What is Free Will?
Philosophers have argued about the nature and the very existence of free will for centuries. Today, many scientists and scientifically minded commentators are skeptical that it exists, especially when it is understood to require the ability to choose between alternative possibilities. If the laws of physics govern everything that happens, they argue, then how can our choices be free? Believers in free will must be misled by habit, sentiment, or religious doctrine. Why Free Will Is Real defies scientific orthodoxy and presents a bold new defense of free will in the same naturalistic terms that are usually deployed against it. According to Christian List, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy, when we discover free will in its proper context, acknowledging that free will is real is not just scientifically respectable; it is indispensable for explaining our world. Here is a brief excerpt outlining List’s ideas about what free will is.
Free will, on a first gloss, is an agent’s capacity to choose and control his or her own actions. Sometimes this is also called “freedom of action” or “freedom of choice,” but I will use “free will” as the conventional term. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, it is “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.” Common sense suggests that, as human beings, we all have this capacity. When you go to a café, it is your free choice to have one kind of drink (say, coffee) rather than another (say, tea or orange juice). Similarly, if you have time tonight, it will be your free choice whether to switch on the radio or not. More significantly, we think that our own free will is involved, at least to some extent, when we choose a partner, a career, or a travel destination. In each of these examples, there is a sense in which our choice is at least partly up to us, and we could have chosen otherwise. Of course, our choices are often constrained by our means and resources, our social context, and our history and commitments. Choosing otherwise may be costly, sometimes too costly to be feasible in practice. Think of the resident of an authoritarian country who considers criticizing the regime but then refrains from doing so for fear of retribution. Notwithstanding this, there is some leeway for free will in many situations. Even the most rigid circumstances leave our choices open at least in trivial matters: whether to sleep on our left side or our right, whether to walk a few additional steps, or whether to drink an additional glass of water. Of course, we would like our freedom to go well beyond such trivial choices.
To get a feel for the idea of free will, try the following. In a few seconds’ time, perform a specific movement — say, the movement of a finger, a leg, or an eyelid. Decide which movement you wish to perform. And now do it. Were you able to exercise your free will? Common sense suggests that you were. All of the following seem to be true:
• You intended to perform the movement.
• You could have chosen a different movement, or no movement at all.
• What you did was under your control.
However trivial this little experiment may seem, it illustrates free will in a nutshell. Free will can be understood as a three-part capacity, as has been noted by other philosophers. It consists of
• the capacity to act intentionally;
• the capacity to choose between alternative possibilities; and
• the capacity to control one’s actions.
I will make this more precise soon. But we can already observe one thing. When we go about our daily lives, we can’t suppress the powerful intuition that we all have this capacity. In the absence of severe medical or psychological impairments, the three-part capacity I have described is central to our status as agents. We have this capacity even if its exercise is sometimes constrained by the environment.
Psychological studies document the robustness of our intuitions about free will. A recent study has found that children as young as four to six years of age already have free-will intuitions resembling those of adults. By age four they recognize their own and others’ ability to choose between alternative possibilities in the absence of certain physical constraints — that is, when they choose one particular action, they could also have chosen another. By age six, children even recognize a person’s freedom to act against his or her own stated desires.
And although free-will intuitions in adults are not always consistent, there is some tentative evidence suggesting that part of our commonsense understanding of free will is shared across different cultures. In a study with participants from Colombia, Hong Kong, India, and the United States, the majority expressed intuitions consistent with what philosophers call a “libertarian” understanding of free will. Libertarianism is the view that free will requires alternative possibilities, and that the world actually offers such alternative possibilities: we do indeed have genuine choices. Another study adds further nuance to this by showing that preschool-age children in both the United States and Nepal recognize the existence of freedom of choice, but that Nepalese children take social obligations to place greater constraints on action than American children do. Nadia Chernyak and colleagues conclude that “basic notions of free choice are universal,” but “recognitions of social obligations as constraints on action may be culturally learned.”
The bottom line is that the picture of the human agent as a free chooser, capable of exercising control over his or her actions, is as common as it is deeply entrenched in our thinking.
