Libertarians about free will believe that there is an important kind of freedom of will that we can possess that is incompatible with determinism and satisfies the following conditions: (i) at some points in our lives we face a genuinely open future, with forking paths into that future, either of which we may choose, and (ii) at these crucial times, it is âup to usâ, and no one and nothing else, which of these possible paths into the future will be chosen.
I will be defending such a libertarian and incompatibilist view of free will in this debate. Many thinkers believe that a free will of the kind libertarians defendâa free will that is not compatible with determinismâis not even possible or intelligible. It is not a kind of freedom, they argue, we could have. This worry has a long history and is related to an ancient dilemma: If free will is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either. Arguments have been made since the time of the ancient Stoics that undetermined events would occur spontaneously and hence could not be controlled by agents in the way that free and responsible actions would require.
If, for example, a choice occurred by virtue of some undetermined quantum events in oneâs brain, it would seem to be a fluke or accident rather than a responsible choice. Undetermined events occurring in brains or bodies, it is commonly argued, would not seem to enhance our freedom and control over, and hence responsibility for, actions but rather to diminish freedom, control and responsibility. Arguments such as these and many others have led to often-repeated charges throughout history that undetermined choices or actions, such as a libertarian free will would require, would be âarbitraryâ, ârandomâ, âirrationalâ, âuncontrolledâ, âmere matters of luckâ or âchanceâ and hence could not be free and responsible actions at all.
In response, libertarians about free will throughout history have often appealed to special and unusual forms of agency or causation to explain undetermined free actions, and their opponents have cried magic or mystery. Indeterminism might provide âcausal gapsâ in nature, libertarians frequently reasoned, but that was only a negative condition for free will. Some special form of agency or causation was needed that went beyond familiar modes of causation in the natural order to âfillâ those causal gaps in nature left by indeterminism. And thus we had historical appeals to âextra factors,â such as noumenal selves outside space and time (e.g., Immanuel Kant), or immaterial minds (e.g., Rene Descartes) or uncaused causes, nonevent agent causes or prime movers unmoved that might account for an otherwise undetermined free will.
Tempting ways to think, to be sure. But such traditional ways of thinking have also prompted charges by compatibilists and free will skeptics and many other modern critics of libertarian free will. These critics argue that one cannot make sense of an undetermined free will without appealing to magical or mysterious forms of agency that have no place in the modern scientific picture of the world and of human beings.
Friedrich Nietzsche summed up this prevailing modern skepticism in his inimitable prose when he said that such a traditional notion of freedom of the will that would underwrite an ultimate responsibility for our actions and require that one somehow be an undetermined âcause of oneselfâ was âthe best self-contradiction that has been conceived so farâ by the human mind (1989, §17.8).
I agree that a traditional idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism is likely to appear utterly mysterious and unintelligible in a modern context unless we learn to think about it in new ways. Hence my long struggle in attempting to defend and make sense of such an idea of free will without reducing it to mere chance, on the one hand, or to mystery, on the other. Yet the struggle seemed worth the effort. For, like many another issue of modernity, the question is whether something of this traditional idea of free will in what Nietzsche called âthe superlative metaphysical senseâ can be retrieved from the dissolving acids of modern science and secular learning. Or would it become, along with other aspects of our self-image, yet another victim of the âdisenchantmentsâ of modernity?
Yet I came to realize that any retrieval of this idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism would be no simple matter, if it were possible at all. Such a retrieval would require answering not one question but a whole host of questions. And it would require rethinking the relations of many different and related notions: agency, choice, mind, action, selfhood, will, control, responsibility, power and many others. 2 I will be addressing many of these questions and topics here, beginning with the following central question in contemporary debates about free will.
