Free will

In philosophy, free will is the power of human beings to choose certain actions, uninfluenced by coercion of any sort, when numerous other options are simultaneously possible. Philosophers have debated the issue of whether humans truly possess free will since the era of antiquity. Some argue that humans act entirely freely, while others assert that all human action is caused by prior conditions that could have resulted in no other way and is therefore not free, a concept known as determinism. The relationship between free will and determinism continues to occupy philosophers into the twenty-first century.

Definitions of Free Will

Throughout its history, the concept of free will has acquired a broad range of definitions from many diverse philosophers around the world in nearly every era. The simplest description of free will, as espoused by such thinkers as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, is that it is the ability to choose an action to satisfy a desire. But modern philosophy has mostly rejected this definition on the grounds that nonhuman animals also act on their wants but lack the intelligence to consider their actions as free choices.

A more complex view of free will, one that has existed in different forms since the time of Plato in ancient Greece, is that the ability of humans to choose actions flows from the interplay between their animal desires and intellects. This means that people's actions are free when they have intelligently determined the best decision to make in any situation, even if their choices conflict with what they truly want, their animal desires. By conquering their basic instincts to make rational, informed decisions, humans have exercised free will. This definition more clearly separates humans from supposedly less intelligent animals.

In 1982, the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt built upon this idea with his own definition of free will that even more heavily relied upon the constant tension between humans' animal desires and intelligence. Frankfurt argued that free will is the choice people make between succumbing to their base impulses, or first-order desires, and acting on their higher intellectual arguments, or second-order desires. This tension could be manifested, for example, in a person who wishes to consume unhealthy food but who overcomes this first-order desire with the decision not to consume it out of health concerns, the second-order desire.

Both desires represent the person's true self. According to Frankfurt, the person choosing not to eat unhealthy food reflects the decision the person wanted to see take place in reality. Therefore, this was an exercise of free will. The person could just as easily have chosen to eat the unhealthy food, and this would also be considered free will, provided that the person was not coerced to eat it by any sort of craving or obsession. This leads into one of the most fundamental principles of the philosophical study of free will: the ability to do otherwise.

Challenges to Free Will

In its most rudimentary form, the concept of "the ability to do otherwise" posits that an action is free if the agent, the person or object with the power of decision, that performed it could have willfully chosen from any number of possible alternatives. To a certain faction of philosophers, this ability—along with the idea of free will in general—clashes with the related philosophical school of determinism. This concept proposes that all actions, human and otherwise, are caused only by events that preceded them and that all future actions have already been destined to occur. Those who believe that determinism naturally opposes free will are called incompatibilists.

From an incompatible determinist's perspective, for example, the existence of a person's nature, with all its inherent preferences and dislikes, could be considered a preceding event that will dictate all the person's future actions. This is based simply on the principle that people must always act in accordance with their natures. Therefore, if people are constrained to act only as the bounds of their natures allow them, they cannot choose otherwise and do not possess free will.

In addition to the purely philosophical notion of determinism, another challenge to the idea of humans' free will throughout history has been the theological argument for the existence of God. According to the traditional Christian view, God is the all-powerful, all-knowing being who created the world exactly as it is and sustains all life upon it, including that of humans. In this case, incompatible determinists argue that God's omnipotence cannot coexist with humans having free will. If God knows what people will do, the choices they make cannot be free.

Other philosophers called compatibilists assert that God can exercise power over humans while still allowing them free will. Compatibilists credit God with having made the world, serving as the source of all life upon it, and determining everything that will happen in its future. They also believe that in so doing, however, God simultaneously granted humans the free will to control their own lives. The compatibilist view of this seeming contradiction, dating to medieval times and supported by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, is that humans tend to choose actions that drive the world toward the goodness of God. Therefore, in this way, people have exercised their free will to bring about God's determined plan for the world.

Believers of compatibilism have differing views of secular determinism as well. Compatibilism challenges the incompatibilist argument asserting that because the future flows from the past, and no one can change the past, the future has therefore been decided and cannot be undone. Compatibilism has offered several responses to this.

One states although the past cannot be changed, people can freely choose any action they want. This is because their pasts would have been different to allow for the choice. Another response asserts what is known as the Garden of Forking Paths model. This suggests that as in a singular path that breaks off into numerous snaking pathways, so too are humans free to choose any number of futures from their singular pasts. Such arguments for and against human free will—begun in past millennia—continue into the modern era.

Bibliography

"Free Will." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 Nov. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

Hoefer, Carl. "Causal Determinism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 23 Jan. 2003. Web. 20 Jan. 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

McKenna, Michael. "Compatibilism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 26 Apr. 2004. Web. 20 Jan. 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

O'Connor, Timothy. "Free Will." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 7 Jan. 2002. Web. 20 Jan. 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/