Free will

Free will is the notion that human beings are able to choose between different courses of action in any given circumstance, whereas its opposite, determinism, claims that all our mental states and actions are made necessary by preceding causes, and we are therefore not free at all, although we may have the illusion thereof.

All of us have subjectively experienced being torn between doing one thing or another –what we would like to do, what we think we should do, or what we think others would appreciate our doing, and so on. We also assume that the decision is up to us, that we are free to do one thing or another, and others heap blame or praise on us assuming the same thing. This is what is meant by free will –the belief that whatever we may have done in actual fact, could have been otherwise had we decided on another course of action, and that before the action itself we were free to choose between at least two alternatives.

At the same time, we realise that the world works in ways that can be understood because there are law-like processes that can be deciphered, and that allow us to explain what happens around us. The principle operating here is that events are caused, not random, a principle that is known as determinism.

If the world is deterministic, that is it responds to patterns of cause and effect, then human actions are either an exception to this rule, or our feeling that we are free to decide what we like is simply an illusion.

We have trouble believing all our actions are determined, and that our sense of freedom is totally illusory, but we also have problems thinking that our actions are totally outside the realm of causality. The latter position would make our actions random, and this is not a palatable idea for most of us...

This is what in philosophy is known as the problem of free will (or sometimes referred to by its flip-side as the dilemma of determinism), and it is a problem because whichever road one chooses to go down seems to lead to conclusions that we would have trouble accepting.

Incompatibilism

One way out of the dilemma, of course, is simply to accept the fact that human beings are not free, a position termed hard determinism or incompatibilism. To accept this position is to accept that our actions are caused by things other than our will –that actions do not originate in volition (willing), but rather in forces that determine its disposition in one way or another. Hard determinism, however, insofar as it accepts a causal chain of events, means our present actions are determined in the past, and is considered to wholly destroy any notion of moral responsibility. Freedom is considered a necessary component of responsiblity, for why should anyone be blamed or praised for actions that could not have been otherwise?

Compatibilism

Another way out of the dilemma, has been to soften the requirements of what it means to be free. This position, also known as soft determinism, accepts the fact that actions have causes, but argues that this does not mean we are not free. I am still free, it is argued, if at the time in which I acted, and did whatever I did, I could have chosen to do otherwise, in the sense that nothing would have impeded me from doing so. That is to say, while my motives may strongly determine a course of action, they neither compel me to act in this way, nor do they stop me from doing something else if I choose to do so. Of course our freedom, understood in this way, is not the rather more arbitrary freedom we subjectively experience. It is only freedom in the sense of nothing would have stopped me if..., but one wonders just how meaningful the if has become at this stage.

Libertarianism

If compatibilism's if I had chosen to do otherwise is considered meaningless once one accepts the determination of actions, then others have argued that the only way out of the dilemma is to accept that determinism is false, or that at the very least, human actions are a special case and stand outside the requirements of a deterministic universe. At any given time, in this view, one is indeed free to choose between alternative courses of action. Some have argued that this is not a unique phenomenon, insofar as quantum reality has already shown that determinism does not hold across the board. Of course this is precisely the door that opens onto the randomness of human behaviour, which is also foreign to human experience. And if human behaviour is random, then how could we make any sense of the notion of moral responsibility. Would any of us be willing, paraphrasing Einstein, to accept that God plays dice with human actions?