Freedom of Action

The Concept of Freedom

When we use words such as freedom, we seem to have a number of related concepts in mind. Consider the following three:

• 1.
  Free agents are generally taken to possess a capacity to choose between various alternatives, or to have futures that are open.
• 2.
  Free agents are generally taken to have a particular sort of control or autonomy, which allows them to decide for themselves: You might suppose the future is not merely open, but it's up to you which actions you perform and hence which of those alternative futures really occur.
• 3.
  Freedom is often thought to ground our view that agents are the source of their own actions in a certain way: It allows us to attribute actions to agents in a way that is often said to ground an agent's responsibility for those actions.

Threats to Freedom

Various phenomena might be thought to threaten our freedom, but in recent years, the debate has focused almost solely on the potential threat from causal determinism: This is the theory that prior causal conditions, along with the laws of nature, causally determine all future events; that the future is fixed by the past and the laws of nature.

If we had a complete statement of all the facts about the universe at some moment in the past and a complete statement of all the laws of nature, then the theory of causal determinism asserts that these statements together would entail every true statement about present and future facts.

The Threat of Determinism

While many people find it intuitive to suppose that if determinism is true, then human action cannot be free, any direct inference from determinism to a lack of freedom would be too quick. Some further assumptions are required to generate this threat. These assumptions tend to rest on claims about the relation between freedom and alternative possibilities.

If determinism is really to threaten freedom, then we need to accept the following claims:

• 1.
  Freedom requires alternative possibilities.
• 2.
  Alternative possibilities are ruled out by determinism.

These assumptions may instead be stated in terms of an ability to do otherwise:

• 1.
  Freedom requires the ability to do otherwise.
• 2.
  The ability to do otherwise is ruled out by determinism.

Given the plausibility of these further claims, along with the plausibility of determinism and our natural conviction that our actions are free, the problem might be stated as a dilemma. We have the following, seemingly plausible claims, which cannot all be true at

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