Free Will

Free will is normally contrasted with determinism. Determinism is the claim that our mental states, choices, and therefore acts are caused by preceding states of the world. Thus, although people might be complex objects, the future for any given person is fixed in precisely the same manner that the future state of any other object in the universe is fixed. The future is as unalterable as the past. Free will is then contrasted with this position such that a person is said to be free in this sense when the person is able to control his or her future—it is not fixed in the same way as is the person's past. Given the events of the past, he or she can choose what actions to take in the future. Past events might influence the person's decision or even make his or her actions obvious or inevitable in a weaker sense that he or she is bound to act one way or another. However, the person is in control of his or her actions and chooses his or her acts.

A great deal of the philosophical literature on freedom of the will is concerned with mapping a plausible version of compatabilism that squares the circle of causal determinism with regard to the universe (including humans as part of it) while making sense of the claim that humans genuinely have agency—that is, freedom of the will. Again, it is easiest to explain compatabilism in relation to its contrast, incompatabilism. Incompatabilists state that if determinism is true with regard to humans, then there is no such thing as moral responsibility and people are truly unfree. Incompatabilists who think that people are truly free because determinism is false are often called libertarians (though [Page 264]they must not be confused with political libertarians who think freedom is the only or fundamental value in society). Some incompatabilists accept determinism and believe moral responsibility and free will are sham concepts that do not really map to anything in the world.

Compatibilists maintain that the opposite of free will is acting under compulsion and so we often do act freely, even if our actions can be subsumed under normal causal laws. So they claim that moral responsibility is to be contrasted with acting under compulsion or being forced into acting one way rather than another. Moral responsibility on this view might simply be the response we have as social organisms to our own behavior. If we were not to hold people morally responsible for their actions and respond appropriately by shunning them (in early societies) or by jailing them or sanctioning them in other ways (in modern societies), they would not respond as they do. Their future actions are caused by past events, including the response of society to past transgressors of rules and laws, and what those transgressors expect the future response of society would be to such transgressions now. However, these causes lead transgressors to behave in ways preferable to others in society. Here moral responsibility is a concept that drives behavior, and the free will that people enjoy is their mental responses to the incentives they have to act in one way or another. People do choose whether to behave in one way rather than another, but their choice is still caused by their own responses to the environment they inhabit.

...