could mean that a slow build-up of decision-related activity occurs, as it happens in accumulation of decision-related evidence to a decision threshold (Ratcliff, 1978 ; Ratcliff and McKoon, 2008 ). Also, as already noted, when no external feedback is available, the previous choice is used as external feedback (Akaishi et al., 2014 ). The history of previous decisions has a systematic effect on subsequent choices, related to the activity in medial posterior parietal cortex/posterior and posterior cingulate cortex (Bode et al., 2011 , 2013 ). And the systematic effect can go in the direction of repetition or of avoidance of repetition depending on the task (Mochizuki and Funahashi, 2014 ).

Here is an important point that deserves study from the neuroscientific point of view but also from that of a philosophical interpretation of free will. It consists in the fact that the internally generated brain activity has to do both with the stochastic noise and with the history of the subject’s choices. On the one hand, the stochastic noise comes both from the configuration that the brain has on average as a result of evolution (adaptive significance) and from individual development, resulting from random processes and environmental influences. On the other hand, the history of the choices is derived from the same process (in part stochastic) that I have just described.

In any case, if (at least some) very short-term decisions have a genesis similar to that described here, these decisions contribute to shaping the brain activity, and then, presumably, also to influencing decisions on a longer time scale that it is not yet possible to investigate experimentally. Ultimately, this could mean that there is a confluence of causal factors at the level of microdecisions. These factors add up in a way that it is hardly possible to tackle for current science. Then also the reasons motivating an action, typical of free actions, such as “I punched the stalker because it is right to punish those who behave in this way and because I wanted to set an example for all”, encoded in neural activity, can be part of the sum of neural causes.

In fact, experimental psychology has been trying to take into account long-term influences. In the so-called marshmallow experiment, researchers focused on delayed gratification (Mischel et al., 1972 , 1989 ). A child was given a choice between one small, immediate reward and two small rewards (i. e. a larger reward) if they were able to wait some minutes while the psychologist left the room and then came back. Children who waited longer for the their rewards tended to have better life outcomes and accomplishments. Such experiments are relevant in terms of explanations and predictions, but it seems hard to trace behavioral profiles back to specific profiles of cerebral activation, once we are aware of the complexity of causal chains in the evidence accumulation model.

As Bode et al. ( 2014 ) write, in the hypothesis of an evidence accumulator that collects sensory evidence until a decision threshold is reached,

task instructions, participants’ internal motivation, and previous choices all have a strong influence on how decision tasks are performed when external information is either unavailable (as in free decisions), or unhelpful (as in perceptual guessing). In the case of free decision tasks, fluctuating intention for one or the other option may result from active competition between neural representations of both options in decision networks (or rather although not consciously monitored by the participants, the previous choice history, embodied in dynamic states of decision networks, can become the primary determinant of behavior, simply because nothing else is available (Bode et al., 2014 ).

However, in this way things get more complicated and at a macroscopic level of behavioral observation, this blurs but doesn’t do away with the idea of free behaviors and behaviors that could be taken as unconscious decisions, of which we become aware only when the action has been performed. What remains to be solved is the problem of the distinction between external stimuli that trigger a stimulus-response circuit, and internal self-paced intentions and decisions that trigger voluntary circuit (Haggard, 2008 ).

Other Neuroscientific Hypotheses on Free Will

Beyond determinism and consciousness.

The concept of free will relevant to our moral and legal, personal and social practices is much more complex than that captured by the experiments considered up to now. But here what matters are not so much theoretical considerations or those derived from experimental psychology (such as the role played in decisions by implementation intentions, which then re-evaluate the active role of consciousness; Gollwitzer, 1999 ), but those that originate from the neuroscientific research itself. In what might be called a new phase of empirical investigation on free will, the problem of determinism and the role of consciousness is left in the background, and the focus goes to other factors that enter the brain mechanisms of decision-making, without asking first if those processes (necessarily the most simple, at least for now) are deterministic or stochastic. On the other side, neuroscientists are trying to confine the concept of free will to operationalizable situations, so as to measure it and be able to identify, at least as a goal, its neural correlates.

There is a line of research on non-human primates, but more recently also on humans, which studies fine decision-making at the neuronal level, bringing it back to a mechanistic process that might be the neuronal interface of our common sense descriptions. This trend has been well described by Roskies ( 2010a , b , 2013 ), who is one of the major supporters of this approach. For example, in Shadlen and Newsome’s ( 2001 ) experiments, monkeys are trained to look at stimuli consisting of points that move randomly to the right and to the left and to “indicate” the overall direction of the points. The monkeys give this indication moving their eyes (with a saccade) to the right or to the left. What emerges is that the activity of the neurons of the lateral interparietal (LIP) area increases with the information in the sensory cells of the middle temporal (MT) area and upper middle temporal (MST) area. The discharge rates rise up to reaching a given level, at which the monkey performs the saccade and the neurons stop discharging. This is the threshold for a decision to take place. The time taken to reach the threshold level depends on the perceptual characteristics of the stimulus (the strength of the movement over time) and the discharges stop after the answer was given.

The discharges also depend on whether the monkey is asked to answer when he wishes, or rather to hold back the response until the signal is given for the saccade. If the monkey is asked to wait until the signal is given to respond, LIP neurons continue to discharge even in the absence of the visual stimulus (Gold and Shadlen, 2007 ). According to Roskies ( 2010b ), this is the discharge scheme of a neuron involved in the decision-making process; the levels of discharge can be maintained in the absence of the stimulus, signifying the independence of the decision from the inputs on which it operates, and the activity continues until it reaches the critical level at which the response is generated, or until the neurons that represent the elements accumulated in favor of a different choice lead to eye movement. In addition, electrical stimulation of LIP neurons can influence the monkey’s decision, indicating that LIP cells causally contribute to the process that triggers decision and action (Hanks et al., 2006 ). It remains, however, to be established whether this role is that of deliberation that leads to a decision or that of the decision itself.

The reaction times and the accuracy in the evaluation are very similar between monkeys and humans, with the probability of choice and the response time connected in a similar way to the difficulty of discriminating the stimulus, so that it can be assumed that also in humans these neural processes are similar. A mathematical description of the dynamics of this system allows one to talk about the race towards the critical threshold (Gold and Shadlen, 2007 ; Wong et al., 2007 ). According to this model, the neuronal populations with specific response properties represent different “hypotheses”. The discharge rates represent the strength of the evidence in favor of those hypotheses based on evidence gathered from the environment. When the evidence for and against each hypothesis is integrated, the discharge rates reach or move away from the critical level, which represents the decision point. This is the point at which the animal “made a choice” about the overall direction of movement. The first group that reaches this threshold “wins”, leading the motor response.

Schurger et al. ( 2012 ) proposed a different interpretation of the premovement buildup of neuronal activity preceding voluntary self-initiated movements in humans as well. They used “a leaky stochastic accumulator to model the neural decision of “when” to move in a task where there is no specific temporal cue, but only a general imperative to produce a movement after an unspecified delay on the order of several seconds”. According to their model, “when the imperative to produce a movement is weak, the precise moment at which the decision threshold is crossed leading to movement is largely determined by spontaneous subthreshold fluctuations in neuronal activity. Time locking to movement onset ensures that these fluctuations appear in the average as a gradual exponential-looking increase in neuronal activity” (Schurger et al., 2012 ).

The model proposed by Schurger et al. ( 2012 ) accounts for the behavioral and EEG data recorded from human subjects performing the task and also makes a specific prediction that was confirmed in a second electroencephalography experiment: fast responses to temporally unpredictable interruptions should be preceded by a slow negative-going voltage deflection beginning well before the interruption itself, even when the subject was not preparing to move at that particular moment. The task was to repeatedly push a button, sometimes at will, sometimes in response to a sound produced by the experimenters according to a causal sequence. The speed of response (pressing the button) when the sound is produced is related to the proximity to the peak of the background brain activity, which appears to be random, an ebb and flow that has its highest point in the threshold at which it produces the decision to push the button.

According to this explanation, “the RP does not reflect processing within a specific action domain. Our finding that movement does not significantly modulate RP amplitude supports this aspect of their claim by extending the RP to the domain of covert decisions” (Alexander et al., 2016 ). Another consequence is the fact that the neural decision to move at a specific time happens much later compared to Libet’s hypothesis, and the RP is only a by-product of a drift diffusion process. But the RP would still be predictive in that it precedes action and conscious awareness of both motor and cognitive action. However, the RP is predictive with regards the whether and the when, if a known task is performed, but not with regards to the what of the action (Brass and Haggard, 2008 ).

Jo et al. ( 2013 ) seems to go in the same direction with their work: they considered both the positive and the negative potential shifts in a “self-initiated movement condition” as well as in a no-movement condition. The comparison of the potential shifts in different conditions showed that the onset of the RP appeared to be unchanged. “This reveals that the apparently negative RP emerges through an unequal ratio of negative and positive potential shifts. These results suggest that ongoing negative shifts of the SCPs facilitate self-initiated movement but are not related to processes underlying preparation or decision to act” (Jo et al., 2013 ).

Murakami et al. ( 2014 ) confirmed those findings. They used rats, who had to perform a specific task: wait for a tone (which was purposely delayed) and decide when to stop waiting for it. The rats’ neuronal activity of the secondary M2 was recorded and resulted consistent with the model of integration-to-bound decision. “A first population of M2 neurons ramped to a constant threshold at rates proportional to waiting time, strongly resembling integrator output. A second population, which they propose provide input to the integrator, fired in sequences and showed trial-to-trial rate fluctuations correlated with waiting times” (Murakami et al., 2014 ). Also, an integration model based on the recorded neuronal activity in the considered brain areas has allowed the researchers to quantitatively foresee the inter-neuronal correlations manifested during the task performance. “Together, these results reinforce the generality of the integration-to-bound model of decision-making. These models identify the initial intention to act as the moment of threshold crossing while explaining how antecedent subthreshold neural activity can influence an action without implying a decision” (Murakami et al., 2014 ).

Schurger et al. ( 2016 ) stress that the main new finding about the brain activity preceding SVM “is that the apparent build-up of this activity, up until about 200 ms pre-movement, may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a “decision” to initiate movement”. The model used is the bounded-integration process, “a computational model of decision making wherein sensory evidence and internal noise (both in the form of neural activity) are integrated over time by one or more decision neurons until a fixed threshold-level firing rate us reached, at which the animal issues a motor response. In the case of spontaneous self-initiated movement there is no sensory evidence, so the process is dominated by internal noise” (Schurger et al., 2016 ). The stochastic decision model (SDM) used by Schurger et al. ( 2012 ) allowed them to claim that bounded integration seems to explain stimulus-response decision as relying on the same neural decision mechanism used for perceptual decisions and internal self-paced intention and decision as “dominated by ongoing stochastic fluctuations in neural activity that influence the precise moment at which the decision threshold is reached” (Schurger et al., 2016 ). And this mechanism seems to be shared with all animals including crayfish (Kagaya and Takahata, 2010 ).

The philosophical implications could be that “when one forms an intention to act, one is significantly disposed to act but not yet fully committed. The commitment comes when one finally decides to act. The SDM reveals a remarkably similar picture on the neuronal level, with the decision to act being a threshold crossing neural event that is preceded by a neural tendency toward this event” (Schurger et al., 2016 ).

The Veto Power

Another recent study has brought back to the center of neuroscientific research the space of autonomy that the subject seems to have compared to the idea of free will as an illusion supported by the experiments based on the alleged unconscious onset of the action. Schultze-Kraft et al. ( 2016 ) showed that people are able to cancel movements after elicitation of RP if stop signals occur earlier than 200 ms before movement onset. In the real-time experiment, “subjects played a game where they tried to press a button to earn points in a challenge with a brain–computer interface (BCI) that had been trained to detect their RPs in real time and to emit stop signals” (Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016 ).

The subjects had to press with their foot a button on the floor after a green light flashed: they could so whenever they wanted after about 2 s. Participants earned points if they pressed the button before the red light to come back (the stop signal). The experiment was composed of three phases. In the first phase, the stop signals were lit at random and the movements of the subjects were not predicted. In the second phase, the authors used data taken from the EEG on the participants in the first phase. In this way a classifier was trained to predict (with imperfect accuracy) the movements (the When and the Whether, not the What). In this phase, the BCI could foresee the fact that the subject would press the button thanks to the detection of the RP and therefore turned on the red light to earn points against the subject if it could not stop the movement. In the third phase, the subjects were informed that the BCI could “see their preparation of the movement” and they had to try to beat the computer by moving in an unforeseeable way.

In all phases of the experiment, there was no difference between RPs. While in the first phase, in 66.5% of the cases, subjects were winning by pressing the button with the green light on, in stages two and three trials in which subjects were able to beat the computer, by not pushing the button with the red light on, decreased to 31%, and warning participants of the prediction of the BCI would not help them do any better. The authors could thus claim that “despite the stereotypical shape of the RP and its early onset at around 1000 ms before EMG activity, several aspects of our data suggest that subjects were able to cancel an upcoming movement until a point of no return was reached around 200 ms before movement onset. If the stop signal occurs later than 200 ms before EMG onset, the subject cannot avoid moving” (Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016 ). The explanation of the minimum threshold of 200 ms could reflect the time necessary for the stop signal to light up, the subject to perceive it and cancel the movement that was already being prepared.

As to which cortical areas are involved in vetoing an already initiated movement, some studies have tried to identify them. Brass and Haggard ( 2007 ) examined the voluntary inhibition using an experimental paradigm that was based on the Libet task. The subjects were asked to press a button while watching a cursor moving along the face of a clock. Every time, after pressing the button, the subjects had to signal the precise moment when they thought they decided to press the button. In addition, the instructions specified that the participants had to inhibit the execution of the response in some tests of their choice. Comparing this voluntary inhibition condition with the condition in which the action had not been inhibited, the authors observed an activation of the dorsal fronto-medial cortex (DFM). This area is different from the brain regions involved in the stop signal tasks, in which the inhibition is controlled by external signals. Furthermore, the DFM cortex is also distinct from the brain regions controlling the activity linked to the when and what components of voluntary action. Brass and Haggard ( 2007 ) have interpreted this finding as evidence that there is a mechanism of voluntary inhibition that can be dissociated, in neuroanatomo-functional terms, from an “environmental” inhibiting mechanism, which involves the lateral prefrontal cortex.

This finding was replicated in a subsequent study of Kühn et al. ( 2009 ), in which the subjects had to avoid dropping a ball sliding down a ramp, by pressing a button before the ball came down and broke. In some tests of their choice, they could choose to voluntarily inhibit the response. The comparison of the condition of voluntary inhibition with the condition of voluntary action still showed activation of the DFM cortex, supporting the idea that this area is involved in the inhibition of voluntary action (Schel et al., 2014 ).

Finally, Schultze-Kraft et al. ( 2016 ) declared to be agnostic about the interpretation of their data in regards of RP. As the RP is predictive of the subsequent movement, it could be read as “the leaky integration of spontaneous fluctuations in autocorrelated neural signals”. Theoretically, the question remains about the departure of the intention to block the action while the movement is being prepared, along with the possible coexistence of two intentions suggested by the commands of the experimenters. The participants in the experiment, in fact, want to win against the computer, therefore they want to push the button, and also have the intention, partly contrasting, not to push the button when the computer turns the red light on.

A More Realistic Model

This novel perspective offered by the line of research by Schurger et al. ( 2012 ) here described works on very simple decision-making processes and could be exposed to the same criticism in this regard have been made to Libet’s research line. But Roskies ( 2010b ) has suggested some tracks along which to develop research on more complex decision-making processes, close to those relevant to social life. First, one must introduce the value of the decision, seen as a subjective or moral feature that drives action. By manipulating the expected rewards for correct action or for a particular type of decisions, or by manipulating the probabilities of the outcomes, both the decision and the activity levels of LIP neurons are altered (Platt and Glimcher, 1999 ; Glimcher, 2002 ; Dorris and Glimcher, 2004 ; Sugrue et al., 2004 ). In this way it is possible to change the monkey’s choice about the objective of the saccade by offering her favorite reward. Although it is not known how the figures are represented, it seems that the Lip neurons can integrate the information on the value or on the reward in the decision-making process, and that information has a causal role.

As for the reasons, and the responsiveness to them, Roskies ( 2010b ) suggests that also the reasons, albeit discursive and propositional, may be encoded as information at the neuronal level. Simplifying, in her view one might think that in a situation where, say, there is little food and many people, different populations of neurons represent the content “I am hungry”, while others represent “others need this more than I do”, others “the weak come first” and so forth, weighing reasons in terms of activation and modulation of the response of the populations of neurons delegated to the choice and the final decision. However, such a model (Dorris and Glimcher, 2004 ) should be considered as purely hypothetical because first we do not know what are the specific populations of neurons, we don’t yet have the instruments to identify them, and we do not know their interactions (also considering the recent failures of naturalized semantics).

Secondly—and perhaps most importantly—it is unclear how what we externally call “reasons” could be activated and weighed by the decision-maker understood as a unitary subject or self, according to the description for which we truly act based on reasons. In this case, I believe one cannot seek a simple neural interface for commonsensical concepts and notions. In fact, the idea of a deep and unitary self—the idea of a conscious subject controlling her behavior instant by instant—has been strongly challenged by evidence coming from empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Dennett, 1991 ; Metzinger, 2004 , 2009 ). Therefore, one should avoid the temptation to reproduce such a description in neural levels. But if we trace back the reasons to populations of neurons in a mechanistic model—if we trace them back to thresholds—it is not easy to figure out who makes the decisions and why. If it is true that some people seem to be more sensitive to specific reasons, other than those to which other people are sensitive, and if people can change over time the reasons by which they are usually motivated, and in certain situations the same people may not to respond to the reasons to which they are usually sensitive, one has to wonder if what prevails are processes that we would call random or that, in any case, are beyond our control.

Here the role of consciousness seems again to be relevant. If experiments à la Libet seemed to have ruled it out from a causal standpoint, the experiment by Schultze-Kraft et al. ( 2016 ) on movement vetoing seems to reassess its role in blocking the preparation process triggered in the brain. In this sense, this seems to be a more realistic line of neuroscientific investigation on free will, one that contemplates, even in broad terms, stochastic brain processes, for the most part triggered by environmental stimuli, which often are not aware of (the same as our train of thoughts arising spontaneously without us being able to orientate it from the beginning), but also by spontaneous activity of the brain (Changeux, 2004 ; Brembs, 2011 ) that creates models of reality. “Learning mechanisms evolved to permit flexible behavior as a modification of reflexive behavioral strategies. In order to do so, not one, but multiple representations and action patterns should be generated by the brain” (De Ridder et al., 2013 ). And this repertoire is not infinite. Indeed, “our evolutionary-evolved brain potential to generate multiple action plans is constrained by what is stored in memory and by what is present in the environment” (De Ridder et al., 2013 ). Schurger and Uithol ( 2015 ) also argue that the “actions emerge from a causal web in the brain” and that the “proprioceptive feedback might play a counterintuitive role in the decision process”. They, thus recommend the use of dynamical systems approach for the study of the origins of voluntary action.

On these spontaneous processes we can exercise control, which can be considered automatic and unconscious when evaluated with the classical theoretical criteria of conscious control. First, there is an innate behavioral repertoire of provisions linked to survival in the environments within which we evolved. Secondly, there is a repertoire of behavioral provisions that is stratified in terms of conscious repetitions due to environmental stimuli or to internal choices (with all the limitations that this expression has in reference to the brain mechanisms analyzed so far) and then becomes automatic. The control can, however, also be explicit, with obvious limitations and cases of complete control failure. Based on this complex self-construction (which has a neural correlates), we are creatures with a higher or lower degree of free will. This free will may then be better understood and circumscribed, so as to be more objectively operationalized and also measured.

Operazionalizing, Measuring and Verifying: From the Action to the Brain

My view is that a richer conceptualization of free will—one that is able to overcome the stall of the metaphysical debate as well as the current difficulties of neuroscience (Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ) and empirical psychology (Nahmias, 2014 )–has to be linked to the idea of “capacity”. In fact, as claimed by Mecacci and Haselager ( 2015 ), the kind of free will investigated by neuroscientific experiments, which is self-generated and defined according to the absence of cues, “does little justice to the common sense practice of holding people responsible for their freely willed actions that consists in asking explanations and justifications from the actor” (Mecacci and Haselager, 2015 ).

Another important point is that there are differences in time scales between laboratory tasks (the milliseconds to seconds time range) and real life or, better, life as we measure it temporally (seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, years) regarding decisions that really concern us. Even if the underlying mechanism might be the same, the experiments described so far cannot investigate whether decisions with a longer maturation process are free and to what extent they are such. It might be possible to distinguish between proximal and distal mechanisms, but this doesn’t seem feasible lacking the tools to address decisions involving longer time scales. For this reason it might be useful to introduce other and different ways to conceptualize and operationalize (supposedly) free actions.

“By capacity, in the context of free will, we mean the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without the moment by moment conscious control that is required by the second condition of free will we have previously seen” (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). The concept of capacity is related to that of internal control, understood as the agent’s “ownership” of the mechanism that triggers the relevant behavior and the reasons-responsiveness of that mechanism (Fischer and Ravizza, 2000 ). And reasons-responsiveness must involve a coherent pattern of reasons-recognition. “More specifically, it must involve a pattern of actual and hypothetical recognition of reasons that is understandable by some appropriate external observer. And the pattern must be at least minimally grounded in reality” (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). The concept of capacity used in this sense, and combined with the idea of reasons-responsiveness, also avoids the objection of determinism that has always weighed on the debate on free will. From a philosophical point of view, the approach related to capacity may fall indeed in the strand of so-called compatibilism, which defends the fact that human freedom can exist even if determinism is true of the physical world.

Cognitive abilities might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Executive functions, also known as control functions, are essential to organize and plan everyday behavior—which is not the instant behavior found in Libet’s experiments. Those skills are necessary to perform the greater part of our goal-oriented actions. They allow us to modulate our behavior, control its development and change it according to the environmental stimuli (the environment being both physical and social). Also, executive functions allow us to change our behavior based on it effects, with a sophisticated feedback mechanism; finally, they are also necessary for tasks of abstraction, inventiveness and judgment. Those who, for whatever reason, have a deficit in their executive functions cannot respond to their social environment appropriately, and struggle to plan their behavior or to choose between alternatives based on their judgment or interest. Sufferers of these deficits in executive functions often fail to control their instinctive responses and to modify their regular courses of action, or are unable to concentrate or persist in the pursuit of a goal (Barkley, 2012 ; Goldstein and Naglieri, 2014 ).

In general terms, the executive functions refer to the set of mental processes necessary for the development of cognitive-behavioral patterns adaptive in response to new and demanding environmental conditions. The domain of executive functions includes (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ):

• the ability of planning and evaluation of effective strategies in relation to a specific purpose related to the skills of problem-solving and cognitive flexibility.
• inhibitory control and decision-making processes that support the selection of functional response and the modification of the response (behavior) in relation to changing environmental contingencies.
• attentional control referred to the ability to inhibit interfering stimuli and to activate the relevant information.
• working memory referring to the cognitive mechanisms that can maintain online and manipulate information necessary to perform complex cognitive tasks.
• (and it can be added with regards to free will) creativity and the ability to cope with environmental changes through novel solutions.

Those of empirical psychology are higher order concepts, which act as a bridge between free will, which is something that is not in the brain but can be observed in behavior (along with its causes), and the underlying brain processes. It has been convincingly suggested that in the construction of a hierarchy of mechanisms and explanations (Craver, 2007 ), also to guide the exploration, one must go from inside to outside and from outside to inside. One goes from measurable skills to their brain basis, and from the tentative index of free will to the underlying (real) mechanisms.

Based on the evidence presented, I believe that a viable proposal is to construct an index related to compatible tests whose relevance can be uniformly ascertained. It would be a kind of IQ-like profile that would allow for the operationalization and quantification of a person’s cognitive skills. All the tests used (for example, Stroop Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Weigl’s Color-Form Sorting Test, Go-No Go Test) should be related to the subject’s age and education and then transformed in new standardized scores (Equivalent Scores, ES) on an ordinal scale, e. g. ranging from 0 to 4, with 0 representing scores below cut-off point and 4 representing scores equal to or better than average. Specific standardized scores exist in many countries or linguistic areas. The subjects would get for each test a raw score (or RS), given by the sum of the scores obtained in each item that makes up the test, which would then be standardized.

A synthetic index such as the one here proposed measures a certain range of cognitive and behavioral control skills that configure a certain kind of free will at the psychological-functional level. These are potential capacities measured with standardized instruments in laboratory situations, which do not consider any other factors that may restrict the freedom of a subject in specific situations, such as those that are relevant in moral scenarios and legal contexts. The same goes for moral judgment. However, an index such as the one I’m proposing here could be the first step, albeit certainly imperfect, towards more objective measures to discriminate between people who have more or less “free will” or, in other words, are more or less capable of self-control and rational choice (i.e., a reasons-responsive choice).

This hypothesis would be in line with the proposals of operationalizing free will advanced so far. According to Vohs ( 2010 ), freedom might be conceived of as the sum of executive functions and goal-directed, future-oriented behaviors, which include rational choice, planning, intelligent thought, and self-control. Free will can be then constituted by a limited stock of energy, devoted to guiding executive functioning processes. The free will index I am proposing is also consistent with Baumeister’s contribution:

Psychologists should focus on what we do best: collecting evidence about measurable variance in behaviors and inner processes and identifying consistent patterns in them. With free will, it seems most productive for psychologists to start with the well-documented observation that some acts are freer than others. As already noted, dissonance, reactance, coping with stress, and other behaviors have been shown in the laboratory to depend on variations in freedom and choice. Hence, it is only necessary to assume that there are genuine phenomena behind those subjective and objective differences in freedom. In a nutshell, we should explain what happens differently between free and unfree actions (Baumeister, 2008 ).

Empirical research on how human beings work has recently focused on self-control as a feature of free will. Self-control can be defined as the exertion of willpower on behavior. Self-control is thus generally regarded as the capacity to override inappropriate impulses and automatic or habitual responses and to suppress or delay immediate gratification so as to reach a long-term goal (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007 ). “Being in control” includes the capacity to maintain goals, to balance long- and short-term values, to consider and evaluate the consequences of a planned action, and to resist being “carried away by emotion” (Churchland, 2006 ). Self-control can also be regarded as the ability of higher-order functions to modulate the activity of lower-level functions, where higher-order functions manifest themselves externally in complex behavior, adjusted according to the environmental needs, while lower-level functions are manifested in simple and stereotyped behaviors, not adjusted according to the demands of the environment (Roskies, 2010a ). Everyone exhibits a different degree of self-control compared to other individuals, and for each person the degree of self-control varies over time (Baumeister et al., 2006 ; Casey et al., 2011 ; Dang et al., 2015 ). The variability of self-control that is manifested in behavior and can be measured with the test has its base in neuronal functioning, which in turn depends on education and habits, external circumstances and the internal neuronal noise.

However, two executive functions turn out to be central:

(i) the ability to predict the future outcomes of a given action; and (ii) the ability to suppress inappropriate, i.e., not sufficiently valuable, actions. Importantly, these two executive functions operate not only during the genesis of an action, but also during the planning of an already selected action. In fact, during the temporal gap between the time when an action has been chosen and the moment when the motor output is going to be generated, the context might have changed, altering the computed value of the action and thus requiring a radical change of the planned motor strategy (Mirabella, 2014 ).

It seems that the peculiarity of our freedom at the cognitive level is the ability to modulate or block courses of action that environmental stimuli automatically or unconsciously arouse in us—a reproposal in different form of Libet’s free won’t and Schultze-Kraft’s vetoing . These psychological-functional indicators must then lead to their cerebral bases. For instance, one can consider a situation in which one’s needs are satisfied (or not) and the consequent motivation to act based on the evaluation process of the need satisfaction.

This is an essential process and one that is continuously performed by our motor system. In fact, in most places where we live, if not all, we are surrounded by tools whose sight automatically activates motor schemas that would normally be employed to interact with those objects. These actions are prompted by the features of the objects, the so-called affordances (Gibson, 1979 ). It has been shown that even the simple observation of pictures depicting affordable objects (such as graspable objects) activates a sub-region of the medial frontal cortex, the SMA, even when there is no requirement to actually act on those stimuli (Grèzes and Decety, 2002 ). These stimulus-driven activations are rapid, involuntary, and unconscious (Mirabella, 2014 ).

Environmental stimuli, in this case, can induce a subject to make specific choices through a priming process that exploits our action tendencies. Typically, individuals are able to control their behavior, but in some cases they fail to do so; for example if suffering from microlesions of the SMA, people have a tendency to invariably implement a certain type of action, even if the environment, both physical and social, does not require it (Sumner et al., 2007 ). In fact, “the suppression of a triggered action might be seen not as an active process, but rather as an automatic consequence of the evaluative procedure” (Mirabella, 2014 ). One could then say that those who have the ability to better monitor, control and direct their own behavior are “freerer” than those who do not have this capability. Individuals affected by disorders of the executive functions are not able to grasp and process environmental stimuli to direct their behavior. For example, these people may not be able to stop the utilization behavior, an automatic mechanism that tends to make us interact with all the objects that are in our perceptual sphere.

Churchland ( 2006 ) and Suhler and Churchland ( 2009 ) proposed a hypothesis concerning the neural basis for control, which can bridge the gap between higher-order concepts and brain mechanisms. As she wrote,

Perhaps we can identify various parameters of the normal profile of being in control, which would include specific connectivity patterns between amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula, between anterior cingulate gyrus and prefrontal cortex, and so forth. Other parameters would identify, for each of the six non specific systems [identified via the neurotransmitter secreted at the axon terminals: serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, histamine and acetylcholine], the normal distribution of axon terminals and the normal patterns of neurotransmitter release, uptake, and co-localization with other neurotransmitters such as glutamate. Levels of various hormones would specify another set of parameters. Yet other parameters contrast the immature with adult pattern of synaptic density and axon myelinization. At the current stage of neuroscience, we can identify the normal range for these parameters only roughly, not precisely (Churchland, 2006 ).

This hypothesis would allow for specific brain correlates of a free will index based on the executive functions-guided self-control and even, hypothetically, a direct brain measure of being in control For example, a recent study (Bartelle et al., 2016 ) highlights the possibility of having MRI imaging of dopamine release thanks to a engineered protein that binds to the neurotransmitter and works as a MRI-visible probe. As the authors put it, “one could imagine a future in which molecular fMRI is used to determine brain-wide neurochemicals maps corresponding to a universe of stimuli and behavioral programs”. Even though one should always consider that there isn’t perfect correspondence between higher-order concepts and putative neural correlates.

In particular, one must consider that what matters in interpersonal relations and in law, to give two examples of practical relevance of free will, is freedom as actually performed: that is, freedom as it can be observed and with some approximation, also measured through a series of psychological tests. This does not mean that the same level of freedom manifested in behavior matches the same level of activation of the related brain areas. However, one can investigate the brain causes of “freedom deficit” compared with the average shown by relevant samples of the population, and so come to a progressive refinement of the research on the neural bases of free will.

Another example is given by the investigation of the role of the cholinergic interneurons in behavioral flexibility (Aoki et al., 2015 ). This class of neurons seem to be connected to survive in an ever-changing world, which requires behaving flexibly. Flexibility can be assessed (and measured) at a behavioral level, but cerebral mechanisms remain largely unknown. Using conventional tests on behavioral flexibility, which require animals to shift their attention from one stimulus property (e.g., color) to another (e.g., shape), researchers probed the effects of an immunotoxin-induced lesion of cholinergic interneurons in the striatum.

A selective cholinergic ablation was made by means of injections of immunotoxin, which targeted neurons containing choline acetyltransferase in the dorsomedial or ventral striatum. A control group was instead injected with saline. “When encountering a change of behavioral rules after the set-shift, either lesion made animals stick to a previously correct but now invalid response strategy. They also showed less exploratory behavior toward finding a new rule. Most interestingly, ablation of cholinergic neurons in the dorsomedial striatum impaired a shift of set when it required attention to a previously irrelevant cue. On the other hand, ventral cholinergic lesions had an effect on a shift in which a novel stimulus was introduced as a new directional cue” (Aoki et al., 2015 ). Animals thus can be taken to be “less free” when striatal cholinergic interneurons don’t work properly.

This last example serves to indicate how to bridge the gap between overt behaviors (to which we tend to attribute the property of freedom) with neuronal mechanisms that are clearly identifiable and even manipulable. In fact, it is not so important to look at the conscious aspect of a single proximal mechanism, but rather to consider the manifest behavioral effect that the considered mechanism helps to produce. This way there would be a paradigm shift with respect to the neuroscience research on free will, which seems to have long been too closely linked to the falsification of the theoretical assumption that an action is free only if it has a beginning that is fully controlled by a conscious process. The proposal, I am making here has only the ambition to be a potentially helpful contribution to theoretical debate and empirical research, although its limits are very clear. First, it focuses on a specific part of what is intuitively called “free will”, relating it to the idea of “capacity”. Second, it proposes to measure free will at a psychological level by means of a unitary index that inevitably misses many nuances of the notion and the relative capacity. Furthermore, the search for the neural correlated of such capacities implies not only the identification of causal mechanisms, but also the consideration of many cerebral areas. All of this makes things harder compared to approaches à la Libet. Nevertheless, there is manifest advantage: there is a greater degree of realism and adherence to the actual behavioral manifestation of what we call “free will”.

Free will is an elusive but crucial concept. For many years we have known that the functioning of our brain has to do not only with the belief that we have free will but also with the existence of free will itself. Evidence of the unconscious start of movement, highlighted by the RP signal, has led to believe that we had reached an experimental proof of the non-existence of free will—which many already claimed at a theoretical level based on the argument of the incompatibility between determinism and freedom. Along with other evidence provided by experimental psychology, the branch of studies inaugurated by Libet has contributed to seeing free will as an illusion: this view seemed to be reliably supported by science, and in particular by neuroscience. Recent studies, however, seem to question this paradigm, which sees the initiation and conscious control of the action as the first requirement of free will, allegedly proving that there are no such things.

The stochastic models and the models of evidence accumulation consider decision as the crossing of a threshold of activity in specific brain regions. They do not restore the idea of conscious control but turn away from the previous paradigm. These studies cannot yet fully explain how the intention to perform an action arises in the brain, but they better account for the complexity of the process. In particular, they recognize the role of the spontaneous activity of the brain, of external cues and other factors—including those that might be called “will” and “reasons” (which, however, do not currently have precisely identified neural correlates)—in reaching the critical threshold. Studies that show how we can consciously block movements whose preparation has already begun unconsciously, then, indicate how the subject is able to exercise a form of control, whose genesis however is still unclear.

One could state that free “decision-making draws upon a rich history of accumulated information, manifested in preferences, attitudes and motivations, and is related to the current internal and external environment in which we act. Complete absence of context is impossible” (Bode et al., 2014 ). In this framework, I have here proposed to integrate neuroscientific research on free will by connecting higher-level concepts with their neural correlates through a psychological operationalization in terms of skills and cognitive functions that do not necessarily imply a continuous conscious control over the decision-making and action process. This may also allow one to create a quantitative index, albeit still quite rudimentary, of the degree of freedom of each subject. This freedom would be specifically defined and therefore may not perfectly coincide with the intuitive concept of free will. Starting from these functional indicators, which psychology has well clarified, one could then move on to investigate the precise neural correlates for a different and (possibly) more fundamental level of explanation in terms of brain processes that enable the executive functions.

According to Craver ( 2007 ), a mechanistic explanation is able to lead to an inter-field integration. There are two relevant aspects to this approach. The functional knowledge that can be drawn from psychological research is a tool to identify neural mechanisms; the knowledge of the brain structure can guide the construction of far more sophisticated psychological models (Bechtel and Mundale, 1999 ). The index of free will that I am proposing (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 )—despite surely needing further refinement—might be useful to explore the brain mechanisms that underlie what appears in behavior as “free will”, which no longer seems to be an illusion, not even for neuroscientific research.

Author Contributions

AL confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence Essay

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If one was to ask a random person whether they have free will, the answer would likely be affirmative, for a variety of reasons. It is both challenging and incomprehensible for most human beings to accept that their life may be guided by something other than the free will of decision-making. However, the concept of determinism, although not directly meant to challenge free will, ultimately suggests incompatibility. Determinism is a theory which states that the course of the future is determined by a combination of past events and the laws of nature, creating a unique outcome. It argues that the events that are secured in the past, combined with laws of nature that drive the real world, results in a possible reality where the very same events and natural laws would apply, and therefore, shape the future. Causal determinism is the primary argument against free will presented in this paper using the following premises:

• P1. The universe is deterministic with past events and laws of nature bring subsequent change and a unique future;
• P2. Humans have no influence or choice about the laws of nature or events in the past;
• P3. Events of past or nature are determined by physical forces since human actions are events, in reality, then they are determined by physical forces;
• P4. If humans do not cause or originate actions, then these events are not controlled by us, thus lacking the ability of self-determination;
• P5. The no-choice principle – a lack of influence on the inputs, resulting in a lack of control over the output or predetermined future;

Determinism is incompatible with freedom of will.

P1 is the basic premise of determinism. P2 examines the human ability to influence said premise. P3 creates the sequence which affects human decisions. P4 explores how the concept of free will plays into determinism. P5 presents a theory and closing argument. The conclusion is the final logical assumption based on the premises.

There are several schools of thought regarding determinism and free will. There are the compatibilism perspectives that suggest that both free will and determinism are real and can co-exist or are mutually compatible in reality. While compatibilists believe at least partially in some effect of a metaphysical combination of past events and natural laws, the freedom of choice ultimately depends on the situation, sometimes humans are forced by circumstance while in other times, humans are free agents. Compatibilists argue that determinism does not suggest a lack of free will because it does not entail that humans ever act on their desires unencumbered

The incompatibilism perspective views free will and determinism as conflicting, with two schools emerging of libertarianism which suggests free will exists in the indeterministic world, and hard determinism that presents a world with no free will. Hard determinism will be explored here, through a concept known as the consequence argument or “no choice principle.” It follows the basic premise of how one can have a choice about something that is an outcome of something that one has no influence on. Therefore, since no human being has a choice about past events or laws of nature, the logical conclusion is that there is no choice about current decisions, supporting determinism.

According to determinism, the state of the universe results in the decision. With laws of nature stating that if a specific state of the universe would lead to certain outcomes. No one has a choice about that sequence of events or the state of the universe or laws of nature, and it is consequential that no one has any choice about the decision. Such conditional proof eliminates any aspect of free will. For example, John is placed in a situation where he has to either lie or tell the truth. This decision is based on a pulse from the brain which converts to behavioral action. For the pulse in the brain to go one way or another, one has to consider the laws of nature as well as the state of John’s brain and related aspects. For John to decide on which way the pulse must go, he had to have done something beforehand to influence it. Since he did not do this, the direction is undetermined and there is no freedom. If John was really free, he must have had an influence on the event leading up to this position, but instead, it was determined by a sequence of prior events and the laws of nature. Every action and thought coming from John are consistent with the prior event both occurring and not occurring. If there is no genuine choice, and the decision is random, it is not an exemplification of free will – fully supporting hard determinism.

The primary philosophical interest and concern in the free will v. determinism argument are actually motivated by the external factor of moral responsibility. If the no-consequence argument is accepted and determinism stands true as the force precludes free will, the same applies to moral responsibility since it is generally accepted that freedom is a necessary condition for one to take responsibility for the course of action. However, the concepts are mutually exclusive as moral responsibility is a scope of ethics rather than compatibilism and incompatibilism. It is also a matter of perception on moral responsibility, whereas proponents of free will argue that only self-determination and full control of one’s actions can present an appropriate platform for the evaluation of morality.

At the same time, supporters of hard determinism demonstrate an argument on their own. The compatibility of moral responsibility with determinism had to be proven via that the ability to do otherwise (alternative action) was also compatible. Eventually, the principle of alternate possibilities was introduced, which suggested that whether one was a supporter of compatibilism or incompatibilism, the ability to choose is not necessary for moral responsibility. It was demonstrated through a two-step thought experiment. In the context of free will, there is a person named John who is faced with a morally challenging decision, and he chooses an immoral alternative, therefore burdening the responsibility. There is an omnipotent being, a threat, or penalty which would punish John if he did not act accordingly. Any sort of coercion mechanism can be implied here, but it would only intervene if John makes an alternate choice. By coincidence, John acts exactly as the coercive mechanism wants, making the decision.

The question arises, whether John is morally responsible for the action even though he was coerced. It is implied that the threat is so significant that John has no other choice, thus the lack of “alternate possibilities.” However, since John acted according to the will of a higher being, there was no intervention and nobody ultimately forced him to make that choice. This is a metaphor for determinism, which suggests that it does not matter whether an individual has free will, because choices are not genuine, always guided by some sort of coercion, and one is unable to choose otherwise. Therefore, moral responsibility is largely irrelevant to the outcome, but rather applies during the actual sequence of events.

As criticism of determinism, it can be argued that if one has knowledge about past events and laws of nature, possessing some intelligence, one can predict the future, thus acting in free will to change it. The no-choice principle becomes challenged as, in this scenario, it would no longer meet the premise. Even if determinism stands true, it is entirely possible for the future to be unpredictable since there is an inherently weak link between a determined future and a predictable future. Humans generally lack the necessary intellectual capacity or the full understanding of past and natural events to make accurate assumptions about the future and cannot be used as an argument that determinism does not exist.

In conclusion, determinism presents a strong argument against the existence of a free will. In comparison to more abstract philosophies such as Laplace’s demon, causal determinism is more grounded in logic. The primary issue with determinism is that it is currently empirically impossible to prove that the universe is deterministic, thus challenging the premises. Furthermore, there are a number of perspectives on whether determinism and free will are compatible and able to co-exist.

The author of this paper does not align with a particular school of thought but most closely relates to compatibilism in the context of Ayer’s Paradox. Ultimately, it does not matter whether determinism is true, or events are probabilistic, as neither demonstrates free will and in both realities, moral responsibility is denied. If events could not have been avoided based on the deterministic argument, then there is no free will or moral responsibility, and the same outcome emerges even if events are random, the combination of factors and natural forces still lead to certain decisions which a human cannot interpret. Free will does not exist in the context that most people assume, as choices are bound to either causal laws or statistical law, which one is unable to escape, and this does not meet the requirements for freedom of action.

• Master Zhuang's Philosophical Theory of Freedom
• Boredom and Freedom: Different Views and Links
• Are We Free to Act and Think as We Like?
• Free Will and Determinism Analysis
• Against Free Will: Determinism and Prediction
• Determinism Argument and Objection to It
• The Existence of Freedom
• Van Inwagen’s Philosophical Argument on Free Will
• Mill's Power over Body vs. Foucault's Freedom
• Rousseau’s vs. Confucius’ Freedom Concept
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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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

Other Internet Resources

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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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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30 Existence of Free Will

Determinism and freedom.

Determinism and free will are often thought to be in deep conflict. Whether or not this is true has a lot to do with what is meant by determinism and an account of what free will requires.

First of all, determinism is not the view that free actions are impossible. Rather, determinism is the view that at any one time, only one future is physically possible. To be a little more specific, determinism is the view that a complete description of the past along with a complete account of the relevant laws of nature logically entails all future events. 1

Indeterminism is simply the denial of determinism. If determinism is incompatible with free will, it will be because free actions are only possible in worlds in which more than one future is physically possible at any one moment in time. While it might be true that free will requires indeterminism, it’s not true merely by definition. A further argument is needed and this suggests that it is at least possible that people could sometimes exercise the control necessary for morally responsible action, even if we live in a deterministic world.

It is worth saying something about fatalism before we move on. It is really easy to mistake determinism for fatalism, and fatalism does seem to be in straightforward conflict with free will. Fatalism is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. If fatalism is true, then nothing that we try or think or intend or believe or decide has any causal effect or relevance as to what we actually end up doing.

But note that determinism need not entail fatalism. Determinism is a claim about what is logically entailed by the rules/laws governing a world and the past of said world. It is not the claim that we lack the power to do other than what we actually were already going to do. Nor is it the view that we fail to be an important part of the causal story for why we do what we do. And this distinction may allow some room for freedom, even in deterministic worlds.

An example will be helpful here. We know that the boiling point for water is 100°C. Suppose we know in both a deterministic world and a fatalistic world that my pot of water will be boiling at 11:22am today. Determinism makes the claim that if I take a pot of water and I put it on my stove, and heat it to 100°C, it will boil. This is because the laws of nature (in this case, water that is heated to 100°C will boil) and the events of the past (I put a pot of water on a hot stove) bring about the boiling water. But fatalism makes a different claim. If my pot of water is fated to boil at 11:22am today, then no matter what I or anyone does, my pot of water will boil at exactly 11:22am today. I could try to empty the pot of water out at 11:21. I could try to take the pot as far away from a heating source as possible. Nonetheless, my pot of water will be boiling at 11:22 precisely because it was fated that this would happen. Under fatalism, the future is fixed or preordained, but this need not be the case in a deterministic world. Under determinism, the future is a certain way because of the past and the rules governing said world. If we know that a pot of water will boil at 11:22am in a deterministic world, it’s because we know that the various causal conditions will hold in our world such that at 11:22 my pot of water will have been put on a heat source and brought to 100°C. Our deliberations, our choices, and our free actions may very well be part of the process that brings a pot of water to the boiling point in a deterministic world, whereas these are clearly irrelevant in fatalistic ones.

Three Views of Freedom

Most accounts of freedom fall into one of three camps. Some people take freedom to require merely the ability to “do what you want to do.” For example, if you wanted to walk across the room, right now, and you also had the ability, right now, to walk across the room, you would be free as you could do exactly what you want to do. We will call this easy freedom.

Others view freedom on the infamous “Garden of Forking Paths” model. For these people, free action requires more than merely the ability to do what you want to do. It also requires that you have the ability to do otherwise than what you actually did. So, If Anya is free when she decides to take a sip from her coffee, on this view, it must be the case that Anya could have refrained from sipping her coffee. The key to freedom, then, is alternative possibilities and we will call this the alternative possibilities view of free action.

Finally, some people envision freedom as requiring, not alternative possibilities but the right kind of relationship between the antecedent sources of our actions and the actions that we actually perform. Sometimes this view is explained by saying that the free agent is the source, perhaps even the ultimate source of her action. We will call this kind of view a source view of freedom.

Now, the key question we want to focus on is whether or not any of these three models of freedom are compatible with determinism. It could turn out that all three kinds of freedom are ruled out by determinism, so that the only way freedom is possible is if determinism is false. If you believe that determinism rules out free action, you endorse a view called incompatibilism. But it could turn out that one or all three of these models of freedom are compatible with determinism. If you believe that free action is compatible with determinism, you are a compatibilist.

Let us consider compatibilist views of freedom and two of the most formidable challenges that compatibilists face: the consequence argument and the ultimacy argument.

Begin with easy freedom. Is easy freedom compatible with determinism? A group of philosophers called classic compatibilists certainly thought so. 2  They argued that free will requires merely the ability for an agent to act without external hindrance. Suppose, right now, you want to put your textbook down and grab a cup of coffee. Even if determinism is true, you probably, right now, can do exactly that. You can put your textbook down, walk to the nearest Starbucks, and buy an overpriced cup of coffee. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you want to do. Determinism does not seem to be posing any threat to your ability to do what you want to do right now. If you want to stop reading and grab a coffee, you can. But, by contrast, if someone had chained you to the chair you are sitting in, things would be a bit different. Even if you wanted to grab a cup of coffee, you would not be able to. You would lack the ability to do so. You would not be free to do what you want to do. This has nothing to do with determinism, of course. It is not the fact that you might be living in a deterministic world that is threatening your free will. It is that an external hindrance (the chains holding you to your chair) is stopping from you doing what you want to do. So, if what we mean by freedom is easy freedom, it looks like freedom really is compatible with determinism.

Easy freedom has run into some rather compelling opposition, and most philosophers today agree that a plausible account of easy freedom is not likely. But, by far, the most compelling challenge the view faces can be seen in the consequence argument. 3  The consequence argument is as follows:

• If determinism is true, then all human actions are consequences of past events and the laws of nature.
• No human can do other than they actually do except by changing the laws of nature or changing the past.
• No human can change the laws of nature or the past.
• If determinism is true, no human has free will.

This is a powerful argument. It is very difficult to see where this argument goes wrong, if it goes wrong. The first premise is merely a restatement of determinism. The second premise ties the ability to do otherwise to the ability to change the past or the laws of nature, and the third premise points out the very reasonable assumption that humans are unable to modify the laws of nature or the past.

This argument effectively devastates easy freedom by proposing that we never act without external hindrances precisely because our actions are caused by past events and the laws of nature in such a way that we not able to contribute anything to the causal production of our actions. This argument also seems to pose a deeper problem for freedom in deterministic worlds. If this argument works, it establishes that, given determinism, we are powerless to do otherwise, and to the extent that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, this argument seems to rule out free action. Note that if this argument works, it poses a challenge for both the easy and alternative possibilities view of free will.

How might someone respond to this argument? First, suppose you adopt an alternative possibilities view of freedom and believe that the ability to do otherwise is what is needed for genuine free will. What you would need to show is that alternative possibilities, properly understood, are not incompatible with determinism. Perhaps you might argue that if we understand the ability to do otherwise properly we will see that we actually do have the ability to change the laws of nature or the past.

That might sound counterintuitive. How could it possibly be the case that a mere mortal could change the laws of nature or the past? Think back to Quinn’s decision to spend the night before her exam out with friends instead of studying. When she shows up to her exam exhausted, and she starts blaming herself, she might say, “Why did I go out? That was dumb! I could have stayed home and studied.” And she is sort of right that she could have stayed home. She had the general ability to stay home and study. It is just that if she had stayed home and studied the past would be slightly different or the laws of nature would be slightly different. What this points to is that there might be a way of cashing out the ability to do otherwise that is compatible with determinism and does allow for an agent to kind of change the past or even the laws of nature. 4

But suppose we grant that the consequence argument demonstrates that determinism really does rule out alternative possibilities. Does that mean we must abandon the alternative possibilities view of freedom? Well, not necessarily. You could instead argue that free will is possible, provided determinism is false. 5  That is a big if, of course, but maybe determinism will turn out to be false.

What if determinism turns out to be true? Should we give up, then, and concede that there is no free will? Well, that might be too quick. A second response to the consequence argument is available. All you need to do is deny that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise.

In 1969, Harry Frankfurt proposed an influential thought experiment that demonstrated that free will might not require alternative possibilities at all (Frankfurt [1969] 1988). If he’s right about this, then the consequence argument, while compelling, does not demonstrate that no one lacks free will in deterministic worlds, because free will does not require the ability to do otherwise. It merely requires that agents be the source of their actions in the right kind of way. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here is a simplified paraphrase of Frankfurt’s case:

Black wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid unnecessary work. So he waits until Jones is about to make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is an excellent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide not to do what Black wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide to do something other than what Black wanted him to do, Black will intervene, and ensure that Jones decides to do, and does do, exactly what Black wanted him to do. Whatever Jones’ initial preferences and inclinations, then, Black will have his way. As it turns out, Jones decides, on his own, to do the action that Black wanted him to perform. So, even though Black was entirely prepared to intervene, and could have intervened, to guarantee that Jones would perform the action, Black never actually has to intervene because Jones decided, for reasons of his own, to perform the exact action that Black wanted him to perform. (Frankfurt [1969] 1988, 6-7)

Now, what is going on here? Jones is overdetermined to perform a specific act. No matter what happens, no matter what Jones initially decides or wants to do, he is going to perform the action Black wants him to perform. He absolutely cannot do otherwise. But note that there seems to be a crucial difference between the case in which Jones decides on his own and for his own reasons to perform the action Black wanted him to perform and the case in which Jones would have refrained from performing the action were it not for Black intervening to force him to perform the action. In the first case, Jones is the source of his action. It the thing he decided to do and he does it for his own reasons. But in the second case, Jones is not the source of his actions. Black is. This distinction, thought Frankfurt, should be at the heart of discussions of free will and moral responsibility. The control required for moral responsibility is not the ability to do otherwise (Frankfurt [1969] 1988, 9-10).

If alternative possibilities are not what free will requires, what kind of control is needed for free action? Here we have the third view of freedom we started with: free will as the ability to be the source of your actions in the right kind of way. Source compatibilists argue that this ability is not threatened by determinism, and building off of Frankfurt’s insight, have gone on to develop nuanced, often radically divergent source accounts of freedom. 6  Should we conclude, then, that provided freedom does not require alternative possibilities that it is compatible with determinism? 7 Again, that would be too quick. Source compatibilists have reason to be particularly worried about an argument developed by Galen Strawson called the ultimacy argument (Strawson [1994] 2003, 212-228).

Rather than trying to establish that determinism rules out alternative possibilities, Strawson tried to show that determinism rules out the possibility of being the ultimate source of your actions. While this is a problem for anyone who tries to establish that free will is compatible with determinism, it is particularly worrying for source compatibilists as they’ve tied freedom to an agent’s ability to be source of its actions. Here is the argument:

• A person acts of her own free will only if she is the act’s ultimate source.
• If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.
• Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will. (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 148) 8

This argument requires some unpacking. First of all, Strawson argues that for any given situation, we do what we do because of the way we are ([1994] 2003, 219). When Quinn decides to go out with her friends rather than study, she does so because of the way she is. She prioritizes a night with her friends over studying, at least on that fateful night before her exam. If Quinn had stayed in and studied, it would be because she was slightly different, at least that night. She would be such that she prioritized studying for her exam over a night out. But this applies to any decision we make in our lives. We decide to do what we do because of how we already are.

But if what we do is because of the way we are, then in order to be responsible for our actions, we need to be the source of how we are, at least in the relevant mental respects (Strawson [1994] 2003, 219). There is the first premise. But here comes the rub: the way we are is a product of factors beyond our control such as the past and the laws of nature ([1994] 2003, 219; 222-223). The fact that Quinn is such that she prioritizes a night with friends over studying is due to her past and the relevant laws of nature. It is not up to her that she is the way she is. It is ultimately factors extending well beyond her, possibly all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe that account for why she is the way she is that night. And to the extent that this is compelling, the ultimate source of Quinn’s decision to go out is not her. Rather, it is some condition of the universe external to her. And therefore, Quinn is not free.

Once again, this is a difficult argument to respond to. You might note that “ultimate source” is ambiguous and needing further clarification. Some compatibilists have pointed this out and argued that once we start developing careful accounts of what it means to be the source of our actions, we will see that the relevant notion of source-hood is compatible with determinism.

For example, while it may be true that no one is the ultimate cause of their actions in deterministic worlds precisely because the ultimate source of all actions will extend back to the initial conditions of the universe, we can still be a mediated source of our actions in the sense required for moral responsibility. Provided the actual source of our action involves a sophisticated enough set of capacities for it to make sense to view us as the source of our actions, we could still be the source of our actions, in the relevant sense (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 154). After all, even if determinism is true, we still act for reasons. We still contemplate what to do and weigh reasons for and against various actions, and we still are concerned with whether or not the actions we are considering reflect our desires, our goals, our projects, and our plans. And you might think that if our actions stem from a history that includes us bringing all the features of our agency to bear upon the decision that is the proximal cause of our action, that this causal history is one in which we are the source of our actions in the way that is really relevant to identifying whether or not we are acting freely.

Others have noted that even if it is true that Quinn is not directly free in regard to the beliefs and desires that suggest she should go out with her friends rather than study (they are the product of factors beyond her control such as her upbringing, her environment, her genetics, or maybe even random luck), this need not imply that she lacks control as to whether or not she chooses to act upon them. 9  Perhaps it is the case that even though how we are may be due to factors beyond our control, nonetheless, we are still the source of what we do because it is still, even under determinism, up to us as to whether we choose to exercise control over our conduct.

Free Will and the Sciences

Many challenges to free will come, not from philosophy, but from the sciences. There are two main scientific arguments against free will, one coming from neuroscience and one coming from the social sciences. The concern coming from research in the neurosciences is that some empirical results suggest that all our choices are the result of unconscious brain processes, and to the extent choices must be consciously made to be free choices, it seems that we never make a conscious free choice.

The classic studies motivating a picture of human action in which unconscious brain processes are doing the bulk of the causal work for action were conducted by Benjamin Libet. Libet’s experiments involved subjects being asked to flex their wrists whenever they felt the urge to do so. Subjects were asked to note the location of a clock hand on a modified clock when they became aware of the urge to act. While doing this their brain activity was being scanned using EEG technology. What Libet noted is that around 550 milliseconds before a subject acted, a readiness potential (increased brain activity) would be measured by the EEG technology. But subjects were reporting awareness of an urge to flex their wrist around 200 milliseconds before they acted (Libet 1985).

This painted a strange picture of human action. If conscious intentions were the cause of our actions, you may expect to see a causal story in which the conscious awareness of an urge to flex your wrist shows up first, then a ramping up of brain activity, and finally an action. But Libet’s studies showed a causal story in which an action starts with unconscious brain activity, the subject later becomes consciously aware that they are about to act, and then the action happens. The conscious awareness of action seemed to be a byproduct of the actual unconscious process that was causing the action. It was not the cause of the action itself. And this result suggests that unconscious brain processes, not conscious ones, are the real causes of our actions. To the extent that free action requires our conscious decisions to be the initiating causes of our actions, it looks like we may never act freely.

While this research is intriguing, it probably does not establish that we are not free. Alfred Mele is a philosopher who has been heavily critical of these studies. He raises three main objections to the conclusions drawn from these arguments.

First, Mele points out that self-reports are notoriously unreliable (2009, 60-64). Conscious perception takes time, and we are talking about milliseconds. The actual location of the clock hand is probably much closer to 550 milliseconds when the agent “intends” or has the “urge” to act than it is to 200 milliseconds. So, there’s some concerns about experimental design here.

Second, an assumption behind these experiments is that what is going on at 550 milliseconds is that a decision is being made to flex the wrist (Mele 2014, 11). We might challenge this assumption. Libet ran some variants of his experiment in which he asked subjects to prepare to flex their wrist but to stop themselves from doing so. So, basically, subjects simply sat there in the chair and did nothing. Libet interpreted the results of these experiments as showing that we might not have a free will, but we certainly have a “free won’t” because we seem capable of consciously vetoing or stopping an action, even if that action might be initiated by unconscious processes (2014, 12-13). Mele points out that what might be going on in these scenarios is that the real intention to act or not act is what happens consciously at 200 milliseconds, and if so, there is little reason to think these experiments are demonstrating that we lack free will (2014, 13).

Finally, Mele notes that while it may be the case that some of our decisions and actions look like the wrist-flicking actions Libet was studying, it is doubtful that all or even most of our decisions are like this (2014, 15). When we think about free will, we rarely think of actions like wrist-flicking. Free actions are typically much more complex and they are often the kind of thing where the decision to do something extends across time. For example, your decision about what to major in at college or even where to study was probably made over a period of months, even years. And that decision probably involved periods of both conscious and unconscious cognition. Why think that a free choice cannot involve some components that are unconscious?

A separate line of attack on free will comes from the situationist literature in the social sciences (particularly social psychology). There is a growing body of research suggesting that situational and environmental factors profoundly influence human behavior, perhaps in ways that undermine free will (Mele 2014, 72).

Many of the experiments in the situationist literature are among the most vivid and disturbing in all of social psychology. Stanley Milgram, for example, conducted a series of experiments on obedience in which ordinary people were asked to administer potentially lethal voltages of electricity to an innocent subject in order to advance scientific research, and the vast majority of people did so! 10  And in Milgram’s experiments, what affected whether or not subjects were willing to administer the shocks were minor, seemingly insignificant environmental factors such as whether the person running the experiment looked professional or not (Milgram 1963).

What experiments like Milgram’s obedience experiments might show is that it is our situations, our environments that are the real causes of our actions, not our conscious, reflective choices. And this may pose a threat to free will. Should we take this kind of research as threatening freedom?

Many philosophers would resist concluding that free will does not exist on the basis of these kinds of experiments. Typically, not everyone who takes part in situationist studies is unable to resist the situational influences they are subject to. And it appears to be the case that when we are aware of situational influences, we are more likely to resist them. Perhaps the right way to think about this research is that there all sorts of situations that can influence us in ways that we may not consciously endorse, but that nonetheless, we are still capable of avoiding these effects when we are actively trying to do so. For example, the brain sciences have made many of us vividly aware of a whole host of cognitive biases and situational influences that humans are typically subject to and yet, when we are aware of these influences, we are less susceptible to them. The more modest conclusion to draw here is not that we lack free will, but that exercising control over our actions is much more difficult than many of us believe it to be. We are certainly influenced by the world we are a part of, but to be influenced by the world is different from being determined by it, and this may allow us to, at least sometimes, exercise some control over the actions we perform.

No one knows yet whether or not humans sometimes exercise the control over their actions required for moral responsibility. And so I leave it to you, dear reader: Are you free?

Chapter Notes

• I have hidden some complexity here. I have defined determinism in terms of logical entailment. Sometimes people talk about determinism as a causal relationship. For our purposes, this distinction is not relevant, and if it is easier for you to make sense of determinism by thinking of the past and the laws of nature causing all future events, that is perfectly acceptable to do.
• Two of the more well-known classic compatibilists include Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. See: Hobbes, Thomas, (1651) 1994, Leviathan , ed. Edwin Curley, Canada: Hackett Publishing Company; and Hume, David, (1739) 1978, A Treatise of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• For an earlier version of this argument see: Ginet, Carl, 1966, “Might We Have No Choice?” in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Keith Lehrer, 87-104, Random House.
• For two notable attempts to respond to the consequence argument by claiming that humans can change the past or the laws of nature see: Fischer, John Martin, 1994, The Metaphysics of Free Will , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; and Lewis, David, 1981, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria 47: 113-21.
• Many philosophers try to develop views of freedom on the assumption that determinism is incompatible with free action. The view that freedom is possible, provided determinism is false is called Libertarianism. For more on Libertarian views of freedom, see: Clarke, Randolph and Justin Capes, 2017, “Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/ .
• For elaboration on recent compatibilist views of freedom, see McKenna, Michael and D. Justin Coates, 2015, “Compatibilism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ .
• You might be unimpressed by the way source compatibilists understand the ability to be the source of your actions. For example, you might that what it means to be the source of your actions is to be the ultimate cause of your actions. Or maybe you think that to genuinely be the source of your actions you need to be the agent-cause of your actions. Those are both reasonable positions to adopt. Typically, people who understand free will as requiring either of these abilities believe that free will is incompatible with determinism. That said, there are many Libertarian views of free will that try to develop a plausible account of agent causation. These views are called Agent-Causal Libertarianism. See: Clarke, Randolph and Justin Capes, 2017, “Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/ .
• As with most philosophical arguments, the ultimacy argument has been formulated in a number of different ways. In Galen Strawson’s original paper he gives three different versions of the argument, one of which has eight premises and one that has ten premises. A full treatment of either of those versions of this argument would require more time and space than we have available here. I have chosen to use the McKenna/Pereboom formulation of the argument due its simplicity and their clear presentation of the central issues raised by the argument.
• For two attempts to respond to the ultimacy argument in this way, see: Mele, Alfred, 1995, Autonomous Agents , New York: Oxford University Press; and McKenna, Michael, 2008, “Ultimacy & Sweet Jane” in Nick Trakakis and Daniel Cohen, eds, Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility , Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 186-208.
• Fortunately, no real shocks were administered. The subjects merely believed they were doing so.

Frankfurt, Harry. (1969) 1988. “Alternative Possibilities and moral responsibility.” In The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays , 10th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Libet, Benjamin. 1985. “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 529-566.

McKenna, Michael and Derk Pereboom. 2016. Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Mele, Alfred. 2014. Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mele, Alfred. 2009. Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Milgram, Stanley. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371-378.

Strawson, Galen. (1994) 2003. “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.” In Free Will, 2nd ed. Edited by Gary Watson, 212-228. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Inwagen, Peter. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Further Reading

Deery, Oisin and Paul Russell, eds. 2013. The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings from the Contemporary Debates . New York: Oxford University Press.

Mele, Alfred. 2006. Free Will and Luck. New York: Oxford University Press.

Attribution

This section is composed of text taken from Chapter 8 Freedom of the Will created by Daniel Haas in Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind , edited by Heather Salazar and Christina Hendricks, and produced with support from the Rebus Community. The original is freely available under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license at https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-of-mind/ . The material is presented in its original form, with the exception of the removal of introductory material Introduction: Are We Free?

A Brief Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © 2021 by Southern Alberta Institution of Technology (SAIT) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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van Inwagen: An Essay on Free Will - 1986

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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.

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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.

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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.

Have a philosophy assignment? Think about buying an essay from Ultius .

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 — Philosophy — Philosophical Concepts — Free Will

Essays on Free Will

Dive into the depths of one of philosophy's most enduring questions with our curated selection of free will essay samples. This collection is designed to provide students, philosophers, and curious minds with a comprehensive overview of the debates and discussions surrounding the concept of free will. Whether you're examining the determinism versus free will debate, exploring the implications of free will on morality, or seeking inspiration for your own free will essay, our assortment of essays offers valuable perspectives and in-depth analysis.

The Concept of Free Will

Free will touches upon the ability of individuals to make choices that are not predetermined by past events, genetic makeup, or divine intervention. Essays on free will traverse the realms of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience , and ethics, offering insights into how we understand human agency and responsibility. By engaging with these essays, readers can explore various positions within the free will debate, from libertarianism to compatibilism and hard determinism, enriching their understanding of this complex philosophical issue.

Highlights from Our Essay Collection

Our free will essay samples cover a broad spectrum of topics and viewpoints, ensuring that readers can find material that resonates with their specific interests and academic needs. From analytical discussions on the existence and nature of free will to explorations of its implications for legal and ethical responsibility, our essays provide a platform for deep engagement with the question of human autonomy. Each essay not only serves as a resource for academic exploration but also as a source of inspiration for developing nuanced and critical perspectives on free will.

Utilizing Our Essays for Academic Success:

• Generating Ideas: Let our essays inspire unique angles and topics for your own free will essay.
• Broadening Research: Use the essays as a springboard for further investigation, helping you to uncover a wide range of arguments and evidence related to free will.
• Structural Guidance: Analyze the organization and argumentation strategies used in our essays to enhance your own essay's clarity and persuasiveness.
• Citation Practices: Observe how our essays incorporate and reference sources, providing a model for academic integrity in your work.

Engaging with the concept of free will through academic writing offers a profound opportunity to delve into questions of human nature, responsibility, and ethics. Our collection of free will essay samples is here to support you in this intellectual journey, providing a solid foundation for informed and compelling writing. By exploring our essays, you can deepen your understanding of free will and contribute thoughtfully to the ongoing philosophical conversation.

Start your exploration of free will by browsing our essay samples today. Let these essays guide and inspire your academic research and writing, helping you to craft a thoughtful and insightful free will essay.

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How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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How to Write an A+ Argumentative Essay

Miscellaneous

You'll no doubt have to write a number of argumentative essays in both high school and college, but what, exactly, is an argumentative essay and how do you write the best one possible? Let's take a look.

A great argumentative essay always combines the same basic elements: approaching an argument from a rational perspective, researching sources, supporting your claims using facts rather than opinion, and articulating your reasoning into the most cogent and reasoned points. Argumentative essays are great building blocks for all sorts of research and rhetoric, so your teachers will expect you to master the technique before long.

But if this sounds daunting, never fear! We'll show how an argumentative essay differs from other kinds of papers, how to research and write them, how to pick an argumentative essay topic, and where to find example essays. So let's get started.

What Is an Argumentative Essay? How Is it Different from Other Kinds of Essays?

There are two basic requirements for any and all essays: to state a claim (a thesis statement) and to support that claim with evidence.

Though every essay is founded on these two ideas, there are several different types of essays, differentiated by the style of the writing, how the writer presents the thesis, and the types of evidence used to support the thesis statement.

Essays can be roughly divided into four different types:

#1: Argumentative #2: Persuasive #3: Expository #4: Analytical

So let's look at each type and what the differences are between them before we focus the rest of our time to argumentative essays.

Argumentative Essay

Argumentative essays are what this article is all about, so let's talk about them first.

An argumentative essay attempts to convince a reader to agree with a particular argument (the writer's thesis statement). The writer takes a firm stand one way or another on a topic and then uses hard evidence to support that stance.

An argumentative essay seeks to prove to the reader that one argument —the writer's argument— is the factually and logically correct one. This means that an argumentative essay must use only evidence-based support to back up a claim , rather than emotional or philosophical reasoning (which is often allowed in other types of essays). Thus, an argumentative essay has a burden of substantiated proof and sources , whereas some other types of essays (namely persuasive essays) do not.

You can write an argumentative essay on any topic, so long as there's room for argument. Generally, you can use the same topics for both a persuasive essay or an argumentative one, so long as you support the argumentative essay with hard evidence.

Example topics of an argumentative essay:

• "Should farmers be allowed to shoot wolves if those wolves injure or kill farm animals?"
• "Should the drinking age be lowered in the United States?"
• "Are alternatives to democracy effective and/or feasible to implement?"

The next three types of essays are not argumentative essays, but you may have written them in school. We're going to cover them so you know what not to do for your argumentative essay.

Persuasive Essay

Persuasive essays are similar to argumentative essays, so it can be easy to get them confused. But knowing what makes an argumentative essay different than a persuasive essay can often mean the difference between an excellent grade and an average one.

Persuasive essays seek to persuade a reader to agree with the point of view of the writer, whether that point of view is based on factual evidence or not. The writer has much more flexibility in the evidence they can use, with the ability to use moral, cultural, or opinion-based reasoning as well as factual reasoning to persuade the reader to agree the writer's side of a given issue.

Instead of being forced to use "pure" reason as one would in an argumentative essay, the writer of a persuasive essay can manipulate or appeal to the reader's emotions. So long as the writer attempts to steer the readers into agreeing with the thesis statement, the writer doesn't necessarily need hard evidence in favor of the argument.

Often, you can use the same topics for both a persuasive essay or an argumentative one—the difference is all in the approach and the evidence you present.

Example topics of a persuasive essay:

• "Should children be responsible for their parents' debts?"
• "Should cheating on a test be automatic grounds for expulsion?"
• "How much should sports leagues be held accountable for player injuries and the long-term consequences of those injuries?"

Expository Essay

An expository essay is typically a short essay in which the writer explains an idea, issue, or theme , or discusses the history of a person, place, or idea.

This is typically a fact-forward essay with little argument or opinion one way or the other.

Example topics of an expository essay:

• "The History of the Philadelphia Liberty Bell"
• "The Reasons I Always Wanted to be a Doctor"
• "The Meaning Behind the Colloquialism ‘People in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones'"

Analytical Essay

An analytical essay seeks to delve into the deeper meaning of a text or work of art, or unpack a complicated idea . These kinds of essays closely interpret a source and look into its meaning by analyzing it at both a macro and micro level.

This type of analysis can be augmented by historical context or other expert or widely-regarded opinions on the subject, but is mainly supported directly through the original source (the piece or art or text being analyzed) .

Example topics of an analytical essay:

• "Victory Gin in Place of Water: The Symbolism Behind Gin as the Only Potable Substance in George Orwell's 1984"
• "Amarna Period Art: The Meaning Behind the Shift from Rigid to Fluid Poses"
• "Adultery During WWII, as Told Through a Series of Letters to and from Soldiers"

There are many different types of essay and, over time, you'll be able to master them all.

A Typical Argumentative Essay Assignment

The average argumentative essay is between three to five pages, and will require at least three or four separate sources with which to back your claims . As for the essay topic , you'll most often be asked to write an argumentative essay in an English class on a "general" topic of your choice, ranging the gamut from science, to history, to literature.

But while the topics of an argumentative essay can span several different fields, the structure of an argumentative essay is always the same: you must support a claim—a claim that can reasonably have multiple sides—using multiple sources and using a standard essay format (which we'll talk about later on).

This is why many argumentative essay topics begin with the word "should," as in:

• "Should all students be required to learn chemistry in high school?"
• "Should children be required to learn a second language?"
• "Should schools or governments be allowed to ban books?"

These topics all have at least two sides of the argument: Yes or no. And you must support the side you choose with evidence as to why your side is the correct one.

But there are also plenty of other ways to frame an argumentative essay as well:

• "Does using social media do more to benefit or harm people?"
• "Does the legal status of artwork or its creators—graffiti and vandalism, pirated media, a creator who's in jail—have an impact on the art itself?"
• "Is or should anyone ever be ‘above the law?'"

Though these are worded differently than the first three, you're still essentially forced to pick between two sides of an issue: yes or no, for or against, benefit or detriment. Though your argument might not fall entirely into one side of the divide or another—for instance, you could claim that social media has positively impacted some aspects of modern life while being a detriment to others—your essay should still support one side of the argument above all. Your final stance would be that overall , social media is beneficial or overall , social media is harmful.

If your argument is one that is mostly text-based or backed by a single source (e.g., "How does Salinger show that Holden Caulfield is an unreliable narrator?" or "Does Gatsby personify the American Dream?"), then it's an analytical essay, rather than an argumentative essay. An argumentative essay will always be focused on more general topics so that you can use multiple sources to back up your claims.

Good Argumentative Essay Topics

So you know the basic idea behind an argumentative essay, but what topic should you write about?

Again, almost always, you'll be asked to write an argumentative essay on a free topic of your choice, or you'll be asked to select between a few given topics . If you're given complete free reign of topics, then it'll be up to you to find an essay topic that no only appeals to you, but that you can turn into an A+ argumentative essay.

What makes a "good" argumentative essay topic depends on both the subject matter and your personal interest —it can be hard to give your best effort on something that bores you to tears! But it can also be near impossible to write an argumentative essay on a topic that has no room for debate.

As we said earlier, a good argumentative essay topic will be one that has the potential to reasonably go in at least two directions—for or against, yes or no, and why . For example, it's pretty hard to write an argumentative essay on whether or not people should be allowed to murder one another—not a whole lot of debate there for most people!—but writing an essay for or against the death penalty has a lot more wiggle room for evidence and argument.

A good topic is also one that can be substantiated through hard evidence and relevant sources . So be sure to pick a topic that other people have studied (or at least studied elements of) so that you can use their data in your argument. For example, if you're arguing that it should be mandatory for all middle school children to play a sport, you might have to apply smaller scientific data points to the larger picture you're trying to justify. There are probably several studies you could cite on the benefits of physical activity and the positive effect structure and teamwork has on young minds, but there's probably no study you could use where a group of scientists put all middle-schoolers in one jurisdiction into a mandatory sports program (since that's probably never happened). So long as your evidence is relevant to your point and you can extrapolate from it to form a larger whole, you can use it as a part of your resource material.

And if you need ideas on where to get started, or just want to see sample argumentative essay topics, then check out these links for hundreds of potential argumentative essay topics.

101 Persuasive (or Argumentative) Essay and Speech Topics

301 Prompts for Argumentative Writing

Top 50 Ideas for Argumentative/Persuasive Essay Writing

[Note: some of these say "persuasive essay topics," but just remember that the same topic can often be used for both a persuasive essay and an argumentative essay; the difference is in your writing style and the evidence you use to support your claims.]

KO! Find that one argumentative essay topic you can absolutely conquer.

Argumentative Essay Format

Argumentative Essays are composed of four main elements:

• A position (your argument)
• Your reasons
• Supporting evidence for those reasons (from reliable sources)
• Counterargument(s) (possible opposing arguments and reasons why those arguments are incorrect)

If you're familiar with essay writing in general, then you're also probably familiar with the five paragraph essay structure . This structure is a simple tool to show how one outlines an essay and breaks it down into its component parts, although it can be expanded into as many paragraphs as you want beyond the core five.

The standard argumentative essay is often 3-5 pages, which will usually mean a lot more than five paragraphs, but your overall structure will look the same as a much shorter essay.

An argumentative essay at its simplest structure will look like:

Paragraph 1: Intro

• Set up the story/problem/issue
• Thesis/claim

Paragraph 2: Support

• Reason #1 claim is correct
• Supporting evidence with sources

Paragraph 3: Support

• Reason #2 claim is correct

Paragraph 4: Counterargument

• Explanation of argument for the other side
• Refutation of opposing argument with supporting evidence

Paragraph 5: Conclusion

• Re-state claim
• Sum up reasons and support of claim from the essay to prove claim is correct

Now let's unpack each of these paragraph types to see how they work (with examples!), what goes into them, and why.

Paragraph 1—Set Up and Claim

Your first task is to introduce the reader to the topic at hand so they'll be prepared for your claim. Give a little background information, set the scene, and give the reader some stakes so that they care about the issue you're going to discuss.

Next, you absolutely must have a position on an argument and make that position clear to the readers. It's not an argumentative essay unless you're arguing for a specific claim, and this claim will be your thesis statement.

Your thesis CANNOT be a mere statement of fact (e.g., "Washington DC is the capital of the United States"). Your thesis must instead be an opinion which can be backed up with evidence and has the potential to be argued against (e.g., "New York should be the capital of the United States").

Paragraphs 2 and 3—Your Evidence

These are your body paragraphs in which you give the reasons why your argument is the best one and back up this reasoning with concrete evidence .

The argument supporting the thesis of an argumentative essay should be one that can be supported by facts and evidence, rather than personal opinion or cultural or religious mores.

For example, if you're arguing that New York should be the new capital of the US, you would have to back up that fact by discussing the factual contrasts between New York and DC in terms of location, population, revenue, and laws. You would then have to talk about the precedents for what makes for a good capital city and why New York fits the bill more than DC does.

Your argument can't simply be that a lot of people think New York is the best city ever and that you agree.

In addition to using concrete evidence, you always want to keep the tone of your essay passionate, but impersonal . Even though you're writing your argument from a single opinion, don't use first person language—"I think," "I feel," "I believe,"—to present your claims. Doing so is repetitive, since by writing the essay you're already telling the audience what you feel, and using first person language weakens your writing voice.

For example,

"I think that Washington DC is no longer suited to be the capital city of the United States."

"Washington DC is no longer suited to be the capital city of the United States."

The second statement sounds far stronger and more analytical.

Paragraph 4—Argument for the Other Side and Refutation

Even without a counter argument, you can make a pretty persuasive claim, but a counterargument will round out your essay into one that is much more persuasive and substantial.

By anticipating an argument against your claim and taking the initiative to counter it, you're allowing yourself to get ahead of the game. This way, you show that you've given great thought to all sides of the issue before choosing your position, and you demonstrate in multiple ways how yours is the more reasoned and supported side.

Paragraph 5—Conclusion

This paragraph is where you re-state your argument and summarize why it's the best claim.

Briefly touch on your supporting evidence and voila! A finished argumentative essay.

Your essay should have just as awesome a skeleton as this plesiosaur does. (In other words: a ridiculously awesome skeleton)

Argumentative Essay Example: 5-Paragraph Style

It always helps to have an example to learn from. I've written a full 5-paragraph argumentative essay here. Look at how I state my thesis in paragraph 1, give supporting evidence in paragraphs 2 and 3, address a counterargument in paragraph 4, and conclude in paragraph 5.

Topic: Is it possible to maintain conflicting loyalties?

Paragraph 1

It is almost impossible to go through life without encountering a situation where your loyalties to different people or causes come into conflict with each other. Maybe you have a loving relationship with your sister, but she disagrees with your decision to join the army, or you find yourself torn between your cultural beliefs and your scientific ones. These conflicting loyalties can often be maintained for a time, but as examples from both history and psychological theory illustrate, sooner or later, people have to make a choice between competing loyalties, as no one can maintain a conflicting loyalty or belief system forever.

The first two sentences set the scene and give some hypothetical examples and stakes for the reader to care about.

The third sentence finishes off the intro with the thesis statement, making very clear how the author stands on the issue ("people have to make a choice between competing loyalties, as no one can maintain a conflicting loyalty or belief system forever." )

Paragraphs 2 and 3

Psychological theory states that human beings are not equipped to maintain conflicting loyalties indefinitely and that attempting to do so leads to a state called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance theory is the psychological idea that people undergo tremendous mental stress or anxiety when holding contradictory beliefs, values, or loyalties (Festinger, 1957). Even if human beings initially hold a conflicting loyalty, they will do their best to find a mental equilibrium by making a choice between those loyalties—stay stalwart to a belief system or change their beliefs. One of the earliest formal examples of cognitive dissonance theory comes from Leon Festinger's When Prophesy Fails . Members of an apocalyptic cult are told that the end of the world will occur on a specific date and that they alone will be spared the Earth's destruction. When that day comes and goes with no apocalypse, the cult members face a cognitive dissonance between what they see and what they've been led to believe (Festinger, 1956). Some choose to believe that the cult's beliefs are still correct, but that the Earth was simply spared from destruction by mercy, while others choose to believe that they were lied to and that the cult was fraudulent all along. Both beliefs cannot be correct at the same time, and so the cult members are forced to make their choice.

But even when conflicting loyalties can lead to potentially physical, rather than just mental, consequences, people will always make a choice to fall on one side or other of a dividing line. Take, for instance, Nicolaus Copernicus, a man born and raised in Catholic Poland (and educated in Catholic Italy). Though the Catholic church dictated specific scientific teachings, Copernicus' loyalty to his own observations and scientific evidence won out over his loyalty to his country's government and belief system. When he published his heliocentric model of the solar system--in opposition to the geocentric model that had been widely accepted for hundreds of years (Hannam, 2011)-- Copernicus was making a choice between his loyalties. In an attempt t o maintain his fealty both to the established system and to what he believed, h e sat on his findings for a number of years (Fantoli, 1994). But, ultimately, Copernicus made the choice to side with his beliefs and observations above all and published his work for the world to see (even though, in doing so, he risked both his reputation and personal freedoms).

These two paragraphs provide the reasons why the author supports the main argument and uses substantiated sources to back those reasons.

The paragraph on cognitive dissonance theory gives both broad supporting evidence and more narrow, detailed supporting evidence to show why the thesis statement is correct not just anecdotally but also scientifically and psychologically. First, we see why people in general have a difficult time accepting conflicting loyalties and desires and then how this applies to individuals through the example of the cult members from the Dr. Festinger's research.

The next paragraph continues to use more detailed examples from history to provide further evidence of why the thesis that people cannot indefinitely maintain conflicting loyalties is true.

Paragraph 4

Some will claim that it is possible to maintain conflicting beliefs or loyalties permanently, but this is often more a matter of people deluding themselves and still making a choice for one side or the other, rather than truly maintaining loyalty to both sides equally. For example, Lancelot du Lac typifies a person who claims to maintain a balanced loyalty between to two parties, but his attempt to do so fails (as all attempts to permanently maintain conflicting loyalties must). Lancelot tells himself and others that he is equally devoted to both King Arthur and his court and to being Queen Guinevere's knight (Malory, 2008). But he can neither be in two places at once to protect both the king and queen, nor can he help but let his romantic feelings for the queen to interfere with his duties to the king and the kingdom. Ultimately, he and Queen Guinevere give into their feelings for one another and Lancelot—though he denies it—chooses his loyalty to her over his loyalty to Arthur. This decision plunges the kingdom into a civil war, ages Lancelot prematurely, and ultimately leads to Camelot's ruin (Raabe, 1987). Though Lancelot claimed to have been loyal to both the king and the queen, this loyalty was ultimately in conflict, and he could not maintain it.

Here we have the acknowledgement of a potential counter-argument and the evidence as to why it isn't true.

The argument is that some people (or literary characters) have asserted that they give equal weight to their conflicting loyalties. The refutation is that, though some may claim to be able to maintain conflicting loyalties, they're either lying to others or deceiving themselves. The paragraph shows why this is true by providing an example of this in action.

Paragraph 5

Whether it be through literature or history, time and time again, people demonstrate the challenges of trying to manage conflicting loyalties and the inevitable consequences of doing so. Though belief systems are malleable and will often change over time, it is not possible to maintain two mutually exclusive loyalties or beliefs at once. In the end, people always make a choice, and loyalty for one party or one side of an issue will always trump loyalty to the other.

The concluding paragraph summarizes the essay, touches on the evidence presented, and re-states the thesis statement.

How to Write an Argumentative Essay: 8 Steps

Writing the best argumentative essay is all about the preparation, so let's talk steps:

#1: Preliminary Research

If you have the option to pick your own argumentative essay topic (which you most likely will), then choose one or two topics you find the most intriguing or that you have a vested interest in and do some preliminary research on both sides of the debate.

Do an open internet search just to see what the general chatter is on the topic and what the research trends are.

Did your preliminary reading influence you to pick a side or change your side? Without diving into all the scholarly articles at length, do you believe there's enough evidence to support your claim? Have there been scientific studies? Experiments? Does a noted scholar in the field agree with you? If not, you may need to pick another topic or side of the argument to support.

#2: Pick Your Side and Form Your Thesis

Now's the time to pick the side of the argument you feel you can support the best and summarize your main point into your thesis statement.

Your thesis will be the basis of your entire essay, so make sure you know which side you're on, that you've stated it clearly, and that you stick by your argument throughout the entire essay .

#3: Heavy-Duty Research Time

You've taken a gander at what the internet at large has to say on your argument, but now's the time to actually read those sources and take notes.

Check scholarly journals online at Google Scholar , the Directory of Open Access Journals , or JStor . You can also search individual university or school libraries and websites to see what kinds of academic articles you can access for free. Keep track of your important quotes and page numbers and put them somewhere that's easy to find later.

And don't forget to check your school or local libraries as well!

#4: Outline

Follow the five-paragraph outline structure from the previous section.

Fill in your topic, your reasons, and your supporting evidence into each of the categories.

Before you begin to flesh out the essay, take a look at what you've got. Is your thesis statement in the first paragraph? Is it clear? Is your argument logical? Does your supporting evidence support your reasoning?

By outlining your essay, you streamline your process and take care of any logic gaps before you dive headfirst into the writing. This will save you a lot of grief later on if you need to change your sources or your structure, so don't get too trigger-happy and skip this step.

Now that you've laid out exactly what you'll need for your essay and where, it's time to fill in all the gaps by writing it out.

Take it one step at a time and expand your ideas into complete sentences and substantiated claims. It may feel daunting to turn an outline into a complete draft, but just remember that you've already laid out all the groundwork; now you're just filling in the gaps.

If you have the time before deadline, give yourself a day or two (or even just an hour!) away from your essay . Looking it over with fresh eyes will allow you to see errors, both minor and major, that you likely would have missed had you tried to edit when it was still raw.

Take a first pass over the entire essay and try your best to ignore any minor spelling or grammar mistakes—you're just looking at the big picture right now. Does it make sense as a whole? Did the essay succeed in making an argument and backing that argument up logically? (Do you feel persuaded?)

If not, go back and make notes so that you can fix it for your final draft.

Once you've made your revisions to the overall structure, mark all your small errors and grammar problems so you can fix them in the next draft.

#7: Final Draft

Use the notes you made on the rough draft and go in and hack and smooth away until you're satisfied with the final result.

A checklist for your final draft:

• Formatting is correct according to your teacher's standards
• No errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Essay is the right length and size for the assignment
• The argument is present, consistent, and concise
• Each reason is supported by relevant evidence
• The essay makes sense overall

#8: Celebrate!

Once you've brought that final draft to a perfect polish and turned in your assignment, you're done! Go you!

Be prepared and ♪ you'll never go hungry again ♪, *cough*, or struggle with your argumentative essay-writing again. (Walt Disney Studios)

Good Examples of Argumentative Essays Online

Theory is all well and good, but examples are key. Just to get you started on what a fully-fleshed out argumentative essay looks like, let's see some examples in action.

Check out these two argumentative essay examples on the use of landmines and freons (and note the excellent use of concrete sources to back up their arguments!).

The Use of Landmines

A Shattered Sky

The Take-Aways: Keys to Writing an Argumentative Essay

At first, writing an argumentative essay may seem like a monstrous hurdle to overcome, but with the proper preparation and understanding, you'll be able to knock yours out of the park.

Remember the differences between a persuasive essay and an argumentative one, make sure your thesis is clear, and double-check that your supporting evidence is both relevant to your point and well-sourced . Pick your topic, do your research, make your outline, and fill in the gaps. Before you know it, you'll have yourself an A+ argumentative essay there, my friend.

What's Next?

Now you know the ins and outs of an argumentative essay, but how comfortable are you writing in other styles? Learn more about the four writing styles and when it makes sense to use each .

Understand how to make an argument, but still having trouble organizing your thoughts? Check out our guide to three popular essay formats and choose which one is right for you.

Ready to make your case, but not sure what to write about? We've created a list of 50 potential argumentative essay topics to spark your imagination.

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Courtney scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT in high school and went on to graduate from Stanford University with a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She is passionate about bringing education and the tools to succeed to students from all backgrounds and walks of life, as she believes open education is one of the great societal equalizers. She has years of tutoring experience and writes creative works in her free time.

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