Free will


Free will is generally understood as the capacity or ability of people to choose between different possible courses of action, exercise control over their actions in a way that is necessary for moral responsibility, or be the ultimate source or originator of their actions. There are different theories as to its nature, and these aspects are often emphasized differently depending on philosophical tradition, with debates focusing on whether and how such freedom can coexist with physical determinism, divine foreknowledge, and other constraints.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility and moral desert, praise, culpability, and other judgements that can logically apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists and the implications of whether it exists or not constitute some of the longest-running debates of philosophy.
Some philosophers and thinkers conceive of free will as the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. However, determinism suggests that the natural world is governed by cause-and-effect relationships, and only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will. Ancient Greek philosophy identified this issue, which remains a major focus of philosophical debate to this day. The view that posits free will as incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism and hard determinism or hard incompatibilism. Another incompatibilist position is illusionism or hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also indeterminism to be incompatible with free will and thus free will to be impossible regardless of the metaphysical truth of determinism.
In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilist philosophers even hold that determinism is actually necessary for the existence of free will and agency, on the grounds that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out. In modern philosophy, compatibilists make up the majority of thinkers, and compatibilists generally consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs. determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what "free will" means and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatibilists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will simply if, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Many contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one's behavior in a way that is responsive to reason or potentially sanctionable. There are still further different conceptions of free will, each with their own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of physical determinism a threat to the possibility of free will.

History of free will

The problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature. The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle and Epictetus : "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them". According to Susanne Bobzien, the notion of incompatibilist free will is perhaps first identified in the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias : "what makes us have control over things is the fact that we are causally undetermined in our decision and thus can freely decide between doing/choosing or not doing/choosing them".
The term "free will" was introduced by Christian philosophy. It has traditionally meant lack of necessity in human will, so that "the will is free" meant "the will does not have to be such as it is". This requirement was universally embraced by both incompatibilists and compatibilists.

Western philosophy

The underlying questions are whether we possess the control over our actions we feel we have, and if so, what sort or amount of control do we exercise over our voluntary behavior. These ancient philosophical problems predate the early Greek stoics, and some modern philosophers still lament the lack of progress over all these centuries.
On one hand, humans have a strong sense of freedom, agency, and self-determination, which leads to a natural belief in free will and a sense of self. On the other hand, an intuitive feeling of free will could be mistaken.
It is difficult to reconcile the intuitive evidence that conscious decisions are causally effective with the view that the physical world can be explained entirely by physical law. The conflict between intuitively felt freedom and natural law arises when either causal closure or physical determinism is asserted. With causal closure, no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain, and with physical determinism, the future is determined entirely by preceding events.
The puzzle of reconciling 'free will' with a deterministic universe is known as the problem of free will or sometimes referred to as the dilemma of determinism. This dilemma leads to a moral dilemma as well: the question of how to assign responsibility for actions if they are caused entirely by past events.
Compatibilists maintain that mental reality is not of itself causally effective. Classical compatibilists have addressed the dilemma of free will by arguing that free will holds as long as humans are not externally constrained or coerced. Modern compatibilists make a distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action, that is, separating freedom of choice from the freedom to enact it. Given that humans all experience a sense of free will, some modern compatibilists think it is necessary to accommodate this intuition. Compatibilists often associate freedom of will with the ability to make rational decisions.
A different approach to the dilemma is that of incompatibilists, namely, that if the world is deterministic, then our feeling that we are free to choose an action is simply an illusion. Metaphysical libertarianism is the form of incompatibilism which posits that determinism is false and free will is possible. This view is associated with non-materialist constructions, including both traditional dualism, as well as models supporting more minimal criteria; such as the ability to consciously veto an action or competing desire. Yet even with physical indeterminism, arguments have been made against libertarianism in that it is difficult to assign Origination.
Free will here is predominantly treated with respect to physical determinism in the strict sense of nomological determinism, although other forms of determinism are also relevant to free will. For example, logical and theological determinism challenge metaphysical libertarianism with ideas of destiny and fate, and biological, cultural and psychological determinism feed the development of compatibilist models. Separate classes of compatibilism and incompatibilism may even be formed to represent these.
Below are the classic arguments bearing upon the dilemma and its underpinnings.

Incompatibilism

Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. In contrast, "metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true. Another view is that of "hard incompatibilists", who hold that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism.
Traditional arguments for incompatibilism are based on an "intuition pump": if a person is like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot, then people must not have free will. This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.
Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain". Incompatibilism is key to the idealist theory of free will. Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that to have free will, an agent must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of their actions. They must be causa sui, in the traditional phrase. Being responsible for one's choices is the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if a person has free will, then they are the ultimate cause of their actions. If determinism is true, then all of a person's choices are caused by events and facts outside their control. So, if everything someone does is caused by events and facts outside their control, then they cannot be the ultimate cause of their actions. Therefore, they cannot have free will. This argument has also been challenged by compatibilist philosophers.
A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the consequences of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the consequence argument. Peter van Inwagen remarks that C. D. Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.
The difficulty of this argument for some compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature, or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider". David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are committed only to the power to do something otherwise if different circumstances had actually obtained in the past.
Using T, F for "true" and "false" and ? for undecided, there are exactly nine positions regarding determinism/free will that consist of any two of these three possibilities:
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Determinism DTFTFTF???
Free will FWFTTF??FT?

Incompatibilism may occupy any of the nine positions except, or, which last corresponds to soft determinism. Position is hard determinism, and position is libertarianism. adds to the table the contention that D implies FW is untrue, and adds the contention that FW implies D is untrue. Position may be called hard incompatibilism if one interprets ? as meaning both concepts are of dubious value. Compatibilism itself may occupy any of the nine positions—that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. But compatibilism is most commonly understood to hold that some form of determinism is true and yet we have some form of free will, position.
File:Toppledominos.jpg|thumb|A domino's movement is determined completely by laws of physics.
Alex Rosenberg makes an extrapolation of physical determinism as inferred on the macroscopic scale by the behaviour of a set of dominoes to neural activity in the brain where "If the brain is nothing but a complex physical object whose states are as much governed by physical laws as any other physical object, then what goes on in our heads is as fixed and determined by prior events as what goes on when one domino topples another in a long row of them." Physical determinism is disputed by prominent interpretations of quantum mechanics, and while not necessarily representative of intrinsic indeterminism in nature, fundamental limits of precision in measurement are inherent in the uncertainty principle. But the relevance of such prospective indeterminate activity to free will is contested, even when chaos theory is introduced to magnify the effects of such microscopic events.
Below these positions are examined in more detail.