free will

← Encyclopedia

Free will is the capacity to choose between courses of action in a way that is genuinely one’s own — neither forced from outside nor settled in advance — and so to be the real author, and the fair bearer of praise or blame, of what one does. Stated that plainly it sounds like common sense. Almost every part of it has been contested for two thousand years.

The problem is not the experience of choosing, which few have doubted, but whether that experience answers to anything. If the gods know the future, the future is already fixed; if every event has a prior cause, the choice was caused too; if a sovereign God awards salvation, the saved did not earn it. Each of these threats arrives from a different direction — foreknowledge, causation, grace — and the history of the idea is largely the history of trying to keep human responsibility intact against one or another of them. Underneath the threats lie two distinct things people mean by freedom: the leeway to have done otherwise, and sourcehood, being the genuine origin of the act. Much of the argument turns on whether responsibility needs both, or only the second.

The Greeks supplied the materials, though not, the cited scholarship insists, the finished problem. Aristotle treated action that is “up to us” as the basis of responsibility without naming any faculty of will; the Stoics argued that everything happens by an unbroken chain of fate, and then insisted, against the obvious objection, that some things remain genuinely up to the agent — Chrysippus likening the soul to a cylinder whose roll, once pushed, follows from its own shape. What recent work resists is the older claim that the early Stoics thereby posed the modern free-will problem. On the reading of Bobzien and Frede, the two authorities the entry rests on, the recognizably modern problem was entertained neither by Aristotle nor by the early Stoics; it crystallized only around the second century, out of a confluence of Stoic and Peripatetic theory, and the notion of a free will pivots on Epictetus — with Augustine inheriting that notion rather than inventing it. The Neoplatonists pressed toward an inward freedom: Plotinus asked in what sense even the highest principle could be called free, and located true liberty not in arbitrary choice but in the soul’s unforced turn toward the Good.

In the monotheist traditions the stakes became salvation itself. Christian thought carried a tension it never fully resolved: Paul wrote of a will divided against itself and of grace that does the saving, and Augustine, reading him, concluded that fallen humanity cannot will the good unaided — against Pelagius, who held that the will keeps its native power for good and that “predestination” is no more than God foreseeing free choices. The Pelagian position was condemned, and a milder settlement reached at Orange in 529; the implications for predestination the Reformation would push to their limit, Calvin to unconditional election and a sovereign decree, while Catholic Molinists and Arminians spent centuries qualifying it back toward a freedom God foreknows rather than overrides. Islamic theology held the same fault line, between the Muʿtazila, who made the human being the creator of his own acts to preserve divine justice, and the determinist reading that subordinated every act to God’s decree; the dominant Ashʿarī settlement tried to hold both at once through kasb, “acquisition” — God creates the act, the human acquires it. Jewish tradition tended to assert the freedom to choose and the divine foreknowledge side by side, in the spirit of the old maxim that all is foreseen yet freedom of choice is given, treating the contradiction as real but not disabling. Beyond the Mediterranean the same knot recurs in another key: karma is often read as fate, yet most South-Asian thought treats present action as genuinely generative, conditioned by accumulated consequence without being wholly fixed by it, with liberation framed as release from that conditioning rather than from choice itself.

The foreknowledge thread has a metaphysical cousin in the ontology of time — the question of whether the future is already, in some sense, there to be known. That side belongs to the block-universe; free will keeps the narrower worry about control and responsibility. Here the modern argument has sorted itself into a few positions, downstream of the larger question of metaphysics. Determinism holds that the state of the world at any moment, with the laws of nature, fixes a unique future. Incompatibilists deny that freedom and determinism can both be true: the hard determinist concludes there is no free will, the libertarian that determinism must therefore be false and that genuine alternatives are real — caused, on some accounts, by the agent herself as an irreducible source rather than by antecedent events. Compatibilists reply that the worry is misplaced. On Hume’s reconciling project, to call an act free is to say it was done without constraint, not that it escaped the causal order; freedom is acting on one’s own desires, and “could have done otherwise” means only that one would have, had one chosen to. Frankfurt refined this into a question of endorsement: a will is free when the desire one acts on is the one a person, reflecting, wants to be moved by — the willing addict owns his craving in a way the unwilling addict does not.

The sharpest exchange runs between two thought-experiments. The consequence argument, pressed by van Inwagen, runs that if determinism is true our acts follow from the laws of nature and the distant past; but no one has any choice about the past or the laws, and so no choice about what they entail — including present action. Against it, Frankfurt devised cases meant to sever responsibility from the ability to do otherwise: a man decides and acts entirely on his own, while a would-be intervener stands ready to force the same choice had he wavered — yet, since he never wavers, the intervener never acts. He could not have done otherwise, and seems answerable all the same, which would let responsibility rest on sourcehood alone. Compatibilists add a metaphysical reply in David Lewis’s local-miracle account: to have done otherwise, an agent need not break a law of nature, only be such that, had she acted differently, some law would have differed by a hair. None of these moves has carried the field; the division is live.

A third pressure comes from the laboratory. Libet’s experiments in the 1980s recorded a “readiness potential” building in the motor cortex hundreds of milliseconds before subjects reported the conscious urge to move, and Soon and colleagues later claimed that brain activity could predict a simple choice several seconds before awareness. Read strongly, the findings suggest the brain decides before the conscious self knows — that free will is a story told after the fact. Read carefully, they show much less. Libet himself preserved a conscious veto in the final moment; the prediction rates run only modestly above chance; the readiness potential may register accumulating neural noise rather than a settled decision. And, as Mele has urged, the studies turn on arbitrary, unmotivated flicks of the wrist, not on the reasoned, contestable choices that responsibility is actually about. The experiments are a real datum, not a refutation; what they unsettle is a picture of the conscious will as an uncaused first mover, which few of the positions above required in the first place.

What recurs across all of it is a refusal to give up either pole. Thinkers who were certain the world was governed — by fate, by causes, by God — were generally just as certain that people are answerable for what they do, and spent their effort not on choosing between the two but on showing how both could be true together. Whether the reconciliations work remains open; the conviction that something is owed to both has proven harder to abandon than any particular solution to it.

→ In the library: Plotinus — Enneads VI.8: On Free-Will and the Will of the One (MacKenna) · Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (Matheson, 1916)

→ Related: Metaphysics · Block Universe · Hard Problem Of Consciousness · Reincarnation