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Main article: Volition

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and cause, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic. The various philosophical positions taken differ on whether all events are determined or not — determinism versus indeterminism — and also on whether freedom can coexist with determinism or not — compatibilism versus incompatibilism. So, for instance, 'hard determinists' argue that the universe is deterministic, and that this makes free will impossible.


In Western philosophy



  1. Is determinism true? and
  2. Does free will exist?

Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are causally necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature. Neither determinism nor its opposite, non-determinism, are positions in the debate about free will.[1]

Compatibilism is the view that the existence of free will and the truth of determinism are compatible with each other; this is opposed to incompatibilism which is the view that there is no way to reconcile a belief in a deterministic universe with a belief in free will.[2] Hard determinism is the version of incompatibilism that accepts the truth of determinism and rejects the idea that humans have any free will.[3] Metaphysical libertarianism topically agrees with hard determinism only in rejecting compatibilism. Because libertarians accept the existence of free will, they must reject determinism and argue for some version of indeterminism that is compatible with freedom.[4]


Main article: Determinism




Theological determinism is the thesis that there is a God who determines all that humans will do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience[7] or by decreeing their actions in advance.[8] The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free, if there is a being who has determined them for us ahead of time.

Biological determinism is the idea that all behavior, belief, and desire are fixed by our genetic endowment. There are other theses on determinism, including cultural determinism and psychological determinism.[5] Combinations and syntheses of determinist theses, e.g. bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.


Main article: Compatibilism and incompatibilism
Thomas Hobbes (portrait)

Thomas Hobbes was a classical compatibilist.

Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. A common strategy employed by "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, is to claim that a person acts freely only when the person willed the act and the person could have done otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to the person and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe."[9] In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains".[10] To illustrate their position, compatibilists point to clear-cut cases of someone's free will being denied, through rape, murder, theft, or other forms of constraint. In these cases, free will is lacking not because the past is causally determining the future, but because the aggressor is overriding the victim's desires and preferences about his own actions. The aggressor is coercing the victim and, according to compatibilists, this is what overrides free will. Thus, they argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' choices are the results of their own desires and preferences, and are not overridden by some external (or internal) force.[9][10] To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.[1]





According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.[17] Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance.[18] More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.[1]


Paul Heinrich Dietrich Baron d&#039;Holbach

Baron d'Holbach was a hard determinist.






Libertarian incompatibilism

Main article: Libertarianism (metaphysics)

The other view under the heading of incompatiblism is metaphysical libertarianism. Libertarianism holds that free-will exists, which entails that the individual is able to take more than one possible course of actions under a given set of circumstances. Since determinism implies that there is only one possible future, it is not compatible with this conception of free-will, and must be false.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into supernatural theories and scientific or naturalistic theories. Supernatural theories hold that a non-physical mind or soul overrides physical causality, so that physical events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation. This approach is allied to mind-body dualism, and sometimes has a theological motivation.

Scientific explanations of libertarianism (described as "naturalistic") sometimes involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both sentient and non-sentient entities.[31]. Other naturalistic approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians. Free volition is regarded as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of indeterminism. An example of this kind of approach has been developed by Robert Kane.

Other views









Moral responsibility


Incompatibilists tend to think that determinism is at odds with moral responsibility. It seems impossible that one can hold someone responsible for an action that could be predicted from (potentially) the beginning of time. Hard determinists say "So much the worse for free will!" and discard the concept.[39] Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney, pleaded the innocence of his clients, Leopold and Loeb, by invoking such a notion of hard determinism.[40] During his summation, he declared:


Conversely, libertarians say "So much the worse for determinism!"[39] Daniel Dennett asks why anyone would care about whether someone had the property of responsibility and speculates that the idea of moral responsibility may be "a purely metaphysical hankering".[14] Jean-Paul Sartre argues that people sometimes avoid incrimination and responsibility by hiding behind determinism: "... we are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse".[41] However, the position that classifying such people as "base" or "dishonest" makes no difference to whether or not their actions are determined is quite as tenable.


Compatibilists argue, on the contrary, that determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Society cannot hold someone responsible unless his actions were determined by something. This argument can be traced back to David Hume. If indeterminism is true, then those events that are not determined are random. It is doubtful that one can praise or blame someone for performing an action generated spontaneously by his nervous system. Instead, one needs to show how the action stemmed from the person's desires and preferences—the person's character—before one can hold the person morally responsible.[10] Libertarians may reply that undetermined actions are not random at all, and that they result from a substantive will whose decisions are undetermined. This argument is considered unsatisfactory by compatibilists, for it just pushes the problem back a step. It also seems to involve some mysterious metaphysics, as well as the concept of ex nihilo nihil fit. Libertarians have responded by trying to clarify how undetermined will could be tied to robust agency.[42]

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans addresses the question of moral responsibility as follows: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"[43] In this view, individuals can still be dishonoured for their acts even though those acts were ultimately completely determined by God.



Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, researchers in the emerging field of neuroethics, argue, on the basis of such cases, that our current notion of moral responsibility is founded on libertarian (and dualist) intuitions.[47] They argue that cognitive neuroscience research is undermining these intuitions by showing that the brain is responsible for our actions, not only in cases of florid psychosis, but even in less obvious situations. For example, damage to the frontal lobe reduces the ability to weigh uncertain risks and make prudent decisions, and therefore leads to an increased likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime.[48] This is true not only of patients with damage to the frontal lobe due to accident or stroke, but also of adolescents, who show reduced frontal lobe activity compared to adults,[49] and even of children who are chronically neglected or mistreated.[50] In each case, the guilty party can be said to have less responsibility for his actions.[47] Greene and Cohen predict that, as such examples become more common and well known, jurors’ interpretations of free will and moral responsibility will move away from the intuitive libertarian notion which currently underpins them.


Another argument is that if determinism is true it makes no sense to speak of whether it is moral or not to hold people responsible for their actions. Whether or not it is moral the people involved in the process of holding them responsible(police, jailers, judges, jury, lawmakers) can't be said to have moral responsibility either and need not feel guilty for doing what was predetermined in throwing people in jail or sentencing them to die (unless they are predetermined to feel guilty). Retributive justice could be justified based solely on "nature", that people felt like getting retribution and it was predetermined for them to act together to deliver and carry out the sentence. By contrast if free will exists some people might have a freer will than others since free will does not mean absolute free will, and then there is a basis for considering some people less responsible.

In science

Many, but not all, arguments for or against free will make an assumption about the truth or falsehood of determinism. The scientific method holds out the promise of being able to turn such assumptions into fact. However, such facts would still need to be combined with philosophical considerations in order to amount to an argument for or against free will. For instance, if compatibilism is true, the truth of determinism would have no effect on the question of the existence of free will. On the other hand, a proof of determinism in conjunction with an argument for incompatibilism would add up to an argument against free will.


Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic,[51] and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories.[52] Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories can not resolve the question, whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Final Theory, and open to many different interpretations.[53][54]

Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics turns out to be the right one, one may still object that such indeterminism is confined to microscopic phenomena.[55] However, many macrosophic phenomena are based on quantum effects, for instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for anything like free will, when the laws of quantum mechanics are supposed to give a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles.[56]

There is also a further, more philosophical, objection. It has been argued that if an action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself means that free will is absent, since such action cannot be controllable by someone claiming to possess such free will.[57] If this argument is conjoined with incompatibilism, then it would follow that free will is impossible, since it would be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and these are the only options. If it is conjoined with compatibilism, on the other hand, it would mean that free will is only possible in a deterministic universe.



Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior.[59] The view of most researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories.[60][61][62] This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions.[How to reference and link to summary or text] Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, as long as behaviour responds to praise and blame.[63] Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.[64]


Bereitschaftspotenzial fig1

Typical recording of the readiness potential. Libet investigated whether this neural activity corresponded to the "felt intention" (or will) to move of experimental subjects.

It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making "machinery" at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether the readiness potential corresponded to the felt intention to move. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked her to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when she felt that she had the conscious will to move.[65]

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move.[65][66] Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of her will was only due to her retrospective perspective on the event. The interpretation of these findings has been criticized by Daniel Dennett, who argues that people will have to shift their attention from their intention to the clock, and that this introduces temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand.[67][68] Consistent with this argument, subsequent studies have shown that the exact numerical value varies depending on attention.[69][70] Despite the differences in the exact numerical value, however, the main finding has held.[71]

In a variation of this task, Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands, but also to decide which hand to move. In this case, the felt intention correlated much more closely with the "lateralized readiness potential" (LRP), an EEG component which measures the difference between left and right hemisphere brain activity. Haggard and Eimer argue that the feeling of conscious will therefore must follow the decision of which hand to move, since the LRP reflects the decision to lift a particular hand.[69]

Related experiments showed that neurostimulation could affect which hands people move, even though the experience of free will was intact. Ammon and Gandevia found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using transcranial magnetic stimulation in either the left or right hemisphere of the brain.[72] Right-handed people would normally choose to move their right hand 60% of the time, but when the right hemisphere was stimulated they would instead choose their left hand 80% of the time (recall that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere for the right). Despite the external influence on their decision-making, the subjects continued to report that they believed their choice of hand had been made freely. In a follow-up experiment, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues found similar results, but also noted that the transcranial magnetic stimulation must occur within 200 milliseconds, consistent with the time-course derived from the Libet experiments.[73]

Despite these findings, Libet himself does not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will—he points out that although the tendency to press a button may be building up for 500 milliseconds, the conscious will retains a right to veto that action in the last few milliseconds.[74] According to this model, unconscious impulses to perform a volitional act are open to suppression by the conscious efforts of the subject (sometimes referred to as "free won't"). A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond. Max Velmans argues however that "free won't" may turn out to need as much neural preparation as "free will".[75]

Neurology and psychiatry


For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary",[76] because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed.[76] People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics to some extent for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control which can be exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.[77]

In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviours without the intention of the subject. The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original).[78] This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.[79][80]


Also, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other compulsive behaviour, such as compulsive overeating and addiction, may be linked to a lack of free will. And only hints, or degrees, of this may be linked to a lack of totally free will.

Determinism and emergent behaviour

Main article: Emergence

In generative philosophy of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist.[83][84] However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behaviour from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist.[83][84] In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so will be simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.[85]


Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.[83]

Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will[86] Wegner summarizes empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:

  1. The first event immediately precedes the second event, and


Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference.[86][87] Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people will often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have in fact not caused, and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors that they did cause. The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, Wegner has asserted that his work informs only of the mechanism for perceptions of control, not for control itself.


Though free will is an illusion in a metaphysical sense, the individual perspective of the illusion has more effect in the specific behavior of the patient. At the base of many disorders lies the abnormally illusive perspective the patient has on free will. A person with bipolar disorder will have higher tendencies to drastic behaviors if his neuronal connections considering free will are appropriately formed relative to his specific form of bipolar disorder. A productive process in therapy may be to get the patient to question or understand his thought process regarding free will in a way that he had not done before, if in fact his specific thought process is a significant contributor to the problem.

In Eastern philosophy

In Hindu philosophy






In Buddhist philosophy



In Kashmir Shaivism





In other theology

Further information: Free will in theology


However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.[93] Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.[94]


The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness.[97] As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free."[98] Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent.[99]

See also


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  14. 14.0 14.1 14.2 Dennett, D., (1984) Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Bradford Books. ISBN 0-262-54042-8
  15. Watson, D. 1982. Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
  16. Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  17. 17.0 17.1 Dennett, D. (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03186-0
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  24. Sartre, J.P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, reprint 1993. New York:Washington Square Press. Sartre also provides a psychological version of the argument by claiming that if man's actions are not his own, he would be in bad faith.
  25. Fischer, R.M. (1994) The Metaphysics of Free Will, Oxford:Blackwell
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  96. Man and His Destiny
  99. Mackie, J.L. (1955) "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind, new series, vol. 64, pp. 200–212.
  100. Life is unpreditable get used to it article in New Scientist

Further reading

  • Epstein J.M. (1999). Agent Based Models and Generative Social Science. Complexity, IV (5).
  • Gazzaniga, M. & Steven, M.S. (2004) Free Will in the 21st Century: A Discussion of Neuroscience and Law, in Garland, B. (ed.) Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice, New York: Dana Press, ISBN 1932594043, pp51–70.
  • Goodenough, O.R. (2004) Responsibility and punishment, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences (Special Issue: Law and the Brain), 359, 1805–1809.
  • Hofstadter, Douglas. (2007) I Am A Strange Loop. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465030781
  • Muhm, Myriam (2004). Abolito il libero arbitrio - Colloquio con Wolf Singer. L'Espresso 19.08.2004
  • Velmans, Max (2003) How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains? Exeter: Imprint Academic ISBN 0907845-39-8.
  • Williams, Clifford (1980). Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.

External links

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