does free will exist essay

Does free will actually exist? It’s complicated.

Like most philosophical dilemmas, the answer is never as simple as it may seem.

By Sara Kiley Watson | Published Dec 8, 2020 6:00 PM EST

Here’s a mind-bending question: Are you reading this because you definitely chose to or because you were destined to?

Philosophers have pondered free will’s existence for millennia, and neuroscientists began to consider whether humans go about their lives of their own accord in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until a pivotal 1983 study that anyone had any hard evidence in either direction; researchers asked participants to consciously decide to move a finger prior to raising it and recorded their brain activity with an EEG. Surprisingly, before subjects chose to move, their grey matter lit up, suggesting noggins make determinations before we’re aware of them. Over the years, the finding has been met with scrutiny, as the actual reason for those EEG spikes is still unclear.

Modern investigators like Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University, are instead tackling the quandary with data. If a supercomputer knows everything about us (from life goals to favorite ice cream) and every decision we make (including instinctual ones happening since birth) influences the next, then a machine could spit out the most likely choice we’d make in any situation. Moaz and others currently study whether there is any chance you’d pick something totally different from what a supercomputer might predict. But in the case of this article, since you’ve nearly finished, it’s more or less a moot point.

This story appears in the Fall 2020, Mysteries issue of Popular Science .

Sara Kiley Watson is a News Editor at Popular Science, where she has led sustainability coverage since 2021. She started her tenure at PopSci as an intern in 2017 before joining the team full time as an Editorial Assistant in 2019. Contact the author here.

Like science, tech, and DIY projects?

Sign up to receive Popular Science's emails and get the highlights.

Does Free Will Really Exist? Your Thoughts

Stephen Cave sparked a ton of reader discussion with his essay “ There’s No Such Thing as Free Will ,” and you can wade into the robust comments section if you’re determined to do so. Here’s one of the more fascinating findings in Cave’s piece:

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.

For an in-depth interrogation of that idea, here’s a video of neuroscientist Sam Harris (whom Cave quoted extensively in his piece) on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and it opens with Harris defending the sort of research pioneered by Libet:

Nick Clairmont—our bright young Politics fellow who wrote his master’s dissertation on the philosophical concept of semicompatibilism —contributed his own note to our discussion and took Cave’s title a step further: “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will and Determinism.” Nick addressed a number of reader emails, as did Cave in a followup note , “Free Will Exists and Is Measurable”—which introduced a new concept, FQ:

We already have tests that assess people’s reasoning skills, creativity, self-control and the likes, all of which are essential components of psychological free will. In another essay , I have suggested that we could therefore meaningfully talk about a “Freedom Quotient” or FQ, which would allow us to rate your or my free will, and identify ways in which we could make it even freer.

Several more readers are joining the philosophical fray. Here’s David in Tallahassee with “my case against free will”:

You don’t decide where you are born. You don’t decide whether you win the lottery of birth, and you don’t decide whether you are born a minority and/or with certain abilities/defects of the brain (ADD or something on the autism spectrum, for better or usually worse). For the most part, you don’t decide your diet and the interactions you have with adults and peers (in your most formative years). Add all of this to the fact that our actions and the way we see the world are governed by chemicals in the brain.

“Free will” is a concept usually thought of in the micro sense, but this heuristic applying to everyone in the world, one begins to wonder how little control we have over large macro world trends and forces. Can we really blame war criminals, domestic offenders and fraudulent bankers? Or does policy and society have a responsibility to be intervening as doctor (rather than punisher) on behalf of the very worst parts of us, which we do not control?

That analogy—doctors intervening with patients—resonated with me because I’ve long considered prison to be a sort of quarantine. If criminal actions are essentially deterministic, criminals might be absolved from any moral culpability based on free will, but of course that doesn’t mean we should allow violent criminals to roam free, spreading violence to others. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku touches on the criminal factor in this clip:

A reader in the military, Robert, has a tough question:

I am about to lose someone dear to me. If I have free will and the ability to choose, why can’t I stop the sadness?

I lost one of my closest friends to brain cancer a few years ago, and I think I would be sad if that sadness completely stopped, because that would mean I stopped thinking about him.

This next reader also delves into some bleak thoughts:

One thing to remember about the lack of free will is that if it really doesn’t exist, it implies much, much more than mere lack of choice. Remember that we are talking about the idea of reduction of the mind to a mere machine—a complex machine, but no more than that. When you reduce the possibility of a soul or something operating in the same conceptual space, you take away much of the significance of not only our actions but also our reactions. I stab you—it wasn’t my choice. You feel pain, but the pain you feel is an illusion, no more real than my idea that I had any option not to cause it. Remember: complex machine, but no more significant than a computer programmed to light up a sign that says “suffering” when kicked. I don’t care when I break a glass, and under a non-deterministic mindset, it’s just as illogical to care when a person bleeds or starves. It makes no more difference then how many times a dropped tennis ball happens to bounce. If someone pushes a button and destroys all life on earth in a nuclear holocaust, you might think it bad, but your feeling was predetermined as well. The universe itself doesn’t care about our presence or absence, and can’t. When the meaning is stripped from choice, it’s necessarily stripped from human existence itself.

If you’re interested in another recent Atlantic piece on this subject, check out Julie’s “ Regret Is the Price of Free Will : Feeling in control of your life is good for you, but it can also lead to heartbreak over mistakes and lost opportunities.” One reader has a thought:

Julie writes, “While too much upward counterfactual thinking (and regret) has been associated with anxiety and depression, it also plays a key role in problem-solving, achieving goals, and improving behavior.” I agree. I believe it also has something to do with frustration, the negative emotional reaction to not getting what one wants or needs. A stalking tiger that misses its prey simply moves on, waiting for the next chance, even if it ends up starving to death. But in early humans, that missed chance must have eventually resulted in frustration and anger, with the brain developing the need for planning and hence advanced thinking. Perhaps emotions like regret, frustration, and anger also led to consciousness itself.

For a more robust take on those mysteries of the mind, check out the recent piece Michael Graziano wrote for us , “A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved.” If you want to grapple with any of these ideas, on free will or consciousness, drop us a note and we’ll weave it into the discussion.

“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action. (Clearly, there will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as being aware—or failing that, being culpably unaware—of relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives' moral significance.) But the significance of free will is not exhausted by its connection to moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a condition on desert for one's accomplishments (why sustained effort and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy and dignity of persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. (See Kane 1996, 81ff. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1.)

Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will do so because our success in carrying out our ends depends in part on factors wholly beyond our control. Furthermore, there are always external constraints on the range of options we can meaningfully try to undertake. As the presence or absence of these conditions and constraints are not (usually) our responsibility, it is plausible that the central loci of our responsibility are our choices, or “willings.”

I have implied that free willings are but a subset of willings, at least as a conceptual matter. But not every philosopher accepts this. René Descartes, for example, identifies the faculty of will with freedom of choice, “the ability to do or not do something” (Meditation IV), and even goes so far as to declare that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained” (Passions of the Soul, I, art. 41). In taking this strong polar position on the nature of will, Descartes is reflecting a tradition running through certain late Scholastics (most prominently, Suarez) back to John Duns Scotus.

The majority view, however, is that we can readily conceive willings that are not free. Indeed, much of the debate about free will centers around whether we human beings have it, yet virtually no one doubts that we will to do this and that. The main perceived threats to our freedom of will are various alleged determinisms: physical/causal; psychological; biological; theological. For each variety of determinism, there are philosophers who (i) deny its reality, either because of the existence of free will or on independent grounds; (ii) accept its reality but argue for its compatibility with free will; or (iii) accept its reality and deny its compatibility with free will. (See the entries on compatibilism ; causal determinism ; fatalism ; arguments for incompatibilism ; and divine foreknowedge and free will .) There are also a few who say the truth of any variety of determinism is irrelevant because free will is simply impossible.

If there is such a thing as free will, it has many dimensions. In what follows, I will sketch the freedom-conferring characteristics that have attracted most of the attention. The reader is warned, however, that while many philosophers emphasize a single such characteristic, perhaps in response to the views of their immediate audience, it is probable that most would recognize the significance of many of the other features discussed here.

1.1 Free Will as Choosing on the Basis of One's Desires

• 1.2 Free Will as Deliberative Choosing on the Basis of Desires and Values

1.3 Self-mastery, Rightly-Ordered Appetite

2. ownership, 3.1 free will as guidance control, 3.2 free will as ultimate origination (ability to do otherwise), 3.3 do we have free will, 4. theological wrinkles, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. rational deliberation.

On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.” (1748, sect.viii, part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1957) a similar account of free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires.

One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be morally responsible agents. Such animals lack not only an awareness of the moral implications of their actions but also any capacity to reflect on their alternatives and their long-term consequences. Indeed, it is plausible that they have little by way of a self-conception as an agent with a past and with projects and purposes for the future. (See Baker 2000 on the ‘first-person perspective.’)

1.2 Free Will as deliberative choosing on the basis of desires and values

A natural suggestion, then, is to modify the minimalist thesis by taking account of (what may be) distinctively human capacities and self-conception. And indeed, philosophers since Plato have commonly distinguished the ‘animal’ and ‘rational’ parts of our nature, with the latter implying a great deal more psychological complexity. Our rational nature includes our ability to judge some ends as ‘good’ or worth pursuing and value them even though satisfying them may result in considerable unpleasantness for ourselves. (Note that such judgments need not be based in moral value.) We might say that we act with free will when we act upon our considered judgments/valuings about what is good for us, whether or not our doing so conflicts with an ‘animal’ desire. (See Watson 2003a for a subtle development of this sort of view.) But this would seem unduly restrictive, since we clearly hold many people responsible for actions proceeding from ‘animal’ desires that conflict with their own assessment of what would be best in the circumstances. More plausible is the suggestion that one acts with free will when one's deliberation is sensitive to one's own judgments concerning what is best in the circumstances, whether or not one acts upon such a judgment.

Here we are clearly in the neighborhood of the ‘rational appetite’ accounts of will one finds in the medieval Aristotelians. The most elaborate medieval treatment is Thomas Aquinas's. [ 1 ] His account involves identifying several distinct varieties of willings. Here I note only a few of his basic claims. Aquinas thinks our nature determines us to will certain general ends ordered to the most general goal of goodness. These we will of necessity, not freely. Freedom enters the picture when we consider various means to these ends, none of which appear to us either as unqualifiedly good or as uniquely satisfying the end we wish to fulfill. There is, then, free choice of means to our ends, along with a more basic freedom not to consider something, thereby perhaps avoiding willing it unavoidably once we recognized its value. Free choice is an activity that involves both our intellectual and volitional capacities, as it consists in both judgment and active commitment. A thorny question for this view is whether will or intellect is the ultimate determinant of free choices. How we understand Aquinas on this point will go a long ways towards determining whether or not he is a sort of compatibilist about freedom and determinism. (See below. Good expositions of Aquinas' account are Donagan 1985, Stump 1997, and MacDonald 1998.)

There are two general worries about theories of free will that principally rely on the capacity to deliberate about possible actions in the light of one's conception of the good. First, there are agents who deliberately choose to act as they do but who are motivated to do so by a compulsive, controlling sort of desire. (And there seems to be no principled bar to a compulsive desire's informing a considered judgment of the agent about what the good is for him.) Such agents are not willing freely. (Wallace 2003 offers an account of the way addiction impairs the will.) Secondly, we can imagine a person's psychology being externally manipulated by another agent (via neurophysiological implant, say), such that the agent is caused to deliberate and come to desire strongly a particular action which he previously was not disposed to choose. The deliberative process could be perfectly normal, reflective, and rational, but seemingly not freely made. The agent's freedom seems undermined or at least greatly diminished by such psychological tampering.

Some theorists are much impressed by cases of inner, psychological compulsion and define freedom of will in contrast to this phenomenon. For such thinkers, true freedom of the will involves liberation from the tyranny of base desires and acquisition of desires for the Good. Plato, for example, posits rational, spirited, and appetitive aspects to the soul and holds that willings issue from the higher, rational part alone. In other cases, one is dominated by the irrational desires of the two lower parts. [ 2 ] This is particularly characteristic of those working in a theological context—for example, the New Testament writer St. Paul, speaking of Christian freedom (Romans vi-viii; Galatians v), and those influenced by him on this point, such as Augustine. (The latter, in both early and later writings, allows for a freedom of will that is not ordered to the good, but maintains that it is of less value than the rightly-ordered freedom. See, for example, the discussion in Books II-III of On Free Choice .) More recently, Susan Wolf (1990) defends an asymmetry thesis concerning freedom and responsibility. On her view, an agent acts freely only if he had the ability to choose the True and the Good. For an agent who does so choose, the requisite ability is automatically implied. But those who reject the Good choose freely only if they could have acted differently. This is a further substantive condition on freedom, making freedom of will a more demanding condition in cases of bad choices.

In considering such rightly-ordered-appetites views of freedom, I again focus on abstract features common to all. It explicitly handles the inner-compulsion worry facing the simple deliberation-based accounts. The other, external manipulation problem could perhaps be handled through the addition of an historical requirement: agents will freely only if their willings are not in part explicable by episodes of external manipulation which bypass their critical and deliberative faculties (Mele 1995). But another problem suggests itself: an agent who was a ‘natural saint,’ always and effortlessly choosing the good with no contrary inclination, would not have freedom of will among his virtues. Doubtless we would greatly admire such a person, but would it be an admiration suffused with moral praise of the person or would it, rather, be restricted to the goodness of the person's qualities? (Cf. Kant, 1788.) The appropriate response to such a person, it seems, is on an analogy with aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty, in contrast to the admiration of the person who chooses the good in the face of real temptation to act selfishly. Since this view of freedom of will as orientation to the good sometimes results from theological reflections, it is worth noting that other theologian-philosophers emphasize the importance for human beings of being able to reject divine love: love of God that is not freely given—given in the face of a significant possibility of one's having not done so—would be a sham, all the more so since, were it inevitable, it would find its ultimate and complete explanation in God Himself.

Harry Frankfurt (1982) presents an insightful and original way of thinking about free will. He suggests that a central difference between human and merely animal activity is our capacity to reflect on our desires and beliefs and form desires and judgments concerning them. I may want to eat a candy bar (first-order desire), but I also may want not to want this (second-order desire) because of the connection between habitual candy eating and poor health. This difference, he argued, provides the key to understanding both free action and free will. (These are quite different, in Frankfurt's view, with free will being the more demanding notion. Moreover, moral responsibility for an action requires only that the agent acted freely, not that the action proceeded from a free will.)

On Frankfurt's analysis, I act freely when the desire on which I act is one that I desire to be effective. This second-order desire is one with which I identify : it reflects my true self. (Compare the addict: typically, the addict acts out of a desire which he does not want to act upon. His will is divided, and his actions proceed from desires with which he does not reflectively identify. Hence, he is not acting freely.) My will is free when I am able to make any of my first-order desires the one upon which I act. As it happens, I will to eat the candy bar, but I could have willed to refrain from doing so.

With Frankfurt's account of free will, much hangs on what being able to will otherwise comes to, and on this Frankfurt is officially neutral. (See the related discussion below on ability to do otherwise.) But as he connects moral responsibility only to his weaker notion of free action, it is fitting to consider its adequacy here. The central objection that commentators have raised is this: what's so special about higher-order willings or desires? (See in particular Watson 2003a.) Why suppose that they inevitably reflect my true self, as against first-order desires? Frankfurt is explicit that higher-order desires need not be rooted in a person's moral or even settled outlook (1982, 89, n.6). So it seems that, in some cases, a first-order desire may be much more reflective of my true self (more “internal to me,” in Frankfurt's terminology) than a weak, faint desire to be the sort of person who wills differently.

In later writings, Frankfurt responds to this worry first by appealing to “decisions made without reservations” (“Identification and Externality” and “Identification and Wholeheartedness” in Frankfurt, 1988) and then by appealing to higher-order desires with which one is “satisfied,” such that one has no inclination to make changes to them (1992). But the absence of an inclination to change the desire does not obviously amount to the condition of freedom-conferring identification. It seems that such a negative state of satisfaction can be one that I just find myself with, one that I neither approve nor disapprove (Pettit, 2001, 56).

Furthermore, we can again imagine external manipulation consistent with Frankfurt's account of freedom but inconsistent with freedom itself. Armed with the wireless neurophysiology-tampering technology of the late 21st century, one might discreetly induce a second-order desire in me to be moved by a first-order desire—a higher-order desire with which I am satisfied—and then let me deliberate as normal. Clearly, this desire should be deemed “external” to me, and the action that flows from it unfree.

3. Causation and Control

Our survey of several themes in philosophical accounts of free will suggests that a—perhaps the —root issue is that of control . Clearly, our capacity for deliberation and the potential sophistication of some of our our practical reflections are important conditions on freedom of will. But any proposed analysis of free will must also ensure that the process it describes is one that was up to, or controlled by, the agent.

Fantastic scenarios of external manipulation and less fantastic cases of hypnosis are not the only, or even primary, ones to give philosophers pause. It is consistent with my deliberating and choosing ‘in the normal way’ that my developing psychology and choices over time are part of an ineluctable system of causes necessitating effects. It might be, that is, that underlying the phenomena of purpose and will in human persons is an all-encompassing, mechanistic world-system of ‘blind’ cause and effect. Many accounts of free will are constructed against the backdrop possibility (whether accepted as actual or not) that each stage of the world is determined by what preceded it by impersonal natural law. As always, there are optimists and pessimists.

John Martin Fischer (1994) distinguishes two sorts of control over one's actions: guidance and regulative. A person exerts guidance control over his own actions insofar as they proceed from a ‘weakly’ reasons-responsive (deliberative) mechanism. This obtains just in case there is some possible scenario where the agent is presented with a sufficient reason to do otherwise and the mechanism that led to the actual choice is operative and it issues in a different choice, one appropriate to the imagined reason. In Fischer and Ravizza (1998), the account is elaborated and refined. They require, more strongly, that the mechanism be the person's own mechanism (ruling out external manipulation) and that it be ‘moderately’ responsive to reasons: one that is “regularly receptive to reasons, some of which are moral reasons, and at least weakly reactive to reason” (82, emphasis added). Receptivity is evinced through an understandable pattern of reasons recognition—beliefs of the agent about what would constitute a sufficient reason for undertaking various actions. (See 69-73 for details.)

None of this, importantly, requires ‘regulative’ control: a control involving the ability of the agent to choose and act differently in the actual circumstances. Regulative control requires alternative possibilities open to the agent, whereas guidance control is determined by characteristics of the actual sequence issuing in one's choice. Fischer allows that there is a notion of freedom that requires regulative control but does not believe that this kind of freedom is required for moral responsibility. (In this, he is persuaded by a form of argument originated by Harry Frankfurt. See Frankfurt 1969 and Fischer 1994, Ch.7 for an important development of the argument. The argument has been debated extensively in recent years, and Widerker and McKenna 2002 offers a representative sampling.)

Many do not follow Fischer here, however, and maintain the traditional view that the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility does indeed require that the agent could have acted differently. As Aristotle put it, “…when the origin of the actions is in him, it is also up to him to do them or not to do them” (1985, Book III). [ 3 ]

A flood of ink has been spilled, especially in the modern era, on how to understand the concept of being able to do otherwise. On one side are those who give it a deflationary reading, on which it is consistent with my being able to do otherwise that the past (including my character and present beliefs and desires) and the basic laws of nature logically entail that I do what I actually do. These are the ‘compatibilists,’ holding that freedom and causal determinism are compatible. (For discussion, see O'Connor, 2000, Ch.1; compatibilism ; and incompatibilism: arguments for .) Conditional analyses of ability to do otherwise have been popular among compatibilists. The general idea here is that to say that I am able to do otherwise is to say that I would do otherwise if it were the case that … , where the ellipsis is filled by some elaboration of “I had an appropriately strong desire to do so, or I had different beliefs about the best available means to satisfy my goal, or … .” In short: something about my prevailing character or present psychological states would have differed, and so would have brought about a different outcome in my deliberation.

Incompatibilists think that something stronger is required: for me to act with free will requires that there are a plurality of futures open to me consistent with the past (and laws of nature) being just as they were . I could have chosen differently even without some further, non-actual consideration's occurring to me and ‘tipping the scales of the balance’ in another direction. Indeed, from their point of view, the whole scale-of-weights analogy is wrongheaded: free agents are not mechanisms that respond invariably to specified ‘motive forces.’ They are capable of acting upon any of a plurality of motives making attractive more than one course of action. Ultimately, the agent must determine himself this way or that.

We may distinguish two broad families of ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘indeterminist’ self-determination accounts. The more radical group holds that the agent who determines his own will is not causally influenced by external causal factors, including his own character. Descartes, in the midst of exploring the scope and influence of ‘the passions,’ declares that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained” (1984, v.I, 343). And as we've seen, he believed that such freedom is present on every occasion when we make a conscious choice—even, he writes, “when a very evident reason moves us in one direction….” (1984, v.III, 245). More recently, John Paul Sartre notoriously held that human beings have ‘absolute freedom’: “No limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself, or, if you prefer, we are not free to cease being free.” (567) His views on freedom flowed from his radical conception of human beings as lacking any kind of positive nature. Instead, we are ‘non-beings’ whose being, moment to moment, is simply to choose:

For human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept….it is entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity of making itself be, down to the slightest details. Thus freedom…is the being of man, i.e., his nothingness of being. (568-9)

Scotus and, more recently, C.A. Campbell, appear to agree with Descartes and Sartre on the lack of direct causal influence on the activity of free choice while allowing that the scope of possibilities for what I might thus will may be more or less constricted. So while Scotus holds that “nothing other than the will is the total cause” of its activity, he grants (with Aquinas and other medieval Aristotelians) that we are not capable of willing something in which we see no good, nor of positively repudiating something which appears to us as unqualifiedly good. Contrary to Sartre, we come with a ‘nature’ that circumscribes what we might conceivably choose, and our past choices and environmental influences also shape the possibilities for us at any particular time. But if we are presented with what we recognize as an unqualified good, we still can choose to refrain from willing it. And while Campbell holds that character cannot explain a free choice, he supposes that “[t]here is one experiential situation, and one only , … in which there is any possibility of the act of will not being in accordance with character; viz. the situation in which the course which formed character prescribes is a course in conflict with the agent's moral ideal: in other words, the situation of moral temptation” (1967, 46). (Van Inwagen 1994 and 1995 is another proponent of the idea that free will is exercised in but a small subset of our choices, although his position is less extreme on this point than Campbell's. Fischer and Ravizza 1992, O'Connor 2000, Ch.5, and Clarke 2003, Ch.7 all criticize van Inwagen's argument for this position.)

A more moderate grouping within the self-determination approach to free will allows that beliefs, desires, and external factors all can causally influence the act of free choice itself. But theorists within this camp differ sharply on the metaphysical nature of those choices and of the causal role of reasons. We may distinguish three varieties. I will discuss them only briefly, as they are explored at length in incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will .

First is a noncausal (or ownership) account (Ginet 1990, 2002 and McCann 1998). According to this view, I control my volition or choice simply in virtue of its being mine—its occurring in me. I do not exert a special kind of causality in bringing it about; instead, it is an intrinsically active event, intrinsically something I do . While there may be causal influences upon my choice, there need not be, and any such causal influence is wholly irrelevant to understanding why it occurs. Reasons provide an autonomous, non-causal form of explanation. Provided my choice is not wholly determined by prior factors, it is free and under my control simply in virtue of being mine.

Proponents of the event-causal account (e.g. Nozick 1995 and Ekstrom 2001) would say that uncaused events of any kind would be random and uncontrolled by anyone, and so could hardly count as choices that an agent made . They hold that reasons influence choices precisely by causing them. Choices are free insofar as they are not deterministically caused, and so might not have occurred in just the circumstances in which they did occur. (See nondeterministic theories of free will and probabilistic causation .) A special case of the event-causal account of self-determination is Kane (1996). Kane believes that the free choices of greatest significance to an agent's autonomy are ones that are preceded by efforts of will within the process of deliberation. These are cases where one's will is conflicted, as when one's duty or long-term self-interest compete with a strong desire for a short-term good. As one struggles to sort out and prioritize one's own values, the possible outcomes are not merely undetermined, but also indeterminate : at each stage of the struggle, the possible outcomes have no specific objective probability of occurring. This indeterminacy, Kane believes, is essential to freedom of will.

Finally, there are those who believe freedom of will consists in a distinctively personal form of causality, commonly referred to as “agent causation.” The agent himself causes his choice or action, and this is not to be reductively analyzed as an event within the agent causing the choice. (Compare our ready restatement of “the rock broke the window” into the more precise “the rock's being in momentum M at the point of contact with the window caused the window's subsequent shattering.”) This view is given clear articulation by Thomas Reid:

I grant, then, that an effect uncaused is a contradiction, and that an event uncaused is an absurdity. The question that remains is whether a volition, undetermined by motives, is an event uncaused. This I deny. The cause of the volition is the man that willed it. (Letter to James Gregory, in 1967, 88)

Roderick Chisholm advocated this view of free will in numerous writings (e.g., 1982 and 1976). And recently it has been developed in different forms by Randolph Clarke (1993, 1996, 2003) and O'Connor (2000). Nowadays, many philosophers view this account as of doubtful coherence (e.g., Dennett 1984). For some, this very idea of causation by a substance just as such is perplexing (Ginet 1997 and Clarke 2003, Ch.10). Others see it as difficult to reconcile with the causal role of reasons in explaining choices. (Clarke and O'Connor devote considerable effort to addressing this concern.) And yet others hold that, coherent or not, it is inconsistent with seeing human beings as part of the natural world of cause and effect (Pereboom 2001).

A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)

The will has also recently become a target of empirical study in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Benjamin Libet (2002) conducted experiments designed to determine the timing of conscious willings or decisions to act in relation to brain activity associated with the physical initiation of behavior. Interpretation of the results is highly controversial. Libet himself concludes that the studies provide strong evidence that actions are already underway shortly before the agent wills to do it. As a result, we do not consciously initiate our actions, though he suggests that we might nonetheless retain the ability to veto actions that are initiated by unconscious psychological structures. Wegner (2002) masses a much range of studies (including those of Libet) to argue that the notion that human actions are ever initiated by their own conscious willings is simply a deeply-entrenched illusion and proceeds to offer an hypothesis concerning the reason this illusion is generated within our cognitive systems. O'Connor (forthcoming) argues that the data adduced by Libet and Wegner wholly fail to support their revisionary conclusions.

A large portion of Western philosophical writing on free will was and is written within an overarching theological framework, according to which God is the ultimate source and sustainer of all else. Some of these thinkers draw the conclusion that God must be a sufficient, wholly determining cause for everything that happens; all suppose that every creaturely act necessarily depends on the explanatorily prior, cooperative activity of God. It is also presumed that human beings are free and responsible (on pain of attributing evil in the world to God alone, and so impugning His perfect goodness). Hence, those who believe that God is omni-determining typically are compatibilists with respect to freedom and (in this case) theological determinism. Edwards (1957) is a good example. But those who suppose that God's sustaining activity (and special activity of conferring grace) is only a necessary condition on the outcome of human free choices need to tell a more subtle story, on which omnipotent God's cooperative activity can be (explanatorily) prior to a human choice and yet the outcome of that choice be settled only by the choice itself. (For important medieval discussions—the period of the apex of treatments of philosophical/theological matters—see the relevant portions of Aquinas 1945 and Scotus 1994. For an example of a more recent discussion, see Quinn 1983.)

Another issue concerns the impact on human freedom of knowledge of God, the ultimate Good. Many philosophers, especially the medieval Aristotelians, were drawn to the idea that human beings cannot but will that which they take to be an unqualified good. (Duns Scotus appears to be an important exception to this consensus.) Hence, in the afterlife, when humans ‘see God face to face,’ they will inevitably be drawn to Him. Murray (1993, 2002) argues that a good God would choose to make His existence and character less than certain for human beings, for the sake of their freedom. (He will do so, the argument goes, at least for a period of time in which human beings participate in their own character formation.) If it is a good for human beings that they freely choose to respond in love to God and to act in obedience to His will, then God must maintain an ‘epistemic distance’ from them lest they be overwhelmed by His goodness and respond out of necessity, rather than freedom. (See also the other essays in Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002.)

Finally, there is the question of the freedom of God himself. Perfect goodness is an essential, not acquired, attribute of God. God cannot lie or be in any way immoral in His dealings with His creatures. Unless we take the minority position on which this is a trivial claim, since whatever God does definitionally counts as good, this appears to be a significant, inner constraint on God's freedom. Did we not contemplate immediately above that human freedom would be curtailed by our having an unmistakable awareness of what is in fact the Good? And yet is it not passing strange to suppose that God should be less than perfectly free?

One suggested solution to this puzzle begins by reconsidering the relationship of two strands in (much) thinking about freedom of will: being able to do otherwise and being the ultimate source of one's will. Contemporary discussions of free will often emphasize the importance of being able to do otherwise. Yet it is plausible (Kane 1996) that the core metaphysical feature of freedom is being the ultimate source, or originator, of one's choices, and that being able to do otherwise is closely connected to this feature. For human beings or any created persons who owe their existence to factors outside themselves, the only way their acts of will could find their ultimate origin in themselves is for such acts not to be determined by their character and circumstances. For if all my willings were wholly determined, then if we were to trace my causal history back far enough, we would ultimately arrive at external factors that gave rise to me, with my particular genetic dispositions. My motives at the time would not be the ultimate source of my willings, only the most proximate ones. Only by there being less than deterministic connections between external influences and choices, then, is it be possible for me to be an ultimate source of my activity, concerning which I may truly say, “the buck stops here.”

As is generally the case, things are different on this point in the case of God. Even if God's character absolutely precludes His performing certain actions in certain contexts, this will not imply that some external factor is in any way a partial origin of His willings and refrainings from willing. Indeed, this would not be so even if he were determined by character to will everything which He wills. For God's nature owes its existence to nothing. So God would be the sole and ultimate source of His will even if He couldn't will otherwise.

Well, then, might God have willed otherwise in any respect? The majority view in the history of philosophical theology is that He indeed could have. He might have chosen not to create anything at all. And given that He did create, He might have created any number of alternatives to what we observe. But there have been noteworthy thinkers who argued the contrary position, along with others who clearly felt the pull of the contrary position even while resisting it. The most famous such thinker is Leibniz (1985), who argued that God, being both perfectly good and perfectly powerful, cannot fail to will the best possible world. Leibniz insisted that this is consistent with saying that God is able to will otherwise, although his defense of this last claim is notoriously difficult to make out satisfactorily. Many read Leibniz, malgre lui , as one whose basic commitments imply that God could not have willed other than He does in any respect.

On might challenge Leibniz's reasoning on this point by questioning the assumption that there is a uniquely best possible Creation (an option noted by Adams 1987, though he challenges instead Leibniz's conclusion based on it). One way this could be is if there is no well-ordering of worlds: some worlds are sufficiently different in kind that they are incommensurate with each other (neither is better than the other, nor are they equal). Another way this could be is if there is no upper limit on goodness of worlds: for every possible world God might have created, there are others (infinitely many, in fact) which are better. If such is the case, one might argue, it is reasonable for God to arbitrarily choose which world to create from among those worlds exceeding some threshhold value of overall goodness.

However, William Rowe (1993) has countered that the thesis that there is no upper limit on goodness of worlds has a very different consequence: it shows that there could not be a morally perfect Creator! For suppose our world has an on-balance moral value of n and that God chose to create it despite being aware of possibilities having values higher than n that He was able to create. It seems we can now imagine a morally better Creator: one having the same options who chooses to create a better world. For a critical reply to Rowe, see the Howard-Snyders (1994) and Wainwright (1996). Rowe (2004) continues the discussion in response to a variety of views, both historical and contemporary.

Finally, Norman Kretzmann (1997, 220-25) has argued in the context of Aquinas's theological system that there is strong pressure to say that God must have created something or other, though it may well have been open to Him to create any of a number of contingent orders. The reason is that there is no plausible account of how an absolutely perfect God might have a resistible motivation—one consideration among other, competing considerations—for creating something rather than nothing. (It obviously cannot have to do with any sort of utility, for example.) The best general understanding of God's being motivated to create at all—one which in places Aquinas himself comes very close to endorsing—is to see it as reflecting the fact that God's very being, which is goodness, necessarily diffuses itself. Perfect goodness will naturally communicate itself outwardly; God who is perfect goodness will naturally create, generating a dependent reality that imperfectly reflects that goodness. (Wainwright (1996) is a careful discussion of a somewhat similar line of thought in Jonathan Edwards. See also Rowe 2004.)

Further Reading . Pink (2004) is an excellent, concise introduction. Pereboom (1997) provides good selections from a number of important historical writers on free will. Bourke (1964) and Dilman (1999) provide critical overviews of many such writers. For thematic treatments, see Fischer (1994); Kane (1996), esp. Ch.1-2; 5-6; Ekstrom (2001); Watson (2003b); and the outstanding collection of survey articles in Kane (2002).

• Adams, Robert (1987). “Must God Create the Best?,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology . New York: Oxford University Press, 51-64.
• Aquinas, Thomas (1945). Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (2 vol.). New York: Random House.
• ----- (1993). Selected Philosophical Writings , ed. T. McDermott. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Aristotle (1985). Nichomachean Ethics , translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Augustine (1993). On the Free Choice of the Will , tr. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Ayer, A.J. (1982). “Freedom and Necessity,” in Watson (1982b), ed., 15-23.
• Baker, Lynne (2000). Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bourke, Vernon (1964). Will in Western Thought . New York: Sheed and Ward.
• Campbell, C.A. (1967). In Defence of Free Will & other essays . London: Allen & Unwin Ltd.
• Chisholm, Roderick (1982). “Human Freedom and the Self,” in Watson (1982b), 24-35.
• ----- (1976). Person and Object . LaSalle: Open Court.
• Clarke, Randolph (1993). “Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will,” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 201-15.
• ----- (1995). “Indeterminism and Control,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32, 125-138.
• ----- (1996). “Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action,” Philosophical Topics 24 (Fall), 19-48.
• ----- (2003). Libertarian Accounts of Free Will . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dennett, Daniel (1984). Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having . Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.
• Descartes, René (1984). Meditations on First Philosophy [1641] and Passions of the Soul [1649], in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , vol. I-III, translated by Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., & Murdoch, D.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Donagan, Alan (1985). Human Ends and Human Actions: An Exploration in St. Thomas's Treatment . Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
• Dilman, Ilham (1999). Free Will: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction . London: Routledge.
• Double, Richard (1991). The Non-Reality of Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Edwards, Jonathan (1957) [1754]. Freedom of Will , ed. P. Ramsey. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Ekstrom, Laura (2000). Free Will: A Philosophical Study . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Farrer, Austin (1958). The Freedom of the Will . London: Adam & Charles Black.
• Fischer, John Martin (1994). The Metaphysics of Free Will . Oxford: Blackwell.
• ----- (1999). “Recent Work on Moral Responsibility,” Ethics 110, 93-139.
• Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark. (1992). “When the Will is Free,” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 239-269.
• Fischer, John Martin (1998) Responsibility and Control . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Frankfurt, Harry (1969). “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66, 829-39.
• ----- (1982). “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in Watson (1982), ed., 81-95.
• ----- (1988). The Importance of What We Care About . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• ----- (1992). “The Faintest Passion,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66, 5-16.
• Ginet, Carl (1990). On Action . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• ----- (1997). “Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency,” The Journal of Ethics 1, 85-98.
• ----- (2002) “Reasons Explanations of Action: Causalist versus Noncausalist Accounts,” in Kane, ed., (2002), 386-405.
• Hobbes, Thomas and Bramhall, John (1999) [1655-1658]. Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity , ed. V. Chappell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Honderich, Ted (1988). A Theory of Determinism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Frances (1994). “How an Unsurpassable Being Can Create a Surpassable World,” Faith and Philosophy 11, 260-8.
• Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Moser, Paul, eds. (2002). Divine Hiddenness: New Essays . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hume, David (1977) [1748]. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Kane, Robert (1995). “Two Kinds of Incompatibilism,” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 115-150.
• ----- (1996). The Significance of Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kane, Robert, ed., (2002). Oxford Handbook on Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kant, Immanuel (1993) [1788]. Critique of Practical Reason , tr. by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.
• Kretzmann, Norman (1997). The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Leibniz, Gottfried (1985) [1710]. Theodicy . LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
• Libet, Benjamin (2002). “Do We Have Free Will?” in Kane, ed., (2002), 551-564.
• MacDonald, Scott (1998). “Aquinas's Libertarian Account of Free Will,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie , 2, 309-328.
• Magill, Kevin (1997). Freedom and Experience . London: MacMillan.
• McCann, Hugh (1998). The Works of Agency: On Human Action, Will, and Freedom . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Mele, Alfred (1995). Autonomous Agents (New York: Oxford University Press).
• Morris, Thomas (1993). “Perfection and Creation,” in E. Stump. (1993), ed., 234-47
• Murray, Michael (1993). “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30, 27-38.
• ----- (2002). “Deus Absconditus,” in Howard-Snyder amd Moser (2002), 62-82.
• Nozick, Robert (1995). “Choice and Indeterminism,” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 101-14.
• O'Connor, Timothy (1993). “Indeterminism and Free Agency: Three Recent Views,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 53, 499-526.
• -----, ed., (1995). Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.
• ----- (2000). Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will . New York: Oxford University Press.
• ----- (forthcoming). “Freedom With a Human Face,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy , Fall 2005.
• Pettit, Philip (2001). A Theory of Freedom . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pereboom, Derk (2001). Living Without Free Will . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• -----, ed., (1997). Free Will . Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Pink, Thomas (2004). Free Will: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Plato (1997). Complete Works , ed. J. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Quinn, Phillip (1983). “Divine Conservation, Continuous Creation, and Human Action,” in A. Freddoso, ed. The Existence and Nature of God . Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
• Reid, Thomas (1969). Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind , ed. B. Brody. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Rowe, William (1993). “The Problem of Divine Perfection and Freedom,” in E. Stump (1993), ed., 223-33.
• ----- (1995). “Two Concepts of Freedom,” in O'Connor (1995), ed. 151-71.
• ----- (2004). Can God Be Free? . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sartre, John Paul (1956). Being and Nothingness . New York: Washington Square Press.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur (1999) [1839]. Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will , ed. G. Zoller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Scotus, John Duns (1986). “Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics IX, Q.15” in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality [selected and translated by Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M.]. Washington: Catholic University of America Press.
• ----- (1994) [1297-99]. Contingency and Freedom: Lectura I 39 , tr. Vos Jaczn et al . Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Shatz, David (1986). “Free Will and the Structure of Motivation,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10, 451-482.
• Smilansky, Saul (2000). Free Will and Illusion . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Strawson, Galen (1986). Freedom and Belief . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Strawson, Peter (1982). “Freedom and Resentment,” in Watson (1982), ed., 59-80.
• Stump, Eleonore (1996). “Persons: Identification and Freedom,” Philosophical Topics 24, 183-214.
• -----(1997). “Aquinas's Account of Freedom: Intellect and Will,” The Monist 80, 576-597.
• -----, ed., (1993). Reasoned Faith . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• van Inwagen, Peter (1983). An Essay on Free Will . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ----- (1994). “When the Will is Not Free,” Philosophical Studies , 75, 95-113.
• ----- (1995). “When Is the Will Free?” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 219-238.
• Wainwright, William (1996). “Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe, and the Necessity of Creation,” in J. Jordan and D. Howard-Snyder, eds., Faith Freedom, and Rationality . Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 119-133.
• Wallace, R. Jay (2003). “Addiction as Defect of the Will: Some Philosophical Reflections,” in Watson, ed., (2003b), 424-452.
• Watson, Gary (1987). “Free Action and Free Will,” Mind 96, 145-72.
• ----- (2003a). “Free Agency,” in Watson, ed., 1982b.
• -----, ed., (2003b). Free Will . 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wegner, Daniel (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Widerker, David and McKenna, Michael, eds., (2002). Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities . Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
• Wolf, Susan (1990). Freedom Within Reason . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• The Garden of Forking Paths: A Free Will/Moral Responsibility Blog , multi-contributor (maintained at the University of California, Riverside)
• The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website , edited by Ted Honderich (University College London)
• Bibliography on Free Will , maintained by David Chalmers (Australian National University)

action | compatibilism | determinism: causal | fatalism | free will: divine foreknowledge and | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | moral responsibility

Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence Essay

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

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

Determinism is incompatible with freedom of will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 11). Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence. https://ivypanda.com/essays/free-will-and-argument-against-its-existence/

"Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence." IvyPanda , 11 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/free-will-and-argument-against-its-existence/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence'. 11 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence." September 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/free-will-and-argument-against-its-existence/.

1. IvyPanda . "Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence." September 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/free-will-and-argument-against-its-existence/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence." September 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/free-will-and-argument-against-its-existence/.

• Determinism, Compatibilism and Libertarianism Philosophy Comparison
• The Issue of the Free Will
• Concepts of Determinism, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism
• Analysis and Comparison of Determinism, Compatibilism and Libertarianism, Free Will
• Philosophical Concepts: Powerful Ideas in Everyday Life
• Free Will and Its Possible Extent
• What is the difference between compatibilsm and incompatibilist in relation to free will
• Are We Free to Act and Think as We Like?
• Free Will and Determinism Analysis
• Against Free Will: Determinism and Prediction
• Determinism Argument and Objection to It
• The Existence of Freedom
• Van Inwagen’s Philosophical Argument on Free Will
• Mill's Power over Body vs. Foucault's Freedom
• Rousseau’s vs. Confucius’ Freedom Concept

Advertisement

Why free will doesn't exist, according to Robert Sapolsky

It's hard to let go of the idea that free will exists, but neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says that society starts to look very different once you do

By Timothy Revell

18 October 2023

Robert Sapolsky is one of the most revered scientists alive today. He made his name from his work studying wild baboons in Kenya, unpicking how their complex social lives lead to stress and how that affects their health.

His most recent focus, however, has been on something rather different – a book that comprehensively argues that free will doesn’t exist in any shape or form.

As he writes: “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control – our biology, our environments, their interactions”.

In this episode of CultureLab, Sapolsky outlines his case against free will and what a society without free will should look like.

You can find New Scientist Podcasts on your favourite podcast platform or by clicking here .

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is out now.

Timothy Revell: Many of our listeners, they will know you as someone who spent years studying wild baboons, and then, also, as an eminent neuroscientist, so what made you decide to then suddenly look at free will so closely, which is, I guess, more often associated with philosophy? Was there, like, an enticing incident? Did something get you onto it first?

Robert Sapolsky: Yes. I turned fourteen years old, at one point, and had a somewhat existentially unnerving experience and, that night, woke up at around two in the morning and say, “Aha, I get it. There’s no God, there’s no purpose, and there’s no free will,” and it’s been, kind of, like that every since.

More approximately, about five years ago, I published a book called, Behave, The Biology of Humans at our Best and Wors t, and I did a lot of public lecturing about, sort of, the general subject in the years since. And you’d go through, sort of, an hour’s talk of telling people about, the events one second before behaviour and one minute, and one hour, and one thousand years and all these different influences. With some regularity, somebody in the audience, afterwards, with Q&A, would say something like, “Wow. All this stuff, kind of, makes one wonder about free will,” which I, in effect, would say, “You think?” and it just struck me that I needed to write something that, very expectantly, tackled how completely silly and bankrupt the notion of free will is, when you put all the relevant science together.

Then dealing with the bigger issue, I know it seems very straightforward and simplistic by now to me that there’s no free will, but the massive issue of, “Ph my God, what are we supposed to do if people actually started believing this? How are we supposed to function?’

Timothy Revell: It’s funny that you say it’s now so easy to say that free will doesn’t exist, but I think for many people it’s one of those things that, subjectively, it feels very real, but then, you know, a good argument against that is a tale feels solid, but it’s mostly empty space, so we can’t really trust what we think about the world, certainly not our own experience of it. For those that haven’t spent as much time thinking about free will and reached the conclusion that you have, that it doesn’t exist, what is the argument? What does science say about free will?

Robert Sapolsky: Well, my essential song and dance, and I should add about 90-95 per cent of philosophers agree, that there’s free will, and steadfastly hold onto it, and these are folks, who classify themselves as compatibilists, which is to say they’re willing to admit there are things like atoms and molecules and cells out there, but somehow, despite that, can still pull free will out of the hat in their thinking.

In terms of my orientation, my basic approach is you look at a behaviour and someone has just done something that’s wonderful or awful or ambiguously in-between or in the eyes of the beholder, but some behaviour has happened, and you ask, “Why did that occur?” and you’re asking a whole hierarchy of questions. You’re, of course, asking, “Which neurons did what, ten milliseconds before?” but you’re also asking, “What sensory stimuli in the previous minutes triggered that?” but you’re also asking, “What did this morning’s hormone levels have to do with how sensitive your brain would be to those stimuli?”

You’re also asking, “What have the previous months been, trauma, stimulation, whatever, in terms of neuroplasticity?” and before you know it, you’re back to adolescents and your last gasp of constructing your frontal cortex, and childhood and foetal environment and it’s epigenetic consequences, and of course, genes. Amazingly, at that point, you have to push further back. What sort of culture were your ancestors inventing and what sort of ecosystems prompted those inventions, because that was influencing how your mother was mothering you within minutes of birth, and then, you know, some evolution thrown in for good measure.

Free will: Can neuroscience reveal if your choices are yours to make?

Philosophers have wrestled with the question of whether we are truly free to decide on our actions for centuries. Now, insights from genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology are shedding fresh light on the issue

What you see at that point is, not just saying, “Wow, when you look at all these different disciplines, collectively, they’re showing we’re just biological machines,” but they’re not all these different disciplines. They’re all one continuous one. If you’re talking about genes, by definition, genes and behaviour, by definition, you’re talking about evolution and you’re talking about neurobiology and genetic variance and neuronal function. If you’re talking about, you know, early trauma in life, you’re talking about epigenetics and you’re talking about adult propensity. So, they’re all one continuous seam of influences, and when you look at it that way, there’s not a damn crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in a notion of free will.

Timothy Revell: You talk about this in your book, but I think, for many people, they still feel like maybe there’s room. You know, with each individual step, it feels like those are influences rather than the 100 per cent determining factor. Is there, when people come to you and say, “Oh, but there’s still a little bit of room,” you know, “These are all things that influence me on a given day. of course, if it’s hot, I’m more likely to go outside and enjoy the sun, but it’s still my decision,” how do you go from that, from influences, to, “It’s not just influences, everything we do is dictated in one way or another, by this whole combination of factors’?

Robert Sapolsky: Well, the jerky, sort of, challenge that I lay down at that point is, “Okay, so you’re still holding out for free will somewhere in there, just because it seems so counter-intuitive if that is all we are,” but look at some behaviour, you just pulled the trigger on a gun, like something very consequential, and you could probably even identify the three-and-a-half neurons in the motor cortex that sent that command to your muscles.

Show me, let’s examine those three-and-a-half neurons that just did that. Show me that what they did was completely impervious to what was going on in any other neuron surrounding them, but at the same time, show me that it was impervious to whether you were tired, stressed, sleepy, happy, well-fed, at that moment. Show me that it’s impervious and would’ve done the exact same thing no matter what your hormone levels were this morning, no matter what your childhood was, no matter what your genome is, the epigenetics. Show me that it would’ve done the exact same thing after changing any of those or all of those variables, and as far as I’m concerned, you’ve just proven free will, and they can’t, because there’s absolutely nothing any of your, like, molecules making you up just did to generate a behaviour that’s independent of every second before.

It is impossible to show that we can act freely of everything that came before.

Timothy Revell: Do you think there’s a reason why we seem so wired to think that free will does exist? Is there some evolutionary benefit to us believing that? If we just accepted it from the beginning, that it doesn’t exist, would that maybe actually be better for us, overall?

Robert Sapolsky: Oh, well, at first pass, it’s depressing as hell and alarming and unsettling and all of that, and all sorts of wise evolutionary biologists have thought about the evolution of self-deception, and by the time you’re as smart of a primate as we are, we had to have developed a robust capacity for not believing in what might be the case, because otherwise, it would be all too overwhelming and despairing and just existential void and all that stuff.

You know, there’s a very, very strong emotional incentive to feel agency, and endless aspects of experimental psychology has shown that you stress people or frazzle them or give them an unsolvable problem, and they get a way distorted sense of agency, at that point, as a defence. The really critical issue there though is the assumption that believing there’s no free will, okay, there’s no free will and you better believe it, and that’s about as appealing as, like, swallowing cod liver oil or something but, you know, suck it up, that’s the way the world works.

The hard problem of consciousness is already beginning to dissolve

Science can solve the great mystery of consciousness – how physical matter gives rise to conscious experience – we just have to use the right approach, says neuroscientist Anil Seth

My overwhelmingly emphasis is, if you suddenly are convinced there’s no free will, and that’s a total bummer for you, because that makes your, like, egregiously privileged salary seem like something you did not necessarily earn and your prestigious degrees and your circle of loving friends and all the other things that you feel like you, in some manner, earn, deserve, you’re entitled to, oh, bummer, if that’s not the case. If that’s your response to the idea of there being no free will, by definition, you were one of the lucky ones.

For most people on earth, who were dealing with far less privilege, the notion that we are not the captains of our fate is, like, wildly liberating and humane. I mean, just ask someone who’s genetic profile and metabolism dooms them to obesity and being subject to a lifelong of unhappiness and societal stigma over that, and that’s just one of the billion ways in which the discovery that we’re nothing more or less than the biology over which we had no control and the environment over-, is great news, and is the most humane thing on Earth. All we spent is the last 500 years of scientific insights into seeing that people are not responsible for all sorts of things for which they used to be blamed or made to feel like they are inadequate or burnt at the stake for, and this is wonderfully liberating.

Timothy Revell: Yes, so I want to get into some of those implications, because, as you say, it’s, sort of, liberating to think, “Well, we’re just the products of our biology,” but at the same time, we’ve built a whole society around responsibility. That you have responsibilities to do certain things, but also, we have responsibility as society to hold people accountable for the decisions that they make, and these words are all, sort of, loaded with an intrinsic understanding of free will being baked into it.

Robert Sapolsky: Yes.

Timothy Revell: If everyone read your book overnight and agreed with you 100 per cent, what does a society look like where we accept this principle that free will does not exist?

Robert Sapolsky: Well, I think the first thing to emphasise is the roof isn’t going to cave in, because over and over and over, we have subtracted responsibility out of our views of human behaviour in the natural world, and it’s been okay. People haven’t run amok, society hasn’t, you know, gone to hell, at that point, because 400 years ago, we figured out hailstorms are not caused by witches and, like, old crones would not be held responsible for hailstorms and burnt at the stake. About 200 years ago, people figured out, definitely, that an epileptic seizure is not a sign of demonic possession. Responsibility is subtracted out.

About 50 years ago, the damn physiatrics, sort of, old boy oligarchy figured out that schizophrenia is not caused by mothers with psychodynamic hatred of their child, and instead, it’s a neurogenetic disorder. 30 years ago, we figured out that kids at school that simply are not learning to read, it’s not because they’re lazy and unmotivated, it’s because their cortical abnormalities are making them reverse letters that have, like, closed loops in them or whatever. We’ve done it over and over and over, and things have been just fine, and in fact, things have gotten much better and much more humane.

So, the challenge is to just imagine what things people a century from now will be saying about our time period and things we still thought were volitional and things that we punished people for and things that we rewarded people for, where there was absolutely no basis for it. More practically, like, how are we supposed to function? It seems like the first, sort of, thing to get off the table is, “Oh my God, we’re all going to run amok, because people will be unconstrained by, you know, “I can’t be held responsible.”

Revealed: What your thoughts look like and how they compare to others’

We finally have a grasp on the many different ways of thinking and how your inner mindscape affects your experience of reality

Really careful studies suggest that people won’t run amok. Some pretty superficial ones say that, as soon as you prime people physiologically to believe less in free will, they start cheating like mad on their economic games, two minutes later, but, sort if, deeper studies show that that’s really not the case, and there’s a great parallel example. Instead of thinking, “Wow, I can do whatever I want, because I’m not responsible for my actions,” thinking, “Wow, I can do whatever I want because I won’t be held responsible in an ultimate sense.” Atheists are, if anything, more ethical in their behaviour than the highly religious. The running amok thing is not a worry.

The next one that’s got to be disposed of is, like nonetheless, dangerous people need to be contained and, yes, absolutely. Just because someone is not responsible for them being a damaging person, because they’ve been damaged as hell, like all of the rotten luck they’ve gotten, adversity in life, that doesn’t mean, you know, you shouldn’t constrain them from damaging. What people emphasise more and more is a quarantine model. Like, if somebody is infectious, through no fault of their own, they’re quarantined.

If a car’s breaks don’t work and it will run you over, keep it in a garage. If a person’s frontal cortex has been so done in by childhood trauma that they can’t regulate their emotional behaviours, make sure they can’t damage people. Make sure if all of that can strain them with the absolute minimum needed to prevent that and not an inch more in the name of retribution or rotten souls or anything that they deserve. And, as the flip side of it, like recognise that some people are better brain surgeons are better basketball players or something than others and that’s great. We really do want to have competent brain surgeons and I presume basketball players out there and they should be doing that stuff but don’t tell that they’re entitled to a greater salary than anyone else and don’t give them a greater salary. The meritocracy makes as little sense as does the criminal justice system when you really think about this.

Timothy Revell: Yes, it’s very interesting that as you present the things from history and you reel through them. Things like the not believing that people are influencing hail storms or that you’re-, in some way it’s a sign of the devil if you have epilepsy or the same with dyslexia. Those things feel so obvious to us now sitting here and I think that the vast majority of people will go of course it’s ridiculous we ever thought anything else but yet when you say for the criminal justice system it needs to be reframed so that it is no longer about responsibility but instead about quarantine I think there are lots of people who maybe have a harder time reaching that same conclusion. Is that what you find? That when you talk to people-, so historical examples that all makes sense but maybe the next step just seems almost unfathomable.

Robert Sapolsky: Exactly, and the real challenge is to think back that somewhere, I don’t know, 400 years ago there was some very learned, reflective, compassionate, empathic, introspective smart guy who is some sort of judge or something, and he believed in helping the underdog. And if there had been national public radio then to contribute money to, he would’ve done that and gotten a little button saying, “I support, like, everything they believe in.” He would’ve been like a total bleeding heart liberal of the time, and he’d come home at the end of the day and say, “Wow, tough day. We had this guy. Had to burn him at the stake. Had seizures. He obviously welcomed in Satan, I mean, kids. He had a wife, kids who were really upset. It was, like, hard to do but what can you do?” Nobody told him to welcome in Satan, so of course, we had to burn him at the stake, but tough day. And that would’ve been a compassionate liberal at the time and it would’ve been inconceivable then in the same way that it’s inconceivable now that somebody’s IQ or somebody’s capacity to master tough difficult things or somebody’s inability to regulate their emotions and thus be really damaging makes just as little sense.

Timothy Revell: Can you talk us through a little bit about that because quite a lot of those historical examples there about-, sort of, parts of the human condition becoming medicalized, us appreciating that their diseases or conditions that are really affecting things that happened to people. For example them having seizures but when it comes to crime I think some people will not see the immediate link there. So if you have someone who has committed a crime, how does the medical side of this, the neuroscience, all of that, fit into the point where they commit a crime?

Robert Sapolsky: Well, the examples you bring up first are the easy ones or the edge cases. Society is pretty good at recognising, at least in the American legal system, that if somebody has a sufficiently low IQ they shouldn’t be held legally responsible for a violent act or whatever. There’s, like, a cut off and people fight over what the cut off should be and all of that. If someone has had massive damage to their frontal cortex or a tumour there, I don’t know, about half the states in the United States are willing to say, in this edge case, there was not actually responsibility.

But yes, then we get to the normative range of like people doing awful stuff or people doing commendable stuff, where there isn’t an obvious whatever that presents, you know, this is a special mitigating case. There’s no special mitigating cases because it’s a continuum of the exact same biology. The second you can show stuff like what a paper a couple of years ago showed which is brain imaging on fetuses that by the time you’re a third trimester fetus the social economic status of your parents are already influencing the rate in which your brain is growing. By the time you can take kids and adolescence and show like a formal checklist of childhood adversaries and traumas, what somebody’s score is on this scale.

Brain scans are putting a major theory of consciousness to the test

A proposed way to measure consciousness called integrated information theory has been tested using data from human brain scans, and seems to work

The ace score, adverse child experience score. Like, we had a score from zero to ten depending on just how unlucky and awful your childhood was and for every additional point you get on the scale there’s about a 35 per cent increase chance that a guy by age 20 will have done something antisocial and violent. There’s about 35 per cent increase change that a female will have had a teen pregnancy of either unsafe sex, of by adulthood, a major mood disorder like anxiety or depression. If you can show that one extra step, whoa. Not only were they sexually abused as a kid but somebody in the family was incarcerated. That one extra point makes him 35 per cent more likely to be that way as an adult. You’re looking at what has to come into any of these factors which is we’ve just scratched the service on the things that move you from a 35 per cent chance of a particular outcome to a 100 per cent chance. And what I endlessly go on about is, like, ace scores adverse childhood experience scores.

You can have the exact same conclusion if there was such a thing as, like, RLCE ridiculously lucky child who experiences and you can get a whole scale on that. Did your parents read books to you? Did you, like, play and laugh a lot? Did you never wonder where your next meal was coming from? And no doubt for every one of those a 35 per cent increase chance that you’re going to have the corner office in some corporation some day. Like, you look at those and any of these myths of somebody being responsible ultimately for the bad or the good just isn’t supportable and eventually is morally repugnant as well.

Timothy Revell: I think for many-, like for me certainly when reading the book, I can accept all of that but part of me also wants to think but I’m different. There’s a certain sense of-, like, I totally understand that if you’ve gone through these horrible life experiences that is of course going to affect you later in life but it’s so hard to drop that idea that maybe I would make different choices but I think it is quite compelling that argument you put forward that I think would it be fair to say it boils down to if you had the same life experiences and you had the same biology you would do the same things.

Robert Sapolsky: Exactly. And feel the same sense of agency and captain of your fate, sort of, delusions. Something I try to emphasise though throughout the book is this is incredibly difficult to think this way. Like, I’ve believed this since I was, like, early adolescence and 99 per cent of the time I can’t manage to pull this off.

I think I recount in there a few years back there was some, like, appalling hate crime. Some guy showed up with an automatic weapon in a place of worship and killed a bunch of people and listening to the radio that next Monday morning saying whoever is being arraigned and is going to be charged with a federal hate crime as well which makes him eligible for the death penalty. I thought, “Yes. Fry the bastard.” Wait. I’m working on death penalty cases right now to convince juries that-, yet no one says this is going to be easy.

I’m terrible at it 99 per cent of the time. Not only am I violating my intellectual beliefs but my moral beliefs as well because these are really strong reflexes to both get pissed off at people who do awful things but in addition probably more fundamentally to feel, kind of, good about yourself if someone says well nice job on that. Yes. I did a nice job. I’m entitled to that praise. This is going to be incredibly hard but we’ve done it over and over and over again and it’s not that hard to identify the corners of society where it’s most important to make that emphasis first.

Timothy Revell: You hinted at it there but can you talk a little bit about your direct experience with the criminal justice system where you have appeared as a, sort of, expert on the brain. What has your role been there and how does it play into all of this?

Robert Sapolsky: Oh, this has been this little, minor hobby of working with what are called public defenders, who are the people who are assigned when some defendant can’t afford their own attorney, and this is a whole world of, like, liberal, do-gooder attorneys who lose 95 per cent of their cases. I’ve been working on a bunch of these, and what has always been the scenario is this is someone who has done something very, very bad. And where, initially, they were threatened and did something that could pass as self-defence, they stabbed the guy before the other guy could stab them who came at them first and they’re then lying there on the ground incapacitated and ten seconds later they come back and stab the guy an additional 72 times.

At which point the jury says well, you know, the first stab was self defence but 10 seconds that was enough time to premeditate and figure out that the threat was over with. But whoa, 72 additional times. That counts as premeditated murder and it’s always that, sort of, scenario and it is always somebody who was already virtually guaranteed to do this by the time they were 5 years old. Substance abuse at home, psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, prenatal exposure drugs of abuse, shuttled through foster homes. Stabbed for the first time at age 10, you know, that repeated concussive head traumas from people abusing them, all of that and you look at someone like that and this is screamingly this is a broken machine.

Why are we conscious? The answer lies in other animals’ heads

The thing that I always do with these juries is take them through, like, what’s going on in the brain when you make a decision and how we’re much more likely neurobiologically to make an awful decision if we’re under a whole lot of stress. Like somebody coming at us with a knife and we’re a gazillion times more likely to make the wrong decision during that 10 seconds if we have a brain that’s been pickled in adversity from day one because your brain would’ve been constructed in a way where you’re going to make a terrible impulsive decision at that point and then I dramatically look at the jury and say the same thing you said before which is if they had gone through this fetal life childhood etc, etc, all the things that-, they would’ve done the exact same thing and the juries all nod and look like they’re following and then they go into the jury room and they look at the pictures of the corpse with the head almost decapitated from stabs number 36 through 43 or something out of the 72 and they vote to convict the guy. I’ve done 12 of these trials by now over the years and we’ve lost 11 of them and that’s even arguing, like, the edge cases. Wow, this is a guy whose frontal cortex was destroyed in a car accident when he was eight.

He spent two months in a coma, came out of it, no prior history whatever and did his first murder at age 12 and here you guys have just convicted him of his 8th and 9th murders and he’s a broken machine. And you know, they go and sit about it for a while and they come back with the death penalty so it’s a real uphill battle even with these edge cases of, whoa, traumatic examples of, like, terrible like or then look at like, Ivy League students or my undergrads at Stanford and look at their histories and you know by age 5 they already had their paths set to have a higher of an average income sometime later and would go to a prestigious college and the same exact thing. It’s very hard to just work with the gears that made them who they are.

Timothy Revell: Alright, one last question for you. What are you planning on tackling next? Is it the meaning of life?

Robert Sapolsky: Oh, I don’t know. I hope something interesting comes along, building on-, not to get all preachy and stuff, but at the end of the day this stops being an issue for neuroscientists or behaviour geneticists or early childhood develop-, and it becomes a social justice issue. It’s really great, philosophically, if people believe less in free will and all of that. The number of people on earth who are made to suffer because of the miserable luck in their life, starting with their ancestors picking the wrong, god-awful corner of the planet to live in, and centuries later, that has something to do with this person’s cerebral malaria when they were five.

The social justice aspects of this, at the end of the day, are really the things that matter most about this, because we have a constructed a world with an awful lot of myths of free will, and culpability and responsibility. And most people who don’t have the corner office in their, like, fancy corporation, most people have mostly suffered because of this so that’s, kind of, the end that is galvanising me the most at this point. At the end of the day, that’s what this stuff is really about.

Timothy Revell: So, what did you think? It’s a pretty compelling case that Sapolsky built I think that free will doesn’t exist and as he puts it in the book “We are not captains of our ships. Our ships never had captains.” And if we could really accept that the implications that would have for our society would be profound. If you have any thoughts on this do please get in touch at podcasts at new scientist.com. We would love to hear from you and if you enjoy our podcast do please leave a review on whatever platform you’re listening to us on. It does really help us out .That’s it for this episode of culture lab. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks time with some more. That’s bye for now. 

• neuroscience

Sign up to our weekly newsletter

Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox! We'll also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers.

Popular articles

Trending New Scientist articles

Is Free Will an Illusion? Scientists, Philosophers Forced to Differ

Are you really in control, or is your every decision predetermined? Who's at the steering wheel: you, your genes, your upbringing, fate, karma, God?

A hot topic for several thousand years, the question of whether free will exists may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. But in a series of new articles for the  Chronicles of Higher Education , six academics from diverse fields offer fresh perspectives from the standpoints of modern neuroscience and philosophy. Ultimately, they voted 4-2 in favor of the position that free will is merely an illusion.

The four scientists on the panel denied the existence of free will, arguing that human behavior is governed by the brain, which is itself controlled by each person's genetic blueprint built upon by his or her life experiences. Meanwhile, the two philosophers cast the dissenting votes, arguing that free will is perfectly compatible with the discoveries of neuroscience.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, defined free will as the possibility that, after making a decision, you could have chosen otherwise. But a "decision," Coyne argues, is merely a series of electrical and chemical impulses between  molecules in the brain  — molecules whose configuration is predetermined by genes and environment. Though each decision is the outcome of an immensely complicated series of chemical reactions, those reactions are governed by the laws of physics and could not possibly turn out differently. "Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made," Coyne wrote.

The three other scientists concurred with Coyne's viewpoint. As Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, put it in his essay: "Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy)."

Though everyone must be held accountable for his or her actions, neuroscience and the nonexistence of free will should be factored into some criminal cases, the scholars argued. [ Math Formula May Explain Why Serial Killers Kill ]

A counterargument came from Hilary Bok, a philosopher at the Johns Hopkins University, who said scientists misunderstand the question of free will when they argue that decisions are governed by the activity of brain cells. Free will, in her opinion, is being capable of stepping back from one's existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among various alternatives. "The claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it," she wrote.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

Alfred Mele, another philosopher at Florida State University, also believes the concept of free will is compatible with the findings of neuroscience. He cited a 2008 study in which volunteers were asked to push either of two buttons. According to the study, brain activity up to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously reached revealed which button the volunteer was more likely to press.

Though the study is widely viewed as evidence against free will, Mele pointed out that the study participants' brain activity accurately predicted their eventual decision only 60 percent of the time. In his view, this suggests people can consciously choose to override their brains' predispositions.

Therefore, he wrote, "I do not recommend betting the farm on the nonexistence of free will."

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @ nattyover . Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @ llmysteries , then join us on  Facebook .

Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics. 

Why do people feel like they're being watched, even when no one is there?

Why do babies rub their eyes when they're tired?

'Unprecedented' discovery of mysterious circular monument near 2 necropolises found in France

Most Popular

• 2 NASA spacecraft snaps mysterious 'surfboard' orbiting the moon. What is it?
• 3 'Gambling with your life': Experts weigh in on dangers of the Wim Hof method
• 4 Viking Age women with cone-shaped skulls likely learned head-binding practice from far-flung region
• 5 'Exceptional' prosthesis of gold, silver and wool helped 18th-century man live with cleft palate
• 2 2,500-year-old skeletons with legs chopped off may be elites who received 'cruel' punishment in ancient China
• 3 Modern Japanese people arose from 3 ancestral groups, 1 of them unknown, DNA study suggests
• 4 Giant, 82-foot lizard fish discovered on UK beach could be largest marine reptile ever found
• 5 The universe may be dominated by particles that break causality and move faster than light, new paper suggests

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.

• The long read
• Philosophy (World news)
• Neuroscience
• Stephen Hawking
• Philosophy (Education)

Most viewed

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Free will is the idea that humans have the ability to make their own choices and determine their own fates. Is a person’s will free, or are people's lives in fact shaped by powers outside of their control? The question of free will has long challenged philosophers and religious thinkers, and scientists have examined the problem from psychological and neuroscientific perspectives as well.

• Does Free Will Exist?
• Why Beliefs About Free Will Matter

Scientists have investigated the concept of human agency at the level of neural circuitry, and some findings have been taken as evidence that conscious decisions are not truly “free.” Free will skeptics argue that the subjective sense of free will is an illusion. Yet many scholars, as well as ordinary people, still profess a belief in free will, even if they acknowledge that choices are partly shaped by forces outside of one's control.

Behavioral science has made plain that individuals’ behavioral tendencies are influenced by genetics , as well as by factors in the environment that may be outside of a person’s control. This suggests that there are, at least, some constraints on the range of decisions and behaviors a person will be inclined to make (or even to consider) in any given situation. Challengers of the idea that people act the way they do due to conscious, unconstrained choices also point to evidence that unconscious brain activity can partly predict a choice before a conscious decision is made. And some have sought to logically refute the argument that choices necessarily demonstrate free will.

While there are many reasons to believe that a person’s will is not completely free of influence, there is not a scientific consensus against free will. Some use the term “free will” in a looser sense to reflect that conscious decisions play a role in the outcomes of a person’s life—even if those are shaped by innate dispositions or randomness. (Critics of the concept of free will might simply call this kind of decision-making “will,” or volition.) Even when unconscious processes help determine a person’s conscious behavior, some argue, such processes can still be thought of as part of an individual’s will.

Determinism is the idea that every event, including every human action, is the result of previous events and the laws of nature. A belief in determinism that includes a rejection of free will has been called “hard determinism.”

From a deterministic perspective, there is only one possible way that future events can unfold based on what has already occurred and the rules that govern the universe—though that doesn’t mean such events can necessarily be predicted by humans. Someone who believes in free will because they do not take determinism for granted is called, in philosophy , a “libertarian.”

Yes. This is called “compatibilism” or “soft determinism.” A compatibilist believes that even though events are predetermined, there is still some version of free will at work in decision-making . An incompatibilist argues that only determinism or free will can be true.

Whether free will exists or not, belief in free will is very real. Does it matter if a person believes that her choices are completely her own, and that other people’s choices are freely made, too? Psychologists have explored the connections between free will beliefs—often gauged by agreement with statements like “I am in charge of my actions even when my life’s circumstances are difficult” and, simply, “I have free will”—and people’s attitudes about decision-making, blame, and other variables of consequence.

The more people agree with claims of free will , some research suggests, the more they tend to favor internal rather than external explanations for someone else’s behavior. This may include, for example, learning of someone’s immoral deed and agreeing more strongly that it was a result of the person’s character and less that factors like social norms are to blame. (A study of whether reducing free-will beliefs influenced sentencing decisions by actual judges, however, did not show any effect. )

One idea proposed in philosophy is that systems of morality would collapse without a common belief that each person is responsible for his actions—and thus deserves reward or punishment for them. In this view, there is value in maintaining belief in free will, even if free will is in fact an illusion. Others argue that morality can exist in the absence of free-will belief, or that belief in free will actually promotes harmful outcomes such as intolerance and revenge-seeking. Some psychology research has been cited as suggesting that disbelief in free will increases dishonest behavior, but subsequent experiments have called this finding into question.

Mental illness can be thought of, in a sense, as involving additional constraints on the freedom of a person’s will (in the form of rigid thought patterns or compulsions, for instance), beyond the usual factors that shape thinking and behavior. Belief in free will, it has been argued, may contribute to the stigma attached to mental illness by obscuring the role of underlying biological and environmental causes.

There is limited evidence that people who believe more strongly in free will may tend to perceive at least some kinds of choices—such as buying electronics or deciding what to watch on TV—as easier to make, and that they may enjoy making choices more.

Two concepts from psychology that bear similarity to belief in free will are “ locus of control ” and “ self-efficacy .” Locus of control refers to a person’s belief about how much power he has over his life—how important factors like intentions and hard work seem to be compared to external forces such as good luck or the actions of others. Self-efficacy is a person’s sense of her ability to perform at a certain level so as to influence events that affect them. While all of these concepts relate to the factors that steer a person’s life, they are distinct—one can doubt that humans have free will, for example, and still be confident in her ability to win a competition .

As initiatives are discussed surrounding involuntary psychiatric care, an important element is ignored. The quality of treatment in the hospital is often poor.

Individuals with serious and persistent mental illnesses are held to a different standard in physician-assisted dying.

Kierkegaard's philosophy offers insights into living authentically and finding fulfillment amidst the distractions and pressures of the modern world.

If the days of bettering oneself through a liberal arts education have transformed into simply “making more money,” then let’s just teach kids to write ransom notes.

As brains evolved in complexity, they acquired top-down control systems, such that bottom-up inputs cannot completely predict behavioral outputs. Does this mean we have free-will?

New theoretical work helps us understand which aspects of emotional processing can and cannot be controlled.

To help ensure you actually reach your New Year's resolutions (or any goal), here is an essential technique you need in your repertoire.

The "mysteries" of concern to Freud and Jung were restricted to semantic processes, which today are not a mystery. But consciousness remains a true mystery.

Is it possible for a tiny decision to make a big impact? Surprisingly, infinitesimal self-help practices can be effective, when bigger commitments will fail.

Dopamine is the molecule that makes us feel good about expending effort. Motivation neurobiology reveals ways to enhance effort without extra calories, drugs, or risk.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

30 Existence of Free Will

Determinism and freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Views of Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Will and the Sciences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

Attribution

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

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

Share This Book

April 28, 2016

What Neuroscience Says about Free Will

We're convinced that it exists, but new research suggests it might be nothing more than a trick the brain plays on itself

By Adam Bear

Klaus Vedfelt Getty Images

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

It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience?

In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago , the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did .

But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose, that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause of behavior.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

In a  study just published in Psychological Science , Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.

Though the precise way in which the mind could do this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before feeling an actual touch further up our arm. “Postdictive” illusions of this sort are typically explained by noting that there’s a delay in the time it takes information out in the world to reach conscious awareness: Because it lags slightly behind reality, consciousness can “anticipate” future events that haven’t yet entered awareness, but have been encoded subconsciously, allowing for an illusion in which the experienced future alters the experienced past.

In one of our studies, participants were repeatedly presented with five white circles in random locations on a computer monitor and were asked to quickly choose one of the circles in their head before one lit up red. If a circle turned red so fast that they didn’t feel like they were able to complete their choice, participants could indicate that they ran out of time. Otherwise, they indicated whether they had chosen the red circle (before it turned red) or had chosen a different circle. We explored how likely people were to report a successful prediction among these instances in which they believed that they had time to make a choice.

Unbeknownst to participants, the circle that lit up red on each trial of the experiment was selected completely randomly by our computer script. Hence, if participants were truly completing their choices when they claimed to be completing them—before one of the circles turned red—they should have chosen the red circle on approximately 1 in 5 trials. Yet participants’ reported performance deviated unrealistically far from this 20% probability, exceeding 30% when a circle turned red especially quickly. This pattern of responding suggests that participants’ minds had sometimes swapped the order of events in conscious awareness, creating an illusion that a choice had preceded the color change when, in fact, it was biased by it.

Importantly, participants’ reported choice of the red circle dropped down near 20% when the delay for a circle to turn red was long enough that the subconscious mind could no longer play this trick in consciousness and get wind of the color change before a conscious choice was completed. This result ensured that participants weren’t simply trying to deceive us (or themselves) about their prediction abilities or just liked reporting that they were correct.

In fact, the people who showed our time-dependent illusion were often completely unaware of their above-chance performance when asked about it in debriefing after the experiment was over. Moreover, in a related experiment, we found that the bias to choose correctly was not driven by confusion or uncertainty about what was chosen: Even when participants were highly confident in their choice, they showed a tendency to “choose” correctly at an impossibly high rate.

Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be systematically misled about how we make choices, even when we have strong intuitions to the contrary. Why, though, would our minds fool us in such a seemingly silly way in the first place? Wouldn’t this illusion wreak havoc on our mental lives and behavior?  

Maybe not. Perhaps the illusion can simply be explained by appeal to limits in the brain’s perceptual processing, which only messes up at the very short time scales measured in our (or similar ) experiments and which are unlikely to affect us in the real world.

A more speculative possibility is that our minds are designed to distort our perception of choice and that this distortion is an important feature (not simply a bug) of our cognitive machinery. For example, if the experience of choice is a kind of causal inference, as Wegner and Wheatley suggest, then swapping the order of choice and action in conscious awareness may aid in the understanding that we are physical beings who can produce effects out in the world. More broadly, this illusion may be central to developing a belief in free will and, in turn, motivating punishment .

Yet, whether or not there are advantages to believing we’re more in control of our lives than we actually are, it’s clear that the illusion can go too far. While a quarter-of-a-second distortion in time experience may be no big deal, distortions at longer delays—which might plague people with mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—could substantially and harmfully warp people’s fundamental views about the world. People with such illnesses may begin to believe that they can control the weather or that they have an uncanny ability to predict other people’s behavior. In extreme cases, they may even conclude that they have god-like powers.

It remains to be seen just how much the postdictive illusion of choice that we observe in our experiments connects to these weightier aspects of daily life and mental illness. The illusion may only apply to a small set of our choices that are made quickly and without too much thought. Or it may be pervasive and ubiquitous—governing all aspects of our behavior, from our most minute to our most important decisions. Most likely, the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. Whatever the case may be, our studies add to a growing body of work suggesting that even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong.

Why the Classical Argument Against Free Will Is a Failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But quantum physics contains probabilistic laws that look like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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