do we have free will essay

February 5, 2020

Yes, Free Will Exists

Just ask Schopenhauer

By Bernardo Kastrup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

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

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

So what happens if this faith erodes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 1, 2015

Why We Have Free Will

Neurons fire in your head before you become aware that you have made a decision. But this discovery does not mean you are a “biochemical puppet”

By Eddy Nahmias

Simon Prades

One fall night I lay awake wondering how I should begin this essay. I imagined a variety of ways I could write the first sentence and the next and the one after that. Then I thought about how I could tie those sentences to the following paragraph and the rest of the article. The pros and cons of each of those options circled back and forth in my head, keeping me from drifting off to sleep. As this was happening, neurons were buzzing away in my brain. Indeed, that neural activity explains why I imagined these options, and it explains why I am writing these very words. It also explains why I have free will.

Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and pundits say that I am wrong. Invoking a number of widely cited neuroscientific studies, they claim that unconscious processes drove me to select the words I ultimately wrote. Their arguments suggest our conscious deliberation and decisions happen only after neural gears below the level of our conscious awareness have already determined what we will choose. And they conclude that because “our brains make us do it”—choosing for us one option over another—free will is nothing more than an illusion.

The experiments most often cited to show that our brains take charge behind the scenes were carried out by the late Benjamin Libet in the 1980s at the University of California, San Francisco. There he instructed study participants outfitted with electrodes on their heads to flick their wrists whenever they felt like it. The electrodes detected fluctuations in electrical activity called readiness potentials that occurred about half a second before people made the flicking motion. But participants became aware of their intentions to move only about a quarter of a second before the movement, leading to the conclusion that their brains had decided before they became aware of what had happened. In essence, unconscious brain processes were in the driver’s seat.

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More recent studies using functional MRI have suggested the unconscious roots of our decisions begin even earlier. In research published in 2013, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and his colleagues had volunteers decide whether to add or subtract two numbers while in the fMRI scanner. They found patterns of neural activity that were predictive of whether subjects would choose to add or subtract that occurred four seconds before those subjects were aware of making the choice.

These studies—and others like them — have led to sweeping pronouncements that free will is dead. “Our decisions are predetermined unconsciously a long time before our consciousness kicks in,” Haynes commented to New Scientist, adding that “it seems that the brain is making the decision before the person.” Others share his opinion. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written: “So it is with all of our ... choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will.” Neuroscientist Sam Harris has concluded from these findings that we are “biochemical puppets”: “If we were to detect [people’s] conscious choices on a brain scanner seconds before they were aware of them ... this would directly challenge their status as conscious agents in control of their inner lives. ”

But does the research really show that all our conscious deliberation and planning is just a by-product of unconscious brain activity, having no effect on what we do later on? No, it does not. There are several reasons to think that those who insist that free will is a mirage are misguided.

Not So Fast

I call those who contend that science shows that free will is an illusion “willusionists.” There are many reasons to be wary of the willusionists’ arguments. First, neuroscience currently lacks the technical sophistication to determine whether neural activity underlying our imagining and evaluating of future options has any impact on which option we then carry out minutes, hours or days later. Instead the research discussed by willusionists fails to clearly define the border between conscious and unconscious actions.

Consider the Libet experiment. It began with study participants preparing consciously to make a series of repetitive and unplanned actions. When the experiment began, they flexed their wrists when a desire arose spontaneously. The neural activity involved in the conscious planning presumably influenced the later unconscious initiation of movements, revealing an interaction between conscious and unconscious brain activity.

Similarly, the 2011 Haynes study, in which people randomly picked whether to add or subtract over the course of many trials, fails to provide convincing evidence against free will. Early brain activity that occurred four seconds before participants were aware of making a choice may be an indication of unconscious biases toward one choice or the other.

But this early brain activity predicted a choice with an accuracy only 10 percent better than random chance. Brain activity cannot, in general, settle our choices four seconds before we act, because we can react to changes in our situation in less time than that. If we could not, we would all have died in car crashes by now! Unconscious neural activity, however, can prepare us to take an action by cuing us to consciously monitor our actions to let us adjust our behavior as it occurs.

Willusionists also point to psychological research showing that we have less conscious control over our actions than we think. It is true that we are often influenced unknowingly by subtle features of our environment and by emotional or cognitive biases. Until we understand them, we are not free to try to counteract them. This is one reason I think we have less free will than many people tend to believe. But there is a big difference between less and none at all.

The Libet and Haynes research deals with choices that people make without conscious deliberation at the time of action. Everyone performs repetitive or habitual behaviors, sometimes quite sophisticated ones that do not require much thought because the behaviors have been learned. You put your key in the lock. A shortstop dives for a ground ball. A pianist becomes immersed in playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

The reflexive turning of the key, the lunging for the ball, or the depressing of the white and black keys requires a particular type of mental processing. What I was doing on that sleepless night—conscious consideration of alternative options—is a wholly different activity from engaging in practiced routines. A body of psychological research shows that conscious, purposeful processing of our thoughts likely does make a difference in what we do.

This work indicates that intentions we formulate to carry out specific tasks in particular circumstances—what psychologists call “implementation intentions”—increase the likelihood that we will complete the planned behavior. A study performed by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer of New York University and his colleagues revealed that dieters who consciously formed an intention to ignore thoughts about tempting foods whenever they came to mind then ate less of those foods than those dieters who simply set the goal to lose weight.

Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, then at Florida State University, and his colleagues demonstrated that conscious reasoning improves performance on logical and linguistic tasks and that it helps in learning from past mistakes and overriding impulsive behaviors. In addition, the late Walter Mischel of Columbia University found that our ability to willfully distract ourselves from a temptation is crucial for self-control.

Every one of us carries out actions every day that we have consciously planned for ourselves. It is possible that the neural activity that carries out this planning has no effect on what we do or that it just concocts stories after the fact to explain to ourselves and others what we did. But that would make little evolutionary sense. The brain makes up only 2 percent of the human body’s weight but consumes 20 percent of its energy. There would be strong evolutionary pressure against neural processes that enable intricate conscious thought yet are irrelevant to our behavior. The brain circuits responsible for my imagining that this is the best way to write this essay are likely causing it to turn out this way.

Free Will in the Brain?

Willusionists, however, suggest brain processing responsible for conscious thinking simply cannot count as free will. They often say that people who believe in free will must be “dualists” who are convinced that the mind somehow exists as a nonphysical entity, separate from the brain. “Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process,” wrote neuroscientist Read Montague in 2008. And Coyne has claimed that “true ‘free will’ ... would require us to step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works.”

It is true that some people think of free will in this way. But there is no good reason to do so. Most philosophical theories develop a view of free will that is consistent with a scientific understanding of human nature. And despite willusionists’ claims, studies suggest most people accept that we can have free will even if our mental activity is carried out entirely by brain activity. If most people are not committed to a dualist view about free will, then it is a mistake to tell them that free will is an illusion based on the scientific view that dualism is false.

One way to test people’s assumptions about free will is to describe the possibility of brain-imaging technology that would allow perfect prediction of actions based on information about prior brain activity. In fact, Harris has suggested this scenario “would expose this feeling [of free will] for what it is: an illusion. ”

To see whether people’s belief in free will would be challenged by the knowledge that the brain is engaged in unconscious information processing that predicts behavior, Jason Shepard of Life University in Georgia, Shane Reuter, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and I performed a series of experiments in which we presented people with detailed scenarios describing futuristic brain-imaging technology, as posited by Harris.

Hundreds of students at Georgia State University participated in the studies. They read about a woman named Jill who, in the distant future, wore a brain-imaging cap for a month. Using information from the brain scanner, neuroscientists predicted everything she thought and did, even when she tried to fool the system. The scenario concluded that “these experiments confirm that all human mental activity just is brain activity such that everything that any human thinks or does could be predicted ahead of time based on their earlier brain activity.”

More than 80 percent of the participants reported that they believed that such future technology was possible, yet 87 percent of them responded that Jill still had free will. They were also asked whether the existence of such technology would indicate that individuals lack free will. Roughly 75 percent disagreed. Further results showed that a significant majority felt that as long as the technology did not allow people’s brains to be manipulated such that their decisions could be controlled by others, they would have free will and be morally responsible for their behavior.

Most participants in the experiments seem to think that the hypothetical brain scanner is just recording the brain activity that is Jill’s conscious reasoning and consideration about what to decide. Rather than taking this to mean that Jill’s brain is making her do something—and that she has no free will—they may just be thinking that the brain scanner is simply detecting how free will works in the brain.

Why, then, do willusionists believe the opposite? It may have to do with the current state of knowledge. Until neuroscience is able to explain consciousness—which will require a theory to explain how our mind is neither reducible to nor distinct from the workings of our brain—it is tempting to think, as the willusionists seem to, that if the brain does it all, there is nothing left for the conscious mind to do.

As neuroscience advances and imaging technology improves, these developments should help reveal more precisely how much conscious control we have and to what extent our actions are governed by processes beyond our control. Finding resolutions for these questions about free will is important. Our legal system—and the moral basis for many of our society’s institutions—requires a better understanding of when people are, and are not, responsible for what they do.

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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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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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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

Copyright © 2021 by David Hunt < dhunt @ whittier . edu > Linda Zagzebski

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Do We Have Free Will? How the Brain Makes Decisions

The brain has complex top-down control systems—themselves shaped by many causes..

Updated April 3, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• As a physical system, the brain is subject to causal determinants. This seems incompatible with free will.
• Yet, complex top-down control systems render its outputs unpredictable and undetermined by bottom-up inputs.
• Those decision-making systems have biases and proclivities shaped by genes, experience, and learning.

“How did you become a person where that is what you did at that juncture? And the answer is, radically enough, that moment happened because of what came just before that, and what came just before that, and before that, all the way down.” —Robert Sapolsky 1

This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

As a psychiatrist, I am constantly reminded of the constraints on free will . I am struck multiple times a day by the many ways in which people’s ability to control their thoughts, moods, and behaviors is subverted by mental disorders. As a typical patient of mine expressed it: "I just can't control what goes on in my head. I wish I had better control of my thoughts." 2

For the most part, mental disorders are not categorically distinct from normal human experience—there is no sharply discernible threshold between normal and abnormal mental experience. Despite this smooth continuum, it is clear that mental disorders frequently reduce a person’s ability to control their mind, whereas those of us fortunate enough to find ourselves in a current state of more-or-less normal mental health (and not intoxicated, sleep-deprived, etc.) would usually insist that we do possess free will—the ability to freely make choices that are not determined for us, impeded, or constrained. Or at least it feels that way.

Yet, acceptance that the mind is the product of the physical brain—and not some free-floating, ethereal entity—would seem to force us to conclude that our thoughts and actions, which are all the product of physical neuronal processes, must be entirely dependent on preceding causes — just like everything else in the universe. 3

Determinism—everything is due to preceding causes

The biologist Robert Sapolsky is a hard determinist. He argues that there is no such thing as free will—that there cannot possibly be. While this may be an unappealing idea to most people, it is in many ways the logical and seemingly most consistent conclusion from a scientific perspective and is, in broad principle, the easier position to defend. In his book Determined , 4 Sapolsky explains the basis of behavior in terms of its antecedent causes—internal and external, biological and psychosocial, the complex interactions between genes and environment, and how these varied factors ultimately exert their effects on behavior at the neurobiological level.

He delineates a range of proximate and distal causes: seconds before we act (e.g., neurotransmitter signals), minutes to hours before (e.g., the immediate social context), days to months before (e.g., hormonal cycles), years before (e.g., the critical role of childhood experiences and development), centuries and millennia before (e.g., genetics , and also the influence of culture and societal norms, on shaping our instincts and behaviors), all the way back to the evolutionary forces shaping our species’ behavior via natural selection across eons of time.

A scientific argument for free will

Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist who, in his book Free Agents , 5 articulates some of the strongest contemporary scientific arguments against determinism and in favor of free will (or, at least, partial free will). Mitchell’s arguments are in many ways less intuitive than Sapolsky’s and more convoluted, so they will require relatively more explanation in these posts to fully appreciate their intriguing but debatable implications.

Mitchell's arguments are based on the complex ways in which high-level decision-making processes in the brain operate. Like Sapolsky, he takes an evolutionary perspective.

The evolution of nervous systems and cognition

Primitive organisms behave in mainly reflexive and mechanistic ways as they respond to stimuli. Their responses are usually based on the value of the stimulus to the organism (good, e.g., an energy source, or bad, e.g., a noxious substance). As animals evolved to become larger, more complex, and more mobile, their nervous systems developed the ability to form complex mental maps or models— internal representations —of the external environment and of their own state and goals . These animals thus had cognitive ability—the ability to form internal representations and to use these to guide behavior. 6,7

Delaying responses, cognitive control, and doing things for reasons

Organisms with this capability could delay responses to stimuli and not merely react reflexively and automatically. As their repertoire of potential behaviors expanded through evolution, they had to acquire ways of deciding between actions. Their nervous systems evolved the ability to integrate information from internal representations about their state, goals, and environment and to weigh potential actions based on predicted costs and benefits. This facilitated adaptive behaviors in complex and changing environments. It was an evolution from mere reactive responses to proactive, informed decision-making based on individual needs and reasons. Mammals have this ability more than other animals.

The expansion of the prefrontal cortex in primates, especially in humans, added more levels to the cognitive hierarchy. Humans evolved a unique ability for introspection and abstract reasoning, and through language, the ability to combine ideas in unlimited ways and to express these. Free will requires reflection or metacognition , and conscious cognitive control. Humans have the ability to reason about our reasons and to articulate them to each other and to ourselves.

Noisiness of bottom-up inputs opens the possibility for top-down effects

Mitchell’s argument in favor of free will rests firstly on the argument that the universe is not deterministic at the level of fundamental particles, due to quantum indeterminacy. This introduces an element of randomness in the way particles behave. Secondly, and more relevantly for neurobiological systems, there is a lot of “noise” in the signals transmitted by neurons, which, for the organism, introduces an additional important level of indeterminacy.

Mitchell suggests that the brain exploits and harnesses this indeterminacy or “slack” in the system: The noisiness of bottom-up inputs opens the possibility for top-down effects. It allows the higher order organization of the system to have some constraining influence over the way things happen—the neuronal and behavioral outputs.

This, according to Mitchell, is what confers agency to the organism, allowing it to have some causal effect on its own behavior. He argues that it is the whole organism—the agent, its emergent holistic self—that is doing the decision-making, not just its mechanistic parts.

How neurons make decisions

Neuronal transmission frequently involves a process in which one neuron receives input from multiple other neurons, summing the excitatory and inhibitory input signals to produce an output signal, thus converting all that noisy input into an all-or-nothing binary “decision” to fire or not. Neurons thereby generate new higher-order information by integrating inputs from many neurons. The lower-level information (the input) shapes the output in a probabilistic rather than deterministic manner.

Thus, individual neurons in neural circuits do much more than pass along signals; they actively integrate, transform, and create new information. This process is essential for the brain's ability to make sense of the world, enabling cognitive functions like perception, decision-making, and learning. Mitchell argues that it underpins an organism's capacity to adapt flexibly and make decisions in a dynamic and unpredictable environment, giving it agency.

“Policies” and value in neuronal decision-making

Michael Shadlen is a neuroscientist and neurologist who is an expert on the neural mechanisms of decision-making. 8 His lab has studied the specific role of neural noise in decision-making, as well as a key neural mechanism in decision-making that Shadlen refers to as “policy”: a higher-level setting that governs the basic mechanism for converting evidence to a decision—thus controlling the process of deliberation toward a choice. An example of such a policy is the trade-off between the speed and accuracy of a decision.

“Policies instantiate value in the decision process. Speed-accuracy is a special case where the value (or cost) of time is pitted against the value of accuracy […] 9 Of course, like other policies, the speed-accuracy tradeoff is controlled by machinery, and it is established through learning and experiences which are themselves shaped by the agent’s history of exposures and decisions […] Policies are controlled by neurobiology with settings established by the organism’s history, but it is not possible to provide an exhaustive explanation of these settings by looking at the genome, childhood experiences, and so on.” 10

If your brain is biased toward favoring speed over accuracy in decisions, then you are inclined toward decisions and actions that are more efficient but also more impulsive. The opposite tendency would be characterized by an inclination toward great caution and perfectionism at the expense of speed.

Genetic predisposition, experience, and learning

Whatever your tendency on that particular continuum and other such continua affecting decision-making, such biases and proclivities are the result of the complex interplay of your genetic predisposition and a lifetime of experience and learning. They define your personality .

We cannot influence our genetic makeup. But can we influence our experience and learning, and if so, how much?

In Part 2 of this two-part series, we will examine the key question of whether we can influence the development of our own biases and proclivities by freely choosing our experiences and our learning , or whether those choices are themselves determined by our predispositions and by circumstances beyond our control.

1. Robert Sapolsky vs Kevin Mitchell: The Biology of Free Will | Philosophical Trials #15, moderated by Theodor Nenu, Lecturer in Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Y1Q8vhX5Y (19:40).

2. Of course, she doesn't experience this feeling all the time, in all her thoughts and actions.

3. A common argument to support the idea that we have some degree of free will in ways that are not completely determined by prior causes, invokes emergent phenomena. These can be hard to define with specificity. Essentially, emergent phenomena refer to complex patterns, behaviors, or properties that arise from the interactions of simpler elements in a system, which are not predictable from the properties of the individual elements alone. Emergent phenomena are observed in systems where the collective behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[Click 'More' to view footnotes 4-10].

4. Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (New York: Penguin Press, 2023). See also his previous book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

5. Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

6. Internal representations have meaning for the organism. They are ultimately grounded in sensory input or motor output, though in their more complex form they may be a few steps removed from these. In complex animals, they can be quite abstract, for example involving categorical semantic concepts.

7. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, who has written extensively on the evolution of cognition, defines cognition as "the ability to use internal representations of information to construct mental models of the world." That is, “the capacity to construct models of the world and use these in thinking, planning, deciding, acting and even feeling.” [Joseph E. LeDoux, The Four Realms of Existence: A new theory of being human (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), p. 138, 165.]

8. Mitchell's ideas about neuronal decision-making are probably influenced by Shadlen's work, though he doesn't explicitly refer to it in Free Agents .

9. Shadlen elaborates: “Other examples of policies would include the relative weighting of different sources of evidence, the value assigned to potential outcomes, temporal discounting of such valuations, the relative contribution to these value functions that reflect group versus self, leverage given to emotional versus empirical considerations, the value assigned to exploration, and so on.” (Shadlen 2014 - reference below)

10. From: “ Comments on Adina Roskies, ‘Can Neuroscience Resolve Issues about Free Will?’ ” Michael N Shadlen. In Moral Psychology , Volume 4: Free Will & Moral Responsibility , edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). See also: Michael N. Shadlen and Eric R. Kandel, “Decision-Making and Consciousness,” in Principles of Neural Science , ed. Eric R. Kandel et al. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2021), 1392-1415.

Ralph Lewis, M.D. , is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto.

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The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?

T owards the end of a conversation dwelling on some of the deepest metaphysical puzzles regarding the nature of human existence, the philosopher Galen Strawson paused, then asked me: “Have you spoken to anyone else yet who’s received weird email?” He navigated to a file on his computer and began reading from the alarming messages he and several other scholars had received over the past few years. Some were plaintive, others abusive, but all were fiercely accusatory. “Last year you all played a part in destroying my life,” one person wrote. “I lost everything because of you – my son, my partner, my job, my home, my mental health. All because of you, you told me I had no control, how I was not responsible for anything I do, how my beautiful six-year-old son was not responsible for what he did … Goodbye, and good luck with the rest of your cancerous, evil, pathetic existence.” “Rot in your own shit Galen,” read another note, sent in early 2015. “Your wife, your kids your friends, you have smeared all there [sic] achievements you utter fucking prick,” wrote the same person, who subsequently warned: “I’m going to fuck you up.” And then, days later, under the subject line “Hello”: “I’m coming for you.” “This was one where we had to involve the police,” Strawson said. Thereafter, the violent threats ceased.

It isn’t unheard of for philosophers to receive death threats. The Australian ethicist Peter Singer, for example, has received many, in response to his argument that, in highly exceptional circumstances, it might be morally justifiable to kill newborn babies with severe disabilities. But Strawson, like others on the receiving end of this particular wave of abuse, had merely expressed a longstanding position in an ancient debate that strikes many as the ultimate in “armchair philosophy”, wholly detached from the emotive entanglements of real life. They all deny that human beings possess free will. They argue that our choices are determined by forces beyond our ultimate control – perhaps even predetermined all the way back to the big bang – and that therefore nobody is ever wholly responsible for their actions. Reading back over the emails, Strawson, who gives the impression of someone far more forgiving of other people’s flaws than of his own, found himself empathising with his harassers’ distress. “I think for these people it’s just an existential catastrophe,” he said. “And I think I can see why.”

The difficulty in explaining the enigma of free will to those unfamiliar with the subject isn’t that it’s complex or obscure. It’s that the experience of possessing free will – the feeling that we are the authors of our choices – is so utterly basic to everyone’s existence that it can be hard to get enough mental distance to see what’s going on. Suppose you find yourself feeling moderately hungry one afternoon, so you walk to the fruit bowl in your kitchen, where you see one apple and one banana. As it happens, you choose the banana. But it seems absolutely obvious that you were free to choose the apple – or neither, or both – instead. That’s free will: were you to rewind the tape of world history, to the instant just before you made your decision, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you’d have been able to make a different one.

Nothing could be more self-evident. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument. According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades. Now that it’s possible to observe – thanks to neuroimaging – the physical brain activity associated with our decisions, it’s easier to think of those decisions as just another part of the mechanics of the material universe, in which “free will” plays no role. And from the 1980s onwards, various specific neuroscientific findings have offered troubling clues that our so-called free choices might actually originate in our brains several milliseconds, or even much longer, before we’re first aware of even thinking of them.

Despite the criticism that this is all just armchair philosophy, the truth is that the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written. Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness. And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

Peer over the precipice of the free will debate for a while, and you begin to appreciate how an already psychologically vulnerable person might be nudged into a breakdown, as was apparently the case with Strawson’s email correspondents. Harris has taken to prefacing his podcasts on free will with disclaimers, urging those who find the topic emotionally distressing to give them a miss. And Saul Smilansky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, told me that if a graduate student who was prone to depression sought to study the subject with him, he would try to dissuade them. “Look, I’m naturally a buoyant person,” he said. “I have the mentality of a village idiot: it’s easy to make me happy. Nevertheless, the free will problem is really depressing if you take it seriously. It hasn’t made me happy, and in retrospect, if I were at graduate school again, maybe a different topic would have been preferable.”

Smilansky is an advocate of what he calls “illusionism”, the idea that although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise – from which it follows that an article like this one might be actively dangerous. (Twenty years ago, he said, he might have refused to speak to me, but these days free will scepticism was so widely discussed that “the horse has left the barn”.) “On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on – and I don’t think I’ve fully internalised the implications myself, even after all these years – it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said. “For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

T he conviction that nobody ever truly chooses freely to do anything – that we’re the puppets of forces beyond our control – often seems to strike its adherents early in their intellectual careers, in a sudden flash of insight. “I was sitting in a carrel in Wolfson College [in Oxford] in 1975, and I had no idea what I was going to write my DPhil thesis about,” Strawson recalled. “I was reading something about Kant’s views on free will, and I was just electrified. That was it.” The logic, once glimpsed, seems coldly inexorable. Start with what seems like an obvious truth: anything that happens in the world, ever, must have been completely caused by things that happened before it. And those things must have been caused by things that happened before them – and so on, backwards to the dawn of time: cause after cause after cause, all of them following the predictable laws of nature, even if we haven’t figured all of those laws out yet. It’s easy enough to grasp this in the context of the straightforwardly physical world of rocks and rivers and internal combustion engines. But surely “one thing leads to another” in the world of decisions and intentions, too. Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?

So in the fruit bowl example, there are physiological reasons for your feeling hungry in the first place, and there are causes – in your genes, your upbringing, or your current environment – for your choosing to address your hunger with fruit, rather than a box of doughnuts. And your preference for the banana over the apple, at the moment of supposed choice, must have been caused by what went before, presumably including the pattern of neurons firing in your brain, which was itself caused – and so on back in an unbroken chain to your birth, the meeting of your parents, their births and, eventually, the birth of the cosmos.

But if all that’s true, there’s simply no room for the kind of free will you might imagine yourself to have when you see the apple and banana and wonder which one you’ll choose. To have what’s known in the scholarly jargon as “contra-causal” free will – so that if you rewound the tape of history back to the moment of choice, you could make a different choice – you’d somehow have to slip outside physical reality. To make a choice that wasn’t merely the next link in the unbroken chain of causes, you’d have to be able to stand apart from the whole thing, a ghostly presence separate from the material world yet mysteriously still able to influence it. But of course you can’t actually get to this supposed place that’s external to the universe, separate from all the atoms that comprise it and the laws that govern them. You just are some of the atoms in the universe, governed by the same predictable laws as all the rest.

It was the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace, writing in 1814, who most succinctly expressed the puzzle here: how can there be free will, in a universe where events just crank forwards like clockwork? His thought experiment is known as Laplace’s demon, and his argument went as follows: if some hypothetical ultra-intelligent being – or demon – could somehow know the position of every atom in the universe at a single point in time, along with all the laws that governed their interactions, it could predict the future in its entirety. There would be nothing it couldn’t know about the world 100 or 1,000 years hence, down to the slightest quiver of a sparrow’s wing. You might think you made a free choice to marry your partner, or choose a salad with your meal rather than chips; but in fact Laplace’s demon would have known it all along, by extrapolating out along the endless chain of causes. “For such an intellect,” Laplace said, “nothing could be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.”

It’s true that since Laplace’s day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain. But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings. And in any case, there’s no more freedom in being subject to the random behaviours of electrons than there is in being the slave of predetermined causal laws. Either way, something other than your own free will seems to be pulling your strings.

B y far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces (plus maybe a little quantum randomness). “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts, a collection of dialogues with his fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett, “it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.” Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

Consider the case of Charles Whitman. Just after midnight on 1 August 1966, Whitman – an outgoing and apparently stable 25-year-old former US Marine – drove to his mother’s apartment in Austin, Texas, where he stabbed her to death. He returned home, where he killed his wife in the same manner. Later that day, he took an assortment of weapons to the top of a high building on the campus of the University of Texas, where he began shooting randomly for about an hour and a half. By the time Whitman was killed by police, 12 more people were dead, and one more died of his injuries years afterwards – a spree that remains the US’s 10th worst mass shooting.

Within hours of the massacre, the authorities discovered a note that Whitman had typed the night before. “I don’t quite understand what compels me to type this letter,” he wrote. “Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts [which] constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks … After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.” Following the first two murders, he added a coda: “Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.” An autopsy was performed, revealing the presence of a substantial brain tumour, pressing on Whitman’s amygdala, the part of the brain governing “fight or flight” responses to fear.

As the free will sceptics who draw on Whitman’s case concede, it’s impossible to know if the brain tumour caused Whitman’s actions. What seems clear is that it certainly could have done so – and that almost everyone, on hearing about it, undergoes some shift in their attitude towards him. It doesn’t make the killings any less horrific. Nor does it mean the police weren’t justified in killing him. But it does make his rampage start to seem less like the evil actions of an evil man, and more like the terrible symptom of a disorder, with Whitman among its victims. The same is true for another wrongdoer famous in the free-will literature, the anonymous subject of the 2003 paper Right Orbitofrontal Tumor with Paedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign, a 40-year-old schoolteacher who suddenly developed paedophilic urges and began seeking out child pornography, and was subsequently convicted of child molestation. Soon afterwards, complaining of headaches, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour; when it was removed, his paedophilic urges vanished. A year later, they returned – as had his tumour, detected in another brain scan.

If you find the presence of a brain tumour in these cases in any way exculpatory, though, you face a difficult question: what’s so special about a brain tumour, as opposed to all the other ways in which people’s brains cause them to do things? When you learn about the specific chain of causes that were unfolding inside Charles Whitman’s skull, it has the effect of seeming to make him less personally responsible for the terrible acts he committed. But by definition, anyone who commits any immoral act has a brain in which a chain of prior causes had unfolded, leading to the act; if that weren’t the case, they’d never have committed the act. “A neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions,” is how Harris expresses it. “Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumour in it.” It appears to follow that as we understand ever more about how the brain works, we’ll illuminate the last shadows in which something called “free will” might ever have lurked – and we’ll be forced to concede that a criminal is merely someone unlucky enough to find himself at the end of a causal chain that culminates in a crime. We can still insist the crime in question is morally bad; we just can’t hold the criminal individually responsible. (Or at least that’s where the logic seems to lead our modern minds: there’s a rival tradition , going back to the ancient Greeks, which holds that you can be held responsible for what’s fated to happen to you anyway.)

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified. Like Strawson, he has received email abuse from people disturbed by the implications. Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.” Indeed some psychological research, he points out, suggests that people believe in free will partly because they want to justify their appetite for retribution. “What seems to happen is that people come across an action they disapprove of; they have a high desire to blame or punish; so they attribute to the perpetrator the degree of control [over their own actions] that would be required to justify blaming them.” (It’s no accident that the free will controversy is entangled in debates about religion: following similar logic, sinners must freely choose to sin, in order for God’s retribution to be justified.)

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction. You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat. (The main focus, in Caruso’s ideal world, would be on redressing social problems to try stop crime happening in the first place – just as public health systems ought to focus on preventing epidemics happening to begin with.)

It’s tempting to try to wriggle out of these ramifications by protesting that, while people might not choose their worst impulses – for murder, say – they do have the choice not to succumb to them. You can feel the urge to kill someone but resist it, or even seek psychiatric help. You can take responsibility for the state of your personality. And don’t we all do that, all the time, in more mundane ways, whenever we decide to acquire a new professional skill, become a better listener, or finally get fit?

But this is not the escape clause it might seem. After all, the free will sceptics insist, if you do manage to change your personality in some admirable way, you must already have possessed the kind of personality capable of implementing such a change – and you didn’t choose that . None of this requires us to believe that the worst atrocities are any less appalling than we previously thought. But it does entail that the perpetrators can’t be held personally to blame. If you’d been born with Hitler’s genes, and experienced Hitler’s upbringing, you would be Hitler – and ultimately it’s only good fortune that you weren’t. In the end, as Strawson puts it, “luck swallows everything”.

G iven how watertight the case against free will can appear, it may be surprising to learn that most philosophers reject it: according to a 2009 survey, conducted by the website PhilPapers, only about 12% of them are persuaded by it. And the disagreement can be fraught, partly because free will denial belongs to a wider trend that drives some philosophers spare – the tendency for those trained in the hard sciences to make sweeping pronouncements about debates that have raged in philosophy for years, as if all those dull-witted scholars were just waiting for the physicists and neuroscientists to show up. In one chilly exchange, Dennett paid a backhanded compliment to Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience, calling his book “remarkable” and “valuable” – but only because it was riddled with so many wrongheaded claims: “I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves.”

What’s still more surprising, and hard to wrap one’s mind around, is that most of those who defend free will don’t reject the sceptics’ most dizzying assertion – that every choice you ever make might have been determined in advance. So in the fruit bowl example, a majority of philosophers agree that if you rewound the tape of history to the moment of choice, with everything in the universe exactly the same, you couldn’t have made a different selection. That kind of free will is “as illusory as poltergeists”, to quote Dennett. What they claim instead is that this doesn’t matter: that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose. That’s why they’re known as “compatibilists”: they think determinism and free will are compatible. (There are many other positions in the debate, including some philosophers, many Christians among them, who think we really do have “ghostly” free will; and others who think the whole so-called problem is a chimera, resulting from a confusion of categories, or errors of language.)

To those who find the case against free will persuasive, compatibilism seems outrageous at first glance. How can we possibly be free to choose if we aren’t, in fact, you know, free to choose? But to grasp the compatibilists’ point, it helps first to think about free will not as a kind of magic, but as a mundane sort of skill – one which most adults possess, most of the time. As the compatibilist Kadri Vihvelin writes, “we have the free will we think we have, including the freedom of action we think we have … by having some bundle of abilities and being in the right kind of surroundings.” The way most compatibilists see things, “being free” is just a matter of having the capacity to think about what you want, reflect on your desires, then act on them and sometimes get what you want. When you choose the banana in the normal way – by thinking about which fruit you’d like, then taking it – you’re clearly in a different situation from someone who picks the banana because a fruit-obsessed gunman is holding a pistol to their head; or someone afflicted by a banana addiction, compelled to grab every one they see. In all of these scenarios, to be sure, your actions belonged to an unbroken chain of causes, stretching back to the dawn of time. But who cares? The banana-chooser in one of them was clearly more free than in the others.

“Harris, Pinker, Coyne – all these scientists, they all make the same two-step move,” said Eddy Nahmias, a compatibilist philosopher at Georgia State University in the US. “Their first move is always to say, ‘well, here’s what free will means’” – and it’s always something nobody could ever actually have, in the reality in which we live. “And then, sure enough, they deflate it. But once you have that sort of balloon in front of you, it’s very easy to deflate it, because any naturalistic account of the world will show that it’s false.”

Consider hypnosis. A doctrinaire free will sceptic might feel obliged to argue that a person hypnotised into making a particular purchase is no less free than someone who thinks about it, in the usual manner, before reaching for their credit card. After all, their idea of free will requires that the choice wasn’t fully determined by prior causes; yet in both cases, hypnotised and non-hypnotised, it was. “But come on, that’s just really annoying ,” said Helen Beebee, a philosopher at the University of Manchester who has written widely on free will, expressing an exasperation commonly felt by compatibilists toward their rivals’ more outlandish claims. “In some sense, I don’t care if you call it ‘free will’ or ‘acting freely’ or anything else – it’s just that it obviously does matter, to everybody, whether they get hypnotised into doing things or not.”

Granted, the compatibilist version of free will may be less exciting. But it doesn’t follow that it’s worthless. Indeed, it may be (in another of Dennett’s phrases) the only kind of “free will worth wanting”. You experience the desire for a certain fruit, you act on it, and you get the fruit, with no external gunmen or internal disorders influencing your choice. How could a person ever be freer than that?

Thinking of free will this way also puts a different spin on some notorious experiments conducted in the 80s by the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, which have been interpreted as offering scientific proof that free will doesn’t exist. Wiring his subjects to a brain scanner, and asking them to flex their hands at a moment of their choosing, Libet seemed to show that their choice was detectable from brain activity 300 milliseconds before they made a conscious decision. (Other studies have indicated activity up to 10 seconds before a conscious choice.) How could these subjects be said to have reached their decisions freely, if the lab equipment knew their decisions so far in advance? But to most compatibilists, this is a fuss about nothing. Like everything else, our conscious choices are links in a causal chain of neural processes, so of course some brain activity precedes the moment at which we become aware of them.

From this down-to-earth perspective, there’s also no need to start panicking that cases like Charles Whitman’s might mean we could never hold anybody responsible for their misdeeds, or praise them for their achievements. (In their defence, several free will sceptics I spoke to had their reasons for not going that far, either.) Instead, we need only ask whether someone had the normal ability to choose rationally, reflecting on the implications of their actions. We all agree that newborn babies haven’t developed that yet, so we don’t blame them for waking us in the night; and we believe most non-human animals don’t possess it – so few of us rage indignantly at wasps for stinging us. Someone with a severe neurological or developmental impairment would surely lack it, too, perhaps including Whitman. But as for everyone else: “ Bernie Madoff is the example I always like to use,” said Nahmias. “Because it’s so clear that he knew what he was doing, and that he knew that what he was doing was wrong, and he did it anyway.” He did have the ability we call “free will” – and used it to defraud his investors of more than $17bn.

To the free will sceptics, this is all just a desperate attempt at face-saving and changing the subject – an effort to redefine free will not as the thing we all feel, when faced with a choice, but as something else, unworthy of the name. “People hate the idea that they aren’t agents who can make free choices,” Jerry Coyne has argued. Harris has accused Dennett of approaching the topic as if he were telling someone bent on discovering the lost city of Atlantis that they ought to be satisfied with a trip to Sicily. After all, it meets some of the criteria: it’s an island in the sea, home to a civilisation with ancient roots. But the facts remain: Atlantis doesn’t exist. And when it felt like it wasn’t inevitable you’d choose the banana, the truth is that it actually was.

I t’s tempting to dismiss the free will controversy as irrelevant to real life, on the grounds that we can’t help but feel as though we have free will, whatever the philosophical truth may be. I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option. In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

But is it? When my mind is at its quietest – for example, drinking coffee early in the morning, before the four-year-old wakes up – things are liable to feel different. In such moments of relaxed concentration, it seems clear to me that my intentions and choices, like all my other thoughts and emotions, arise unbidden in my awareness. There’s no sense in which it feels like I’m their author. Why do I put down my coffee mug and head to the shower at the exact moment I do so? Because the intention to do so pops up, caused, no doubt, by all sorts of activity in my brain – but activity that lies outside my understanding, let alone my command. And it’s exactly the same when it comes to those weightier decisions that seem to express something profound about the kind of person I am: whether to attend the funeral of a certain relative, say, or which of two incompatible career opportunities to pursue. I can spend hours or even days engaged in what I tell myself is “reaching a decision” about those, when what I’m really doing, if I’m honest, is just vacillating between options – until at some unpredictable moment, or when an external deadline forces the issue, the decision to commit to one path or another simply arises.

This is what Harris means when he declares that, on close inspection, it’s not merely that free will is an illusion, but that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion: watch yourself closely, and you don’t even seem to be free. “If one pays sufficient attention,” he told me by email, “one can notice that there’s no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own.” This is an idea with roots in Buddhism, and echoed by others, including the philosopher David Hume: when you look within, there’s no trace of an internal commanding officer, autonomously issuing decisions. There’s only mental activity, flowing on. Or as Arthur Rimbaud wrote, in a letter to a friend in 1871: “I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought; I watch it, I listen to it.”

There are reasons to agree with Saul Smilansky that it might be personally and societally detrimental for too many people to start thinking in this way, even if it turns out it’s the truth. (Dennett, although he thinks we do have free will, takes a similar position, arguing that it’s morally irresponsible to promote free-will denial.) In one set of studies in 2008, the psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler asked one group of participants to read an excerpt from The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, in which he suggests free will is an illusion. The subjects thus primed to doubt the existence of free will proved significantly likelier than others, in a subsequent stage of the experiment, to cheat in a test where there was money at stake. Other research has reported a diminished belief in free will to less willingness to volunteer to help others, to lower levels of commitment in relationships, and lower levels of gratitude.

Unsuccessful attempts to replicate Vohs and Schooler’s findings have called them into question. But even if the effects are real, some free will sceptics argue that the participants in such studies are making a common mistake – and one that might get cleared up rather rapidly, were the case against free will to become better known and understood. Study participants who suddenly become immoral seem to be confusing determinism with fatalism – the idea that if we don’t have free will, then our choices don’t really matter, so we might as well not bother trying to make good ones, and just do as we please instead. But in fact it doesn’t follow from our choices being determined that they don’t matter. It might matter enormously whether you choose to feed your children a diet rich in vegetables or not; or whether you decide to check carefully in both directions before crossing a busy road. It’s just that (according to the sceptics) you don’t get to make those choices freely.

In any case, were free will really to be shown to be nonexistent, the implications might not be entirely negative. It’s true that there’s something repellent about an idea that seems to require us to treat a cold-blooded murderer as not responsible for his actions, while at the same time characterising the love of a parent for a child as nothing more than what Smilansky calls “the unfolding of the given” – mere blind causation, devoid of any human spark. But there’s something liberating about it, too. It’s a reason to be gentler with yourself, and with others. For those of us prone to being hard on ourselves, it’s therapeutic to keep in the back of your mind the thought that you might be doing precisely as well as you were always going to be doing – that in the profoundest sense, you couldn’t have done any more. And for those of us prone to raging at others for their minor misdeeds, it’s calming to consider how easily their faults might have been yours. (Sure enough, some research has linked disbelief in free will to increased kindness.)

Harris argues that if we fully grasped the case against free will, it would be difficult to hate other people: how can you hate someone you don’t blame for their actions? Yet love would survive largely unscathed, since love is “the condition of our wanting those we love to be happy, and being made happy ourselves by that ethical and emotional connection”, neither of which would be undermined. And countless other positive aspects of life would be similarly untouched. As Strawson puts it, in a world without a belief in free will, “strawberries would still taste just as good”.

Those early-morning moments aside, I personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life. Yet even if only entertained as a hypothetical possibility, free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone – and that you’ve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail. It’s a reminder that accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.

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• Concept of Free Will in “Paradise Lost” by John Milton All these kind of punishments provokes the image in the readers’ mind that God has done what he warned to Adam and Eve.
• Perspectives on Free Will: A Comparison of Hobbes and Berkeley Hobbes argued that God has a free will because his free will is not affected by anything that happens. On the other hand, George Berkeley believed that free will was controlled by God in his […]
• Free Will and Fate in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King Drama Even though the role of fate and prophecy is significant in influencing the life of Oedipus, the king’s destiny can be discussed as a direct result of his actions, choices, and decisions.
• Free Will: Towards Hume’s Compatibilist Approach According to Williams, libertarians are of the view that free will is rationally incompatible with the concept of determinism, and that a deterministic world may be rationally impossible or false.
• Fatalism and Free Will: Terms Comparison Some of them, especially at the initial stages of the development of the mankind, kept to the point of view that certain supernatural forces control and predetermine all actions of people and events in the […]
• Calvinism and Wesleyanism: Predestination vs. Free Will On the one hand, the emphasis on the sovereignty of God has been the source of Reformed piety, the inspiration of the courage, self-sacrifice, and broad humanitarianism that has often marked the Children of Geneva.
• Free Will and Determinism According to William James and Jean-Paul Sartre What is important to note at this point is that both philosophers rejected the notions of free will and determinism albeit in varying levels and for different reasons.
• Philosophy: Free Will of Aristotle and Lucretius The philosopher says that every action having place under the influence of the external force is not a free will, which comes from the inner desire and motivation of an individual. Moreover, the movie is […]
• Determinism and Free Will Controversy The problem of determinism is that applying such a system to an individual would bring it to the point of absurdity.
• Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence 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.
• “The City of God” by Saint Augustine: Theme of Free Will I am going to analyze the theme of free will in the book written by Saint Augustine “City of God” as it is an imprescriptible symbol of religious text, aspects of morality, and the interpretation […]
• Hunting, Death, and Free Will: “No Country for Old Men” by the Coen Brothers From the beginning, the directors of the film warn the viewer that the movie is about at least two things: hunting and death.
• Saint Augustine and the Question of Free Will Applying Augustine’s idea of free will to the concept of an all-knowing God, one could think that after God deprived Adam and Eve of free will, the future choices we make are made by God […]
• Morality and Free Will in “Daisy Miller” by James Later on that evening, Daisy suggests to Winterborne about her wish to ride on the lake and willingly overlooks the appropriateness of the time.
• The Divine Sovereignty of God and the Free Will of Man God’s intervention in history means for most biblical authors that the will of God ultimately determines the course of events, and human freedom is manifested in the fact that he either accepts this will of […]
• Moral Responsibility, Free Will and Determinism On the other hand, however, it would be unreasonable to assume that the phenomenon of free will is entirely applicable in today’s social and moral contexts as well.
• The Role of Free Will and Determinism Thus, the presence of free will is important for marking a person as guilty and subsequent punishment. We can define the soul as the consciousness of matter, its mental world, responsible for it.
• Machiavelli’s Views on Free Will and Class Conflict Thus, Machiavelli raised the question of the historical and political process laws and the need for both objective conditions and the role of the human factor, participants in political activity.
• The Book of Genesis: Predestination and Free Will The Book of Genesis sets the stage for the later books, explains the main concepts, laws, God’s promises to the people, and introduces the characters who played an essential role in God’s plans and God […]
• Free Will: Determinism and Libertarianism The first one constitutes a belief that there is no free will in nature and that all of the actions are already predetermined.
• Free Will vs. Determinism as Philosophical Concepts An objective and meticulous examination of the freedom and responsibility spectrum that highlights the difference between choice and causation explains whether human actions are free or predetermined.
• Free Will in Human Life: Reality or Fraud? The paradox of the question about free will for humans is also related to the role of God and the impossibility of great philosophers to provide a clear answer.
• Free Will and Its Possible Extent According to Compatibilism philosophy, Clarence’s murdering his girlfriend is a free action, because, as Hume states, “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform as that between cause and effect in […]
• The Concept of Free Will by Susan Wolf In the Asymmetry of the Reason view, Wolf argues that responsibility depends on the aptitude to operate and act in agreement with the true and good.
• Against Free Will: Determinism and Prediction On the other hand, humans have the ability to make predictions about themselves and others, some of which will come true, undermining the idea of free will.
• Analysis and Comparison of Determinism, Compatibilism and Libertarianism, Free Will It would be safe to assume that a person’s environment is limited by the geography of the planet and the amount of possible places to visit, which is enormous but is nonetheless limited.
• Free Will in Hinduism and Christianity: Ideologies on Both Religious Practices and Philosophy On the basis of the aspect of free will, the determination of the laws of karma is not favoring to particular people as everyone is treated the same, and has the same opportunity for personal […]
• Free Will and Choice in Islamic Psychology The free choice is concentrated on nafs that a human being has, according to Quran: nafs can be good or bad, and it is up to an individual whether to strive towards the higher potentials […]
• Free Will and Determinism: Discussion In particular, it would not provide the capacity to be the origin of one’s decisions and actions that according to incompatibilists is unavailable to compatibilists.
• Free Will and Willpower: Is Consciousness Necessary? This plainly makes it a duty to love ourselves and regard our own happiness by the value of the scale. It is our desire only that induces within us the spirit to help others therefore […]
• Free Will and Determinism Analysis Jonathan Edwards, in his fundamental work The Freedom of the Will, argues that the will always choose according to its greatest desire at the moment of choice.
• Van Inwagen’s Philosophical Argument on Free Will The notion of a state should be treated in such a way that the physical condition of the world remains independent of logic.
• Free Will in Philosophy and Society The emergence and popularization of democratic values all around the world raised the question of social and political pressures that used to be overlooked in the past.
• Human Free Will in Philosophical Theories The above factors are completely out of our control thereby affirming the fact that we do not act out of free will. Essentially, we may seem to have free will but our actions and decisions […]
• Predestination vs. Free Will The protagonists of free will acknowledge that God is always aware of the choices that people intend to make and the consequences thereof.
• Ontology, Free Will, Fate and Determinism On the other hand, fate is simply the predetermined course of the events or the predetermined future. It is pragmatic that people should not believe in the cause and effect.
• Nielsen’s Free Will and Determinism: An Analysis and Critique Despite the proof that Nielsen provides for the fact that determinism and freedom can actually coexist and, moreover, complement each other, Nielsen makes it clear that the existence of moral luck defines the boundaries of […]
• Ethical Issue of Free Will in Business In this paper, we shall discuss and understand the importance of free will in the sphere of business. According to some people, social reforms are the duty of politicians and not the business community.
• Free Will Does Not Exist It cannot be imagined how the society would be is there was no thought in the minds of the people about the existence of God who oversees the actions of deeds of people in the […]
• Do Humans Have Free Will? However, he takes the view that some humans are not guided only by laws to act and they are not able to exercise their own free will.
• Free Will of a Heroin Addict This paper seeks to present the case of a heroin addict who makes herself and the other people surrounding her suffer evaluating whether she is the one to be fully responsible for her actions or […]
• What is the difference between compatibilsm and incompatibilist in relation to free will The no choice statement provides that if a person lacks choice in relation to p, and also lacks choice in relation to whether if p, then q, then there is no choice in relation to […]
• The Issue of the Free Will On the one hand, the opponents of the hard determinism state that free will exists and people do not base their own decisions on anything, however, it is possible to say that the decision was […]
• Faith or Free Will Used in the Movie – Minority Report and the Drama – Antigone In life, people have the freewill to choose what they want; however, in some cases, faith and fate takes the center stage despite the choices made through freewill.
• The Workings Of Destiny, Fate, Free Will And Free Choice In Oedipus The King
• The Natural Law on Free Will and the Nature of Evil According to St. Thomas Aquinas
• The Unalienable Right of Free Will in A Clockwork Orange, a Novel by Anthony Burgess
• Were Adam and Eve Influenced By the Snake or Free Will
• The Three Claims on the Debate on Free Will Between Libertarianism and Determinism
• What is The Meaning of Free Will in Life
• The Theme of Free Will in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a Novel by Mark Twain
• The Role of Fate Versus Free Will in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
• Determinism Vs. Indeterminism And The Existence Of Free Will
• Critically Examine the Claim That Free Will and Determinism Are Incompatible
• The Struggle Between Fate and Free Will in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a Novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• How Free Will And Inborn Neurological Hardwiring Influence Morality
• Triumph of Free Will in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
• An Overview of the Imposition of Law as Free Will and the Myth of the Social Contract
• Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice – Prophecies in Oedipus, Antigone, and Agamemnon
• An Analysis of Fate and Free Will in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
• Baron D’holbach And William James On Free Will And Determinism
• Can Free Will And Determinism Co-exist
• The Theory Of Free Will And Determinism
• What is Frankfurt’s account of free will? Is it successful?
• Aeneas’s Free Will Despite His Fate in The Aeneid
• The Theme of Free Will and Spirituality in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• An Argument in Favor of Hard Determinism in the Debate on Free Will and Determinism
• Comparing Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King and Antigone
• Boundaries of Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King
• Analysis of the Actions of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus Based on Free Will and Fate
• Who Is Responsible for the Downfall of Oedipus Fate or Free Will
• The True Nature And Extent Of Influence Of Free Will Versus Fate
• The Varying Levels of Free Will in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
• Understanding the Foreknowledge of God and Its Influence in Free Will and Predestination
• Concept Of Free Will In The Brothers Karamazov
• Understanding the Existence of Free Will and Determinism
• Compatibility Of Free Will In The Tenseless Theory Of Time
• Emotions and Free Will in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King
• The Scorch Trials Movie And The Issue Of Free Will
• The Question of Free Will Versus Determinism in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Control and The Role of Destiny, Free Will, and Fate
• Existence, Conee And Sider Go Over The Description Of Free Will
• The Witches In Macbeth: Corruption And Fate Vs. Free Will In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
• Augustine´s View on the Origins of Sin, Grace, and Free Will
• The Issue of Free Will in The End of Evil, an Article by Ron Rosenbaum
• Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King – Fate and the Modern World
• Attitudes and Free Will in the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost by John Milton
• How Do Our Duties and Responsibility Affect Our Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism?
• Why Does Galen Strawson Think Free Will Is Impossible?
• What Was Benjamin Libet‘s Free Will Experiment?
• Does Advertising Erode Free Will?
• How Does Pride Effect Free Will and Fate?
• Can You Put Free Will Into an Equation?
• How Can Quantum Brain Biology Rescue Conscious Free Will?
• Does Free Will Exist or Is It All an Illusion?
• Is Free Will a Third Option Aside From Chance and Necessity?
• How Do Race, Gender, and Socioeconomic Class Limit the Free Will of Americans?
• Are Our Lives Governed by Fate or Free Will?
• Does Oedipus Have Free Will?
• Can Free Will and Determinism Coexist?
• Does Free Will exist within Milton’s Hierarchy’s Constraints in Paradise Lost?
• How Does the Conflict Between Free Will and the Predestination Play Out?
• Does Macbeth Have Free Will?
• How Do Fate and Free Will Play a Part in the Odyssey?
• Were Adam and Eve Influenced by the Snake or Free Will?
• What’s the Problem With Free Will?
• Is the Theory of Evolution a Good Basis for an Argument Against Free Will?
• Why Did God Give Us Free Will?
• For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility?
• How Does Shakespeare Present Macbeth as Having Free Will?
• What Is the Difference Between Free-Will and Randomness and or Non-determinism?
• Does Having Free Will Presuppose Consciousness, Can Philosophical Zombies Have It?
• What Are the Necessary Conditions for an Action to Be Regarded as a Free Choice?
• Is Free Will Reconcilable With a Purely Physical World?
• How Does Quantum Mechanics Affect the Modern Account of Free Will and Determinism?
• What Counters Are There to Spinoza’s Argument That Acts of Free Will Create Infinite Regress?
• Is Kant’s “Noumenal Self” Argument on Freedom Flawed?
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IvyPanda . "117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/.

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Student Writing Sample: “Do We Have Free Will?”

Do we have free will? CISL San Francisco students were asked this question last month for our writing contest. The winning entry, from Maxime Bindzi, is a wonderful example of a five-paragraph English essay. Enjoy his musings on free will. Congratulations, Maxime! Your writing skills are truly impressive!

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Author: Chelsea Haramia Category: Ethics , Metaphysics Word Count: 1000

You probably shouldn’t steal. Common sense tells us that stealing is wrong. But sometimes stealing seems less wrong, or not wrong at all, after we discover the cause of the stealing behavior. For example, if the fact that your family is starving causes you to steal a loaf of bread, many would say that you are not as blameworthy as someone who steals out of greed or spite. And imagine a kleptomaniac who cannot control her stealing behavior. We probably shouldn’t blame her for those actions (though we might encourage her to consult a therapist about her condition).

But why shouldn’t we blame the kleptomaniac? That is to say, how are we justified in holding the kleptomaniac morally responsible? One good reason not to blame the kleptomaniac is that she cannot help her behavior. She possesses a psychological problem that is out of her control. That’s why some defendants are acquitted on grounds of insanity. If you are not in control of your actions, you are not responsible for those actions.

But what if every one of our actions is actually out of our control? That is, what if only seems as if we have the freedom to choose between actions, but we are in fact as undeserving of blame as, say, the severely mentally ill?

There are many philosophically interesting answers to this question, and they deal with some famous and famously difficult problems surrounding the concept of free will. The concept of free will brings with it the idea that at least some of our choices are ours alone— we are fully in control of them, and therefore we are fully responsible for them. Free will is the basis for moral responsibility, or so many have argued.

Philosophers commonly say that ‘ought’ implies ‘can.’ What does this mean? To justifiably tell someone that she (morally) ought to do something, it would also have to be the case that she can do that thing. Suppose I tell you that you ought to cure cancer. If you did cure cancer, you could prevent large amounts of suffering and many premature deaths. It would be a really good thing. Nonetheless, given that, in all likelihood, it would be impossible for you to cure cancer, it seems absurd to say that you have a moral responsibility to do so, or that you ought to. Importantly, then, you are not blameworthy for your failure to cure cancer. It seems that we are only justified in blaming (or praising) people for their actions—or believing that they are responsible for their actions—when they are able to freely choose one action over others. As we have seen, this freedom is the subject of extensive philosophical analysis, but our everyday sense of moral responsibility hangs in the balance. 1

1. Libertarian Free Will

Those who claim that we have libertarian free will argue that we make free choices when it is possible that we could have done otherwise than what we actually did. 2 When this condition obtains, we are justified in blaming (or praising) the person who made the choice, i.e., holding that person morally responsible for the action.

The idea that we possess free in this sense will has a lot of intuitive force behind it, but philosophers have struggled with the question of what could allow for free will in the face of concerns about the causal laws of the world.

2. Hard Determinism

Hard determinists appeal to the causal laws of the world in order to challenge the claim that we have free will, in the sense of ‘free will’ that both they and libertarians accept. Everything that happens can be fully explained by the causal history of what happened before. Though it seems as if we have choices, it is always the case that, for any choice we are faced with, only one of the seemingly available paths will ultimately be taken, and the other paths were never truly available: we cannot do otherwise. 3 To suggest that we have free will is to suggest that we are somehow outside of and unaffected by the causal chain of events—that we can be the sole source of our actions—and the hard determinist argues that this is unsupported by facts about how the world works. 4

3. Compatibilism

The hard determinist may then find this to be proof that moral responsibility is an illusion, or she may attempt to retain a viable sense of moral responsibility in the face of determinism. Compatibilists argue for the latter: they claim that determinism and moral responsibility are actually compatible. 5 By appealing to claims about an agent’s internal states, compatibilists argue that people can be held responsible when they are acting according to certain sorts of dispositions, e.g., their own beliefs and desires. And others have pointed out that we still have strong intuitions of responsibility even about cases that are explicitly deterministic. 6

4. Revisionism/Illusionism

The power of these intuitions of responsibility cause some hard determinists to argue for a revisionist approach. They accept that appeals to moral responsibility are theoretically unjustified, but they nonetheless assert that we are pragmatically justified in accepting the illusion that people actually have moral responsibility, because practices of praising and blaming are still useful, and abandoning them could lead to chaos. 7

5. Incompatibilism

Finally, there are those who maintain that determinism and moral responsibility are utterly incompatible. Importantly, both hard determinists and libertarians about free will may hold this view. The libertarian can then tout this incompatibility as a virtue of his view. If the two really are incompatible, then only libertarian free will allows us to retain our very commonsense intuitions of moral responsibility. 8 The hard determinist will bite the bullet and claim that, if the two really are incompatible, we are being intellectually dishonest by maintaining practices of moral responsibility, given that we can always trace the causes of an action to something that is ultimately fully outside of the control of the agent. 9

This is an ancient philosophical problem that has given rise to an expanding and ever more nuanced set of views. But we can all agree that anyone who grapples with the problem of free will must also take seriously questions of moral responsibility.

1  See Jonah Nagashima’s Free Will and Free Choice  for more philosophical analysis of freedom of the will, and for the metaphysical details underlying some of the views discussed here.

2  See Robert Kane’s The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) for more information on libertarian free will.

3  Some interpretations of quantum-mechanical results suggest that the outcomes of some measurements are indeterministic, but it is difficult to argue that (1) decisions are quantum-mechanical measurements and (2) wholly random events count as “free” choices.

4  See Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (translated by H.D. Robinson, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970) or Galen Strawson’s “The Bounds of Freedom” (in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane, Oxford University Press: New York, 2002) for more information on the determinist position.

5  See Daniel Dennet’s “I Could Not Have Done Otherwise—So What?” (in Free Will, edited by Robert Kane, Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2002) or John Martin Fischer’s “Compatibilism” (in Four Views on Free Will . Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007) for more information on the compatibilist position.

6  These are commonly referred to as “Frankfurt-style cases,” made famous in Harry Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (in the Journal of Philosophy 66: 829-39, 1969) . See also John Martin Fischer’s “Frankfurt-style Examples, Responsibility and Semi-Compatibilism” (in Free Will, edited by Robert Kane, Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2002).

7  See Saul Smilansky’s “Free Will, Fundamental Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusionism” (in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane, Oxford University Press: New York, 2002) and Manuel Vargas’ “Revisionism” (in Four Views on Free Will , Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007) for more information on the revisionist position.

8  See Peter van Inwagen’s An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) for more information on the libertarian incompatibilist.

9  See Derk Pereboom’s “Hard Incompatibilism” (in Four Views on Free Will , Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007) for more information on the determinist incompatibilist position, also known as “hard incompatibilism” or “hard determinism.”

Related Essays

Free Will and Free Choice  by Jonah Nagashima

Praise and Blame  by Daniel Miller

Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility by Rachel Bourbaki

Manipulation and Moral Responsibility  by Taylor W. Cyr

Theories of Punishment  by Travis Joseph Rodgers

About the Author

Chelsea Haramia is an associate professor of philosophy at Spring Hill College. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from CU Boulder, a graduate certificate in gender and women’s studies from CU Boulder, and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently interested in metaethics, population and procreation ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. She once did sixteen backflips in a row, but these days she mostly practices mental gymnastics. ChelseaHaramia.com  

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25 Do We Have Free Will?

Benjamin Libet is Professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, supervised by Ralph Gerard (founder and Honorary President of the Society for Neuroscience). Libet also worked with K.A.C. Elliott on brain metabolism and with Sir John Eccles on synaptic mechanisms. In 1958 he began a series of highly influential experimental studies in human subjects relating brain activities to the appearance or production of conscious experience. Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143–0444.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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This article takes an experimental approach to the question of whether we have free will, with special reference to the role consciousness plays in free voluntary action. It shows that voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical charge in the brain (the “readiness potential”), which begins several hundred milliseconds before the human subjects become consciously aware of their intention to act. This suggests that the volitional process is initiated unconsciously. Some philosophers and scientists have been tempted to conclude that willed actions are determined by unconscious forces and hence that our awareness of conscious control is illusory. However, it is argued that there is still a role for consciousness in controlling the outcome of willed actions, since consciousness can veto the act once underway. Thus, free will is not necessarily excluded, though novel neuroscientific findings place constraints on how free will could operate and how we are to make sense of it in terms of current research on the brain.

I have taken an experimental approach to the question of whether we have free will. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the “readiness potential”, RP) that begins 550 msec, before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 msec, after RP starts, but 200 msec, before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility.

But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, nondetermined by natural laws and “truly free”? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites.

The question of free will goes to the root of our views about human nature and how we relate to the universe and to natural laws. Are we completely defined by the deterministic nature of physical laws? Theologically imposed fateful destiny ironically produces a similar end-effect. In either case, we would be essentially sophisticated automatons, with our conscious feelings and intentions tacked on as epiphenomena with no causal power. Or do we have some independence in making choices and actions, not completely determined by the known physical laws?

I have taken an experimental approach to at least some aspects of the question. The operational definition of free will in these experiments was in accord with common views. First, there should be no external control or cues to affect the occurrence or emergence of the voluntary act under study; that is, it should be endogenous. Second, the subject should feel that he or she wanted to do it, on her or his own initiative, and feel he or she could control what is being done, when to do it or not to do it. Many actions lack this second attribute. For example, when the primary motor area of the cerebral cortex is stimulated, muscle contractions can be produced in certain sites in the body. However, the subject (a neurosurgical patient) reports that these actions were imposed by the stimulator, that is, that he did not will these acts. And there are numerous clinical disorders in which a similar discrepancy between actions and will occurs. These include the involuntary actions in cerebral palsy, Parkinsonism, Huntington's chorea, Tourette's syndrome, and even obsessive compulsions to act. A striking example is the “alien hand syndrome.” Patients with a lesion in a fronto-medial portion of premotor area may find that the hand and arm on the affected side performs curious purposeful actions, such as undoing a buttoned shirt when the subject is trying to button it up; all this occurs without or even against the subject's intention and will. (See Spence and Frith 1999 : 23.)

1. Timing of Brain Processes and Conscious Will

Performance of “self-paced” voluntary acts had, surprisingly, been found to be preceded by a slow electrical change recordable on the scalp at the vertex (Kornhuber and Deecke 1965 ). The onset of this electrical indication of certain brain activities preceded the actual movement by up to 1 sec or more. It was termed the “Bereitschaftpotential” or “readiness potential” (RP). To obtain the RP required averaging the recordings in many self-paced acts. Subjects were therefore asked to perform their acts within time intervals of 30 sec. to make the total study manageable. In our experiments, however, we removed this constraint on freedom of action; subjects performed a simple flick or flexion of the wrist at any time they felt the urge or wish to do so. These voluntary acts were to be performed capriciously, free of any external limitations or restrictions (Libet et al. 1982 ). RPs in these acts began with onsets averaging 550 msec, before activation of the involved muscle (Figure 25.1 ).

The brain was evidently beginning the volitional process in this voluntary act well before the activation of the muscle that produced the movement. My question then became, When does the conscious wish or intention (to perform the act) appear? In the traditional view of conscious will and free will, one would expect conscious will to appear before, or at the onset, of the RP, and thus command the brain to perform the intended act. But an appearance of conscious will 550 msec, or more before the act seemed intuitively unlikely. It was clearly important to establish the time of the conscious will relative to the onset of the brain process (RP); if conscious will were to follow the onset of RP, that would have a fundamental impact on how we could view free will.

To establish this temporal relation required a method for measuring the time of appearance of the conscious will in each such act. Initially, that seemed to me an impossible goal. But after some time it occurred to me to try having the subject report a “clock-time” at which he or she was first aware of the wish or urge to act (Figure 25.2 ) (Libet et al., 1983a ). The clock had to be much faster than the usual clock, in order to accommodate time differences in the hundreds of msec. For our clock, the spot of light of a cathode ray oscilloscope was made to revolve around the face of the scope like the sweep-second hand of an ordinary clock, but at a speed approximately 25 times as fast. Each of the marked off “seconds” around the periphery was thus equivalent to about 40 msec. When we tried out this method, we were actually surprised to find that each subject reported times for first awareness of wish to act (W) with a reliability of 20 msec., for each group of 40 such trials. A test for the accuracy of such reports was also encouraging. In this, the subject remained relaxed and did not perform any voluntary act. Instead, a weak electrical stimulus was delivered to the skin of the same hand. The stimulus was applied at random times in the different trials. The experimental observers knew the actual time for each stimulus. The subject did not know this actual time but was asked to report the clock-time at which he felt each such stimulus. Subjects accomplished this with an error of only −50 msec.

1.1. The Experiment

In the actual experiment, then, each RP was obtained from an averaged electrical recording in 40 trials. In each of these trials, the subject performed the sudden flick of the wrist whenever he or she freely wanted to do so. After each of these trials, the subject reported W, the clock-time associated with the first awareness of the wish to move (Libet et al. 1983a ).

1.2. Brain Initiates Voluntary Act Unconsciously

The results of many such groups of trials are diagrammed in Figure 25.3 . For groups in which all the voluntary acts were freely spontaneous, with no reports of rough planning of when to act, the onset of RP averaged −550 msec, (before the muscle was activated). The W times for first awareness of wish to act averaged about −200 msec., for all groups. This value was the same even when subjects reported having pre-planned roughly when to act! If we correct W for the −50 msec, error in the subjects' reports of timings of the skin stimuli, we have an average corrected W of about −150 msec. Clearly, the brain process (RP) to prepare for this voluntary act began about 400 msec, before the appearance of the conscious will to act (W). This relationship was true for every group of 40 trials and in every one of the nine subjects studied. It should also be noted that the actual difference in times is probably greater than the 400 msec; the actual initiating process in the brain probably starts before our recorded RP, in an unknown area that then activates the supplementary motor area in the cerebral cortex. The supplementary motor area is located in the midline near the vertex and is thought to be the source of our recorded RP.

Readiness potentials (RP) preceding self-initiated voluntary acts. Each horizontal row is the computer-averaged potential for 40 trials, recorded by a DC system with an active electrode on the scalp, either at the midline-vertex (Cz) or on the left side (contralateral to the performing right hand (Cc).

When every self-initiated quick flexion of the right hand (fingers or wrist) in the series of 40 trials was (reported as having been) subjectively experienced to originate spontaneously and with no planning by the subject, RPs labeled type II were found in association. (Arrowheads labeled MN indicate onset of the “main negative” phase of the vertex recorded type II RPs in this figure; see Libet et al 1982. Onsets were also measured for 90% of the total area of RP). When an awareness of a general intention or planning to act sometime within the next second or so was reported to have occurred before some of the 40 acts in the series, type I RPs were recorded (ibid). In the last column, labeled S, a near-threshold skin stimulus was applied in each of the 40 trials at a randomized time unknown to the subject, with no motor act performed; the subject was asked to recall and report the time when he became aware of each stimulus in the same way he reported the time of awareness of wanting to move in the case of self-initiated motor acts.

The solid vertical line through each column represents o time, at which the electromyogram (EMG) of the activated muscle begins in the case of RP series, or at which the stimulus was actually delivered in the case of S series. The dashed horizontal line represents the DC baseline drift.

For subject S.S., the first RP (type I) was recorded before the instruction “to let the urge come on its own, spontaneously” was introduced; the second RP (type II) was obtained after giving this instruction in the same session as the first. For subjects G.L., S.B., and B.D., this instruction was given at the start of all sessions. Nevertheless, each of these subjects reported some experiences of loose planning in one of the 40-trial series, those series exhibited type I RPs rather than type II. Note that the slow negative shift in scalp potential that precedes EMGs of self-initiated acts (RP) does not precede the skin stimulus in S series. However, evoked potentials following the stimulus are seen regularly to exhibit a large positive component with a peak close to +300 ms. (arrow indicates this time), this P300 event-related potential had been shown by others to be associated with decisions about uncertain events (in this case, the time of the randomly delivered stimulus), and it also indicates that the subject is attending well to the experimental conditions.

2. Any Role for Conscious Will?

The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!. Is there, then, any role for conscious will in the performance of a voluntary act? (see Libet, 1985 ) To answer this it must be recognized that conscious will (W) does appear about 150 msec, before the muscle is activated, even though it follows onset of the RP.

Oscilloscope “clock.” Spot of light revolves around periphery of screen, once in 2.56 sec. (instead of 60 sec. for a sweep-second hand of a regular clock). Each marked off “second” (in the total of 60 markings) represents 43 msec, of actual time here. The subject holds his gaze to the center of the screen. For each performed quick flexion of the wrist, at any freely chosen time, the subject was asked to note the position of the clock spot when he or she first became aware of the wish or intention to act. This associated clock time is reported by the subject later, after the trial is completed.

An interval of 150 msec, would allow enough time in which the conscious function might affect the final outcome of the volitional process. (Actually, only 100 msec, is available for any such effect. The final 50 msec, before the muscle is activated is the time for the primary motor cortex to activate the spinal motor nerve cells. During this time the act goes to completion with no possibility of stopping it by the rest of the cerebral cortex.)

Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues. Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.

Diagram of sequence of events, cerebral and subjective, that precede a fully self-initiated voluntary act. Relative to o time, detected in the electromyogram (EMG) of the suddenly activated muscle, the readiness potential (RP an indicator of related cerebral neuronal activities) begins first, at about −1050 ms. when some planning is reported (RP I) or about −550 ms. with spontaneous acts lacking immediate planning (RP II). Subjective awareness of the wish to move (W) appears at about −200 ms., some 350 ms. after onset even of RP II; however, W does appear well before the act (EMG). Subjective timings reported for awareness of the randomly delivered S (skin) stimulus average about −50 ms. Relative to actual delivery time (from Libet 1989 ).

The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt. The subjects in our experiments at times reported that a conscious wish or urge to act appeared but that they suppressed or vetoed that. In the absence of the muscle's electrical signal when being activated, there was no trigger to initiate the computer's recording of any RP that may have preceded the veto; thus, there were no recorded RPs with a vetoed intention to act. We were, however, able to show that subjects could veto an act planned for performance at a prearranged time. They were able to exert the veto within the interval of 100 to 200 msec, before the preset time to act (Libet et al., 1983b ). A large RP preceded the veto, signifying that the subject was indeed preparing to act, even though the action was aborted by the subject. All of us, not just experimental subjects, have the experience of vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor. (Incidentally, in the disorder called Tourette's syndrome, subjects do spontaneously shout obscenities. These acts should not be regarded as freely voluntary. No RP appears before such an act. A quick reaction to an unwarned stimulus also lacks a preceding RP, and it is not a freely voluntary act.)

Another hypothetical function for conscious will could be to serve as a “trigger” that is required to enable the volitional process to proceed to final action. However, there is no evidence for this, such as there is for a veto function, and the “trigger” possibility also seems unlikely on other grounds. For example, voluntary acts that become somewhat “automatic” can be performed with no reportable conscious wish to do so; the RP is rather minimal in amplitude and duration before such automatic acts. Automatic acts clearly go to completion without any conscious trigger available.

2.1. Does The Conscious Veto Have a Preceding Unconscious Origin?

One should, at this point, consider the possibility that the conscious veto itself may have its origin in preceding unconscious processes, just as is the case for the development and appearance of the conscious will. If the veto itself were to be initiated and developed unconsciously, the choice to veto would then become an unconscious choice of which we become conscious, rather than a consciously causal event. Our own previous evidence had shown that the brain “produces” an awareness of something only after about a 0.5 sec. period of appropriate neuronal activations (see reviews by Libet 1993 , 1996 ).

Some have proposed that even an unconscious initiation of a veto choice would nevertheless be a genuine choice made by the individual and could still be viewed as a free will process (for example. Velmans 1991 ). I find such a proposed view of free will to be unacceptable. In such a view, the individual would not consciously control his actions; he would only become aware of an unconsciously initiated choice. He would have no direct conscious control over the nature of any preceding unconscious processes. But a free will process implies one could be held consciously responsible for one's choice to act or not to act. We do not hold people responsible for actions performed unconsciously, without the possibility of conscious control. For example, actions by a person during a psychomotor epileptic seizure, or by one with Tourette's syndrome, and so on, are not regarded as actions of free will. Why, then, should an act unconsciously developed by a normal individual, a process over which he also has no conscious control, be regarded as an act of free will?

I propose, instead, that the conscious veto may not require or be the direct result of preceding unconscious processes. The conscious veto is a control function, different from simply becoming aware of the wish to act. There is no logical imperative in any mind-brain theory, even identity theory, that requires specific neural activity to precede and determine the nature of a conscious control function. And there is no experimental evidence against the possibility that the control process may appear without development by prior unconscious processes.

Admittedly, to be conscious of the decision to veto does mean one is aware of the event. How may one reconcile this with my proposal? Perhaps we should revisit the concept of awareness, its relation to the content of awareness, and the cerebral processes that develop both awareness and its contents. Our own previous studies have indicated that awareness is a unique phenomenon in itself, distinguished from the contents of which one may become aware. For example, awareness of a sensory stimulus can require similar durations of stimulus trains for somatosensory cortex and for medial lemniscus. But the content of those awarenesses in these two cases is different, in the subjective timings of sensations (Libet et al. 1979 ). The content of an unconscious mental process (for example correct detection of a signal in the brain without any awareness of the signal) may be the same as the content with awareness of the signal. But to become aware of that same content required that stimulus duration be increased by about 400 msec (see Libet et al. 1991 ).

In an endogenous, freely voluntary act, awareness of the intention to act is delayed for about 400 msec after brain processes initiate the process unconsciously (Libet et al. 1983 ; Libet 1985 ). Awareness developed here may be thought of as applying to the whole volitional process; that would include the content of the conscious urge to act and the content of factors that may affect a conscious veto. One need not think of awareness of an event as restricted to one detailed item of content in the whole event.

The possibility is not excluded that factors, on which the decision to veto (control) is based , do develop by unconscious processes that precede the veto. However, the conscious decision to veto could still be made without direct specification for that decision by the preceding unconscious processes. That is, one could consciously accept or reject the program offered up by the whole array of preceding brain processes. The awareness of the decision to veto could be thought to require preceding unconscious processes, but the content of that awareness (the actual decision to veto) is a separate feature that need not have the same requirement.

3. What Significance Do Our Findings Have for Voluntary Acts in General?

Can we assume that voluntary acts other than the simple one studied by us also have the same temporal relations between unconscious brain processes and the appearance of the conscious wish/will to act? It is common in scientific researches to be limited technically to studying a process in a simple system; and then to find that the fundamental behavior discovered with the simple system does indeed represent a phenomenon that appears or governs in other related and more complicated systems. For example, the charge on a single electron was measured by Milliken in one isolated system, but it is valid for electrons in all systems. It should also be noted that RPs have been found by other investigators to precede other more complex volitional acts, such as beginning to speak or to write; they did not, however, study the time of appearance of the conscious wish to begin such acts. We may, therefore, allow ourselves to consider what general implications may follow from our experimental findings, while recognizing that an extrapolation to encompass voluntary acts in general has been adopted.

We should also distinguish between deliberations about what choice of action to adopt (including planning of when to act on such a choice) and the final intention actually “to act now.” One may, after all, deliberate all day about a choice but never act; there is no voluntary act in that case. In our experimental studies we found that in some trials subjects engaged in some conscious planning of roughly when to act (in the next second or so). But even in those cases, the subjects reported times of the conscious wish to actually act to be about −200 msec.; this value was very close to the values reported for fully spontaneous voluntary acts with no planning. The onset of the unconscious brain process (RP) for preparing to act was well before the final conscious intention “to act now” in all cases. These findings indicated that the sequence of the volitional processes “to act now” may apply to all volitional acts, regardless of their spontaneity or prior history of conscious deliberations.

4. Ethical Implications of How Free Will Operates

The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control occurrences of the act. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious-will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing.

This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures, which commonly advocate that you “control yourself” Most of the Ten Commandments are “do not” orders.

How do our findings relate to the questions of when one may be regarded as guilty or sinful, in various religious and philosophical systems? If one experiences a conscious wish or urge to perform a socially unacceptable act, should that be regarded as a sinful event even if the urge has been vetoed and no act has occurred? Some religious systems answer yes. President Jimmy Carter admitted to having had urges to perform a lustful act. Although he did not act, he apparently still felt sinful for having experienced a lustful urge. 1 But any such urges would be initiated and developed in the brain unconsciously, according to our findings. The mere appearance of an intention to act could not be controlled consciously; only its final consummation in a motor act could be consciously controlled. Therefore, a religious system that castigates an individual for simply having a mental intention or impulse to do something unacceptable, even when this is not acted out, would create a physiologically insurmountable moral and psychological difficulty.

Indeed, insistence on regarding an unacceptable urge to act as sinful, even when no act ensues, would make virtually all individuals sinners. In that sense such a view could provide a physiological basis for “original sin”! Of course, the concept of “original sin” can be based on other views of what is regarded as sinful.

Ethical systems deal with moral codes or conventions that govern how one behaves toward or interacts with other individuals; they are presumably dealing with actions, not simply with urges or intentions. Only a motor act by one person can directly impinge on the welfare of another. Since it is the performance of an act that can be consciously controlled, it should be legitimate to hold individuals guilty of and responsible for their acts.

5. Determinism and Free Will

There remains a deeper question about free will that the foregoing considerations have not addressed. What we have achieved experimentally is some knowledge of the way free will may operate. But we have not answered the question of whether our consciously willed acts are fully determined by natural laws that govern the activities of nerve cells in the brain, or whether acts and the conscious decisions to perform them can proceed to some degree independently of natural determinism. The first of these options would make free will illusory. The conscious feeling of exerting one's will would then be regarded as an epiphenomenon, simply a byproduct of the brain's activities but with no causal powers of its own.

First, it may be pointed out that free choices or acts are unpredictable , even if they should be completely determined. The “uncertainty principle” of Heisenberg precludes our having a complete knowledge of the underlying molecular activities. Quantum mechanics forces us to deal with probabilities rather than with certainties of events. And, in chaos theory, a random event may shift the behavior of a whole system, in a way that was not predictable. However, even if events are not predictable in practice, they might nevertheless accord with natural laws and therefore be determined.

Let us rephrase our basic question as follows: Must we accept determinism? Is non-determinism a viable option? We should recognize that both of these alternative views (natural law determinism versus nondeterminism) are unproven theories, that is, unproven in relation to the existence of free will. Determinism has, on the whole, worked well for the physical observable world. That has led many scientists and philosophers to regard any deviation from determinism as absurd and witless, and unworthy of consideration. But no evidence, nor even a proposed experimental test design, definitively or convincingly demonstrates the validity of natural law determinism as the mediator or instrument of free will.

There is an unexplained gap between the category of physical phenomena and the category of subjective phenomena. As far back as Leibniz, it was pointed out that if one looked into the brain with a full knowledge of its physical makeup and nerve cell activities, one would see nothing that describes subjective experience. The whole foundation of our own experimental studies of the physiology of conscious experience (beginning in the late 1950s) was that externally observable and manipulable brain processes and the related reportable subjective introspective experiences must be studied simultaneously, as independent categories, to understand their relationship. The assumption that a deterministic nature of the physically observable world (to the extent that may be true) can account for subjective conscious functions and event, is a speculative belief , not a scientifically proven proposition.

Nondeterminism, the view that conscious will may, at times, exert effects not in accord with known physical laws, is of course an unproven speculative belief. The view that conscious will can affect brain function in violation of known physical laws takes two forms. In one it is held that the violations are not detectable, because the actions of the mind may be at a level below that of the uncertainty allowed by quantum mechanics. (Whether this last proviso can in fact be tenable is a matter yet to be resolved). This view would thus allow for a nondeterministic free will without a perceptible violation of physical laws. In a second view it may be held that violations of known physical laws are large enough to be detectable, at least in principle. But, it can be argued, detectability in actual practice may be impossible. That difficulty for detection would be especially true if the conscious will is able to exert its influence by minimal actions at relatively few nerve elements; these actions could serve as triggers for amplified nerve cell patterns of activity in the brain. In any case, we do not have a scientific answer to the question of which theory (determinism or nondeterminism) may describe the nature of free will.

However, we must recognize that the almost universal experience that we can act with a free, independent choice provides a kind of prima facie evidence that conscious mental processes can causatively control some brain processes (Libet, 1992, 1994 ). This creates, for an experimental scientist, more difficulty for a determinist than for a non-determinist option. The phenomenal fact is that most of us feel that we do have free will, at least for some of our actions and within certain limits that may be imposed by our brain's status and by our environment. The intuitive feelings about the phenomenon of free will form a fundamental basis for views of our human nature, and great care should be taken not to believe allegedly scientific conclusions about them that actually depend upon hidden ad hoc assumptions. A theory that simply interprets the phenomenon of free will as illusory and denies the validity of this phenomenal fact is less attractive than a theory that accepts or accommodates the phenomenal fact.

In an issue so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim for illusory nature should be based on fairly direct evidence. Such evidence is not available; nor do determinists propose even a potential experimental design to test the theory. Actually, I myself proposed an experimental design that could test whether conscious will could influence nerve cell activities in the brain, doing so via a putative “conscious mental field” that could act without any neuronal connections as the mediators (Libet 1994 ). This difficult though feasible experiment has, unfortunately, still to be carried out. If it should turn out to confirm the prediction of that field theory, there would be a radical transformation in our views of mind-brain interaction.

My conclusion about free will, one genuinely free in the nondetermined sense, is then that its existence is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and nondeterminist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does)? Such a view would at least allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws. Such a permissive option has also been advocated by the neurobiologist Roger Sperry (see Doty 1998 ). 2

I close, then, with a quotation from the great novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer that relates to the foregoing views. Singer stated his strong belief in our having free will. In an interview (Singer 1968 ) he volunteered that “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself life is worthwhile living.”

President Carter was drawing on a Christian tradition deriving from the following two verses in the Sermon on the Mount: “[Jesus said], ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ ” (Matthew 5.27–28).

The belief by many people that one's fate is determined by some mystical reality or by divine intervention produces a difficult paradox for those who also believe we have free will and are to be held responsible for our actions. Such a paradox can arise in the Judeo-Christian view that (a) God is omnipotent, knows in advance what you are going to do, and controls your fate, while (b) also strongly advocating that we can freely determine our actions and are accountable and responsible for our behavior. This difficulty has led to some theological attempts to resolve the paradox. For example, the Kabbalists proposed that God voluntarily gave up his power to know what man was going to do, in order to allow man to choose freely and responsibly and to possess free will.

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Sample essay on free will and moral responsibility.

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

History of free will and moral responsibility

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

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

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

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

Defining free will

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

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

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

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

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The determinism viewpoint

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

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

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

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

Moral judgments, decisions, and responsibility for free will

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

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

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

Free will and changing societal views

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

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

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

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

Determining when free will is not applicable

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

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

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

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