Free Will

Free will is the capacity to make choices and to act on those choices. Most of us are convinced that we have this capacity because we know, or think we know, that when faced with a choice between one action and another, it is up to us to decide. We decide what to do, and we act on that decision. Had we decided otherwise, we would have done otherwise. Thus, we have free will. Or so it certainly seems.

The problem is that our conviction that we have free will does not fit together with other things we think we know. For instance, either everything that happens—every event—is a necessary consequence of previous events and the laws of nature, or not everything that happens is a necessary consequence of previous events and the laws of nature. Call the first possibility “determinism” and the second “indeterminism.” We know that one of these two must be true; there are no other alternatives. If the first is true, then everything we do, including every decision we make, is a necessary consequence of previous events and the laws of nature. If so, we do not have free will after all because we cannot do anything other than what we actually do. On the other hand, if not everything is a necessary consequence of previous events, then some of the things we do might have no antecedents—they just happen for no reason at all. Yet if a decision we make or an act we perform just happens for no reason, then there is no reason to say that it is our decision or our action. It is not up to us in the sense required for free will. Again, we do not have free will. Since one of these alternatives must be true, and since we do not have free will on either alternative, the only conclusion we can draw is that we are not free. We may fervently believe that we are, but if we do, we are sadly mistaken.

A response might be that as long as we believe that we have free will, then it does not really matter that at some “deeper” level we suspect that we are not free. Our commonsense belief in free will works well enough for everyday purposes, so why not leave it at that?

This sounds like a good way to sidestep the problem, but it immediately collides with another commonsense idea, that is, that moral responsibility implies free choice. We all believe that we are morally responsible for what we do only if we could have done otherwise had we chosen to do so. But if we cannot do otherwise, if we are not, in a deep sense, free to choose and free to act on our decisions, then in what sense are we morally responsible? And if we are not morally responsible, how can we be properly blamed or praised for what we do? Without freedom, the notion of moral responsibility and all that goes with it seems pointless. So it looks like we are in a tight spot. On one hand, we believe that we have free will, we believe that we are morally responsible, and we believe that either determinism or indeterminism is true. On the other hand, it seems impossible that all three of these beliefs are correct. We have to give up something. What should it be?

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