Free, or Only Caused

Think of two ways your arm can go up. In the first, you decide to raise it — a free action. In the second, a gust of wind lifts it for you — not up to you at all. The difference feels obvious.

Here is the puzzle. Even your decision has causes — your mood, your reasons, what you ate for breakfast. Some people say having causes makes a choice unfree. Others say a choice is free as long as it comes from you and no one is forcing you. This folio is about that disagreement.

Determinism is the claim that every event, including every human choice, is the necessary result of earlier causes acting under the laws of nature. If it is true, then in principle your choices were fixed long before you made them.

That raises the free-will problem, and three answers divide the field. Hard determinism says determinism is true and so no choice is free. Libertarianism says we truly are free, so determinism must be false for human action. Compatibilism says both can hold at once — a choice is free when it flows from your own desires without compulsion, even if those desires were themselves caused.

The dispute turns on the phrase could have done otherwise. An incompatibilist argues that under determinism, given the past and the laws, you could not have done otherwise — so you are neither free nor responsible. Compatibilists read the phrase conditionally: to say you could have done otherwise is to say you would have, had you chosen differently — and that conditional can hold even in a determined world.

Harry Frankfurt sharpened the case with the willing addict, who takes the drug and also wants to want it. He acts on a desire he endorses, so his act is free in the sense that matters — while the unwilling addict, dragged by a craving he disowns, is not. Freedom becomes a matter of inner structure, not the absence of causes.

You raise your hand because you want to answer. That was your choice. But if someone grabs your arm and lifts it for you, that is not your choice. A choice is yours when you do what you want.

Almost everything has a cause. The wind moved the leaf. You wanted the answer, so your hand went up. A choice can have a cause and still be yours.

The strongest incompatibilist argument is van Inwagen's Consequence Argument: if determinism holds, our acts are consequences of the laws of nature and the remote past; but those are not up to us, and neither are their consequences; so our acts are not up to us. Compatibilists reply by separating leeway freedom — having alternative possibilities — from sourcehood freedom — being the true origin of the act — and locate responsibility in the second.

Frankfurt-style cases press further: one can imagine an agent who could not have done otherwise yet acts on his own reasons and seems fully responsible — hinting that alternative possibilities were never the point. The worry cuts back, though, in Pereboom's manipulation argument: if a covertly manipulated agent is unfree, and manipulation shades by degrees into ordinary determination, then determinism may erode responsibility after all.

Libertarianism owes an account of how an undetermined choice escapes mere randomness — the luck objection: if a decision is not settled by the agent's reasons, what makes it hers rather than a chance event? Event-causal libertarians (Kane) place freedom in indeterministic 'self-forming actions'; agent-causal theorists (O'Connor, Clarke) posit a substance's irreducible power to cause; each is charged with obscurity or with luck.

Galen Strawson's Basic Argument threatens every side: to be truly responsible for an act you must be responsible for the character it flows from, which needs an earlier act of self-making, and so on without end — so ultimate responsibility is impossible, determinism or not. Most philosophers now accept some compatibilism about the freedom worth wanting, while disagreeing sharply about desert, punishment, and whether indeterminism could add anything at all.