Is free will an illusion?
You feel like the author of your choices. The question is whether that feeling tracks anything real.
- Reading time
- 6 min
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Branch
- Free will
- First posed
- Ancient Greece; sharpened by Baruch Spinoza and David Hume
The question
Right now you could stop reading this sentence. You could close the page, stand up, or keep going. It certainly seems that the choice is yours, that several futures are open and you will settle which one happens.
Now consider what you are made of. Your brain is a physical system of roughly 86 billion neurons, and each one fires or stays quiet according to chemistry and electricity. Your next thought will come out of that machinery, shaped by your genes, your upbringing, what you ate this morning and the mood you woke up in. None of those were chosen by you, and you did not choose the self that would do the choosing.
So which is it? Are you an agent who genuinely decides, or a very complicated event that experiences itself as deciding? The question of free will is whether the first picture can survive contact with the second.
It helps to be precise about what is being asked. Nobody doubts that you often do what you want. The deeper question is whether you could ever have done otherwise, given everything about you and the world at that moment, and whether you are ultimately the source of what you do rather than the last link in a chain that began long before you were born.
“Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will (1839), as commonly paraphrased
Why it matters
Almost everything in ordinary life assumes an answer. Praise and blame, pride and guilt, gratitude and resentment all treat people as the authors of their actions. Criminal law separates the person who chose to harm from the person who could not help it. If free will is an illusion, much of this needs rethinking, or at least a better justification.
The question is also personal. People report that believing in free will feels like a precondition for effort: why try if the outcome was always fixed? Others report the opposite, that giving up the idea of ultimate authorship made them kinder, both to others and to themselves.
Key terms
- Free willThe capacity to choose between options in a way that makes us the real authors of our actions and responsible for them. What exactly that requires is the central dispute.
- DeterminismThe thesis that the state of the world at any moment, together with the laws of nature, fixes everything that happens afterwards.
- Libertarianism (free will)The view that we have free will and that free will requires indeterminism, so determinism is false. Unrelated to political libertarianism.
- Hard determinismThe view that determinism is true and that it rules out free will and, on most versions, deserved praise and blame.
- CompatibilismThe view that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Freedom, on this view, is acting on your own reasons and desires without compulsion, not escaping the laws of nature.
- Principle of alternative possibilitiesThe principle that a person is morally responsible for an action only if they could have done otherwise. Frankfurt cases are designed to refute it.
The positions
Libertarian free will
We really are free. At the moment of choice, more than one future is genuinely possible, and we settle which one happens. The universe is not fully determined, at least where minds are concerned.
Hard determinism
Every event, including every choice, follows from prior causes. Since you could never have done otherwise, free will in the sense that matters is an illusion.
Compatibilism
Free will and determinism can both be true. Being free means acting from your own reasons without coercion, not escaping causation altogether.
Illusionism
We are not free in the deep sense, but the belief that we are is useful and perhaps should be kept in place.
Arguments and objections
Libertarian free will
- Best argument
- Our experience of deliberating is as direct as any evidence we have. When you weigh two options, you are not watching a result being calculated; you are making it. If we abandon this, we abandon the basis of responsibility, and there is no scientific finding that actually proves the future is fixed. Modern physics itself contains indeterminism at the quantum level, so the door is not closed.
- Strongest objection
- Randomness is not freedom. If your choice was not determined by your reasons, character and history, then something else settled it, and an uncaused event inside your head is chance, not control. This is the so-called luck objection: the more a choice escapes causation, the less it seems to be yours.
- The reply
- Agent-causal libertarians answer that the agent, as a whole persisting being, causes the decision, not a prior event. The choice is neither random nor fixed by earlier states; it is made by you. Critics reply that this names the mystery rather than solving it.
Hard determinism
- Best argument
- Science has explained ever more of the world through causes and laws, and the brain is part of the world. No neuron fires without a physical reason. Your desires come from your genes and history, which you did not choose. To be ultimately responsible for a choice you would have to have chosen the self that made it, which is impossible. So ultimate responsibility is impossible too.
- Strongest objection
- The view seems to undermine itself and our practices. If nobody deserves blame, it is hard to justify punishment, gratitude, or even the claim that hard determinists should be believed. And it may overreach: quantum physics suggests the universe is not strictly deterministic after all.
- The reply
- Many modern defenders call themselves hard incompatibilists. They grant that indeterminism may be real but argue that randomness would not give us control either. Without free will, they say, we can still restrain dangerous people for protection, as we quarantine the sick, while dropping the idea that anyone deserves to suffer.
Compatibilism
- Best argument
- Think about what we actually check when we hold someone responsible: did they act knowingly, on purpose, without a gun to their head, from their own values? None of that requires an uncaused event in the brain. A choice caused by your reasons is not less yours; it is exactly what makes it yours. This is the freedom worth wanting.
- Strongest objection
- Critics call this a verbal trick. If the past and the laws of nature fixed your act, you could not have done otherwise in any deep sense, and redefining freedom does not change that. Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument puts it formally: if you have no control over the past or the laws, and they entail your action, you have no control over your action.
- The reply
- Compatibilists answer that 'could have done otherwise' has a sensible meaning they can keep: you would have acted differently if your reasons had been different. And Frankfurt cases suggest that being able to do otherwise may not be what responsibility needs in the first place.
Illusionism
- Best argument
- The libertarian kind of freedom does not exist, yet a world in which everyone believed that would lose something valuable: a sense of dignity, effort and accountability. Saul Smilansky argues that illusion here plays a positive role, and that we should be cautious about dismantling it.
- Strongest objection
- Deliberately maintaining a belief you think is false sits uneasily with honesty, and it treats people as subjects to be managed rather than adults who can handle the truth.
- The reply
- Illusionists answer that the alternative risks real harm, and that the illusion is not imposed but natural: we are built to experience ourselves as free.
Who argued what
- Libertarian free will Immanuel Kant, Thomas Reid, Robert Kane, Timothy O'Connor
- Hard determinism Baruch Spinoza, Baron d'Holbach, Derk Pereboom, Sam Harris
- Compatibilism David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Daniel Dennett, Harry Frankfurt
- Illusionism Saul Smilansky
Where you stand
Do we have free will?
In surveys
Choose one to see how people answer.
Variations
The manipulation case
Imagine a neuroscientist who, from your birth, has arranged your brain so that you will reliably reason your way to stealing a car. You deliberate, you weigh the reasons, you choose. Most people say you are not responsible. But how does this differ from being shaped by genes and upbringing, which also arranged your brain without your consent? This is Pereboom's four-case argument, and it presses compatibilists hard.
The rerun
Rewind the universe to the moment before your choice and press play again, with every atom in the same place. If you would choose differently on some reruns, your choice was not fixed. But then what explains why you chose one way this time rather than the other? If nothing does, it seems to be luck.
Go deeper
The consequence argument, step by step
Peter van Inwagen's argument runs roughly like this. No one has any choice about what happened before they were born. No one has any choice about the laws of nature. If determinism is true, the past plus the laws entail everything you do. So no one has any choice about anything they do.
The argument is valid in form, so compatibilists must reject a premise or the rule that carries 'no choice about' through the entailment. Most attack the meaning of 'having a choice', arguing that a person can have a choice about something that is entailed by facts they cannot change.
What does neuroscience actually show?
Experiments such as those of Benjamin Libet found brain activity that precedes a person's reported awareness of deciding to move. Some read this as proof that the brain decides before 'you' do. The interpretation is contested, and the details matter: see Libet's experiments.
Schools of thought: Stoicism, Existentialism
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Free Will
- WikipediaFree will
- SurveyPhilPapers Survey, 2020 · question: Free will; about 1,785 professional philosophers; accept or lean toward
- BookFreedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett
- BookFour Views on Free Will, John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas
- BookFree Will: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas Pink
Open questions
- If every choice has a cause, can any choice be truly yours?
- Would discovering that free will is an illusion change how you treat other people, or yourself?
- Is the freedom you actually care about the kind that requires escaping causation at all?