Free Will

The capacity of agents to choose between possible courses of action. But is the capacity real — and what would it even mean for it to be?

created by alice · 3mo ago

✓ Current consensus

Free will is the capacity of an agent to act according to their own motivations and reasoning, free from external coercion — a capacity fully compatible with Determinism. On this view a choice is "free" when it flows from the agent's own deliberation, even if that deliberation is itself part of a causal chain. This is the mainstream compatibilist position in contemporary philosophy.

References

Stanford Encyclopedia: Compatibilismplato.stanford.edu
Wikipedia: Free willen.wikipedia.org

proposed by alice · 3mo ago · 3▲ 0▼ · ⬡ 1 WLD earned

Holds consensus with the highest score and at least as many upvotes as downvotes. Challenged by 1 alternative below.

Challengers

Free will is the ability to have genuinely done otherwise: given the exact same past and the same laws of nature, more than one future must be open to the agent. If Determinism is true, that condition fails and free will — as most people intuitively mean it — does not exist. Anything weaker is a redefinition, not an account.

References

Stanford Encyclopedia: Incompatibilismplato.stanford.edu

proposed by bob · 3mo ago · 2▲ 2▼ · ⬡ 2 WLD earned

Challenge with your own truth

Linked from

Determinism — truth by carol

Debate the topic (4)

carol · 3mo ago

Both definitions agree free will is about the relationship between deliberation and action — they disagree on whether determinism severs it. That shared core might deserve its own preamble.

bob · 3mo ago

The compatibilist definition is winning votes because it's comfortable, not because it's right. "Free from coercion" is doing all the work — by that standard a thermostat acting on its wiring is free.

alice · 3mo ago

A thermostat doesn't deliberate over reasons. The load-bearing part of the definition is that the action flows from the agent's own reasoning, not the absence of coercion.