What Is Free Will?

In January of 2010, I launched the four-year Big Questions in Free Will project. The project’s main aim was to bring scientists—specifically, neuroscientists and social, cognitive, and developmental psychologists—together with philosophers to explore big questions about free will. The project also had a theological wing that explored questions about divine freedom and the possible bearing of a supreme being on human freedom.

​The TV series Closer to Truth took an interest in the project. A dozen of their episodes are about free will and feature participants from our project. The Closer to Truth group also made a 97-minute documentary on the project, available on YouTube. The last time I checked, its YouTube views totaled over 1.7 million.

Why is there all this interest in free will—not just among philosophers, scientists, and theologians, but among people in general? Why is free will sufficiently important or interesting to people that they tune in to a TV show?

​Part of the answer is found in the value people place on their will be up to them. To put it differently, people value having significant control over what they do. Although different people conceive of free will differently, almost everyone ties it to some kind of control over our actions. Reflect on your own conception or image of who you are, including how you function in the world, and how you live your daily life. If you are like most readers of this post, your self-conception, your view of yourself as a person, includes an assumption of free will. You take yourself to have significant control over what you do. You assume that what you do is often up to you. And even if you yourself balk at calling this an assumption that you have free will, at least it’s in the ballpark of free will.

​Philosophers traditionally link free will tightly to moral responsibility, asserting that a being that lacks free will (for example, a fly) isn’t morally responsible for anything and therefore never deserves blame or credit from a moral point of view. Probably, you take it to be an important fact about yourself that you are morally responsible for some of what you do. If so, and if these philosophers are right, free will is included in your self-image.

What is free will anyway? What does free will mean? What would our making a choice or decision of our own free will amount to? There are many competing ideas about this in the philosophical, scientific, and theological literature on free will. One way to proceed is to ask what kind of control over our behavior we would need for our conception of ourselves as morally responsible beings to be accurate. Is it enough that we are capable of making rational, well-informed decisions in the absence of undue pressure from others? If so, then it’s hard to deny that we make at least some decisions of our own free will.

Is something more required? Some people say that to make decisions of our own free will, alternative decisions need to be open to us in a very specific way that I will try to shed some light on. Sometimes you would have decided differently than you did if things had been a bit different. For example, if you had been in a slightly better mood, you might have decided to donate 20 dollars to a worthy cause instead of just 10. But this isn’t enough for the kind of openness of options in decision-making that some people say is necessary for deciding freely, what I call deep openness. What’s needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it actually was at the time—your mood, all your thoughts and feelings, your brain, your environment, and, indeed, the entire universe and its entire history. Having been able to make a different decision if things had been a bit different is one thing; having been able to have made a different decision without there being any prior difference at all is another thing, a more demanding or deeper thing. Hence the label deep openness.

Discussions of a conception of free will that requires deep openness for free decision-making can quickly get technical. I’ll try to avoid technicality here. Yesterday, George’s friends invited him to join them on a karaoke outing. George doesn’t care much for karaoke, but he likes hanging out with his friends. After giving the matter some thought, he decided to accept their invitation. Now, imagine that time (and the whole universe, actually) could be rewound in something like the way you rewind a movie you are watching on your favorite media player. And imagine that, after George makes his decision, time is rewound to a moment just before he decided to say yes. Everything is exactly the same as it was the first time through. But this time, what happens next – what happens when the “play” button is pressed – is that George decides to reject his friends’ invitation. This is a way to picture deep openness and the associated conception of having been able to decide otherwise. If George had deep openness when he made his decision, then if time could be rewound again and again for just a few moments and then played forward, he would make different decisions in some of the “replays.”

If free will does, indeed, depend on deep openness, then the jury is still out on whether we have free will. We simply don’t know enough about the brain to know whether we have or lack deep openness. But we can take comfort in the fact that we are capable of making rational, well-informed decisions in the absence of undue pressure from others. The kind of control that capacity involves may be enough to support our conception of ourselves as morally responsible beings. And if we’re morally responsible for some of what we do, we have free will, according to one prominent conception of free will.