Free Will

Free will is described as the capacity for rational agents (namely humans) to choose one course of action over other possible alternatives. The main questions around Free Will are: (1) Do we have it? (2) If we do have it, to what extent? (3) If we do not have it, what are the alternatives? These questions have proven significant to moral philosophers because Free Will is often viewed as a precondition for moral responsibility.

Some philosophers, such as Rene Descartes and Jean Paul Sartre, have argued for the position of radical Free Will – that each agent is wholly free of influence, whether internal or external, when making choices. The antithesis of this position is that of Determinism, the idea that the present or future is effectively determined by the state of the past in conjunction with the basic laws of nature. In this view the human will is not exempted from the laws of natural causality and thus not “free” to self-determination.

There are some, however, who believe that the freedom of the will is in some sense compatible with Determinism in that the possibility still exists for agents to act otherwise. Because agents would necessarily act otherwise under varying natural conditions (including mental states), they are not destined for only one future.

Those who reject this definition of freedom generally fall into the incompatibilist camp, stating that in order for the will to be free there must be multiple futures available to the agent regardless of past events or present conditions. Whether determinist or indeterminist, many incompatibilists insist that mental features, such as personality and emotion, exert influence over the will. They hold that if these psychological functions did not play a role in decision making then the will would simply operate ungoverned, acting at random; it would be no more “free” in the conventional sense than if completely determined by natural forces. Furthermore, such a will would not be an appropriate locus of moral responsibility.

By this logic, then, in order for an agent to be held truly morally responsible, he or she must also be responsible for those personality traits which in some sense determine action. Philosopher Galen Strawson argues that one’s initial personality is invariably a product of a confluence of forces outside of one’s control (nature and nurture when one is an infant). Any personality, which subsequently arises must necessarily be determined (consciously or unconsciously) by the functions of this initial personality. It is thus impossible, according to Strawson, for any agent to be held ultimately responsible for any of his or her actions (he states we can still speak of proximate responsibility out of convention when referring to any one personality).

Prominent Free Will philosopher Robert Kane accepts Strawson’s premise that self-creation is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, but argues that aspects of each “subsequent personality” are not wholly determined by the former, but arise out of moments of intense internal conflict when strong desires and duties are competing for expression. In these moments when the agent is unaware of which desires or duties will “win out,” Kane argues there is in fact indeterminacy about the kind of personality that might subsequently emerge. In these “windows of indeterminacy” the agent is empowered to change herself, thus assuming greater moral responsibility for future behavior.