free will essays

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

F or centuries , philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope , American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

So what happens if this faith erodes?

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species . Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

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Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something .

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

In 2002, two psychologists had a simple but brilliant idea: Instead of speculating about what might happen if people lost belief in their capacity to choose, they could run an experiment to find out. Kathleen Vohs, then at the University of Utah, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of Pittsburgh, asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. Would differences in abstract philosophical beliefs influence people’s decisions?

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.

Another pioneer of research into the psychology of free will, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, has extended these findings. For example, he and colleagues found that students with a weaker belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate than were those whose belief in free will was stronger. Likewise, those primed to hold a deterministic view by reading statements like “Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion” were less likely to give money to a homeless person or lend someone a cellphone.

Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships. They found that when subjects were induced to believe that “all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” those subjects came away with a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance.

The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand. Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. “Imagine,” he told me, “that I’m deliberating whether to do my duty, such as to parachute into enemy territory, or something more mundane like to risk my job by reporting on some wrongdoing. If everyone accepts that there is no free will, then I’ll know that people will say, ‘Whatever he did, he had no choice—we can’t blame him.’ So I know I’m not going to be condemned for taking the selfish option.” This, he believes, is very dangerous for society, and “the more people accept the determinist picture, the worse things will get.”

Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. Only the initiated, behind those walls, should dare to, as he put it to me, “look the dark truth in the face.” Smilansky says he realizes that there is something drastic, even terrible, about this idea—but if the choice is between the true and the good, then for the sake of society, the true must go.

Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.

Illusionism is a minority position among academic philosophers, most of whom still hope that the good and the true can be reconciled. But it represents an ancient strand of thought among intellectual elites. Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism.

Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control . Luckily, he argues, we don’t need them. Belief in free will comes naturally to us. Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear. Most scientists “don’t realize what effect these ideas can have,” Smilansky told me. “Promoting determinism is complacent and dangerous.”

Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. Some simply don’t agree that these consequences might include the collapse of civilization. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his 2012 book, Free Will , set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

“We need our beliefs to track what is true,” Harris told me. Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things. But if we instead accept that “human behavior arises from neurophysiology,” he argued, then we can better understand what is really causing people to do bad things despite this threat of punishment—and how to stop them. “We need,” Harris told me, “to know what are the levers we can pull as a society to encourage people to be the best version of themselves they can be.”

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.

Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Holding people responsible for their actions might sound like a keystone of civilized life, but we pay a high price for it: Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment.

“Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina,” Harris suggested, with “the response to the 9/11 act of terrorism.” For many Americans, the men who hijacked those planes are the embodiment of criminals who freely choose to do evil. But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon—and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response.

Although the scale of the two catastrophes was similar, the reactions were wildly different. Nobody was striving to exact revenge on tropical storms or declare a War on Weather, so responses to Katrina could simply focus on rebuilding and preventing future disasters. The response to 9/11 , Harris argues, was clouded by outrage and the desire for vengeance, and has led to the unnecessary loss of countless more lives. Harris is not saying that we shouldn’t have reacted at all to 9/11, only that a coolheaded response would have looked very different and likely been much less wasteful. “Hatred is toxic,” he told me, “and can destabilize individual lives and whole societies. Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone.”

Whereas the evidence from Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues suggests that social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life—Harris thinks that social benefits will result from seeing other people’s behavior in the very same light. From that vantage point, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better.

What’s more, Harris argues, as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean “that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.” Certain kinds of action require us to become conscious of a choice—to weigh arguments and appraise evidence. True, if we were put in exactly the same situation again, then 100 times out of 100 we would make the same decision, “just like rewinding a movie and playing it again.” But the act of deliberation—the wrestling with facts and emotions that we feel is essential to our nature—is nonetheless real.

The big problem, in Harris’s view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism. Determinism is the belief that our decisions are part of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Fatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that our decisions don’t really matter, because whatever is destined to happen will happen—like Oedipus’s marriage to his mother, despite his efforts to avoid that fate.

When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference. But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives. If people better understood these fine distinctions, Harris believes, the consequences of losing faith in free will would be much less negative than Vohs’s and Baumeister’s experiments suggest.

Can one go further still? Is there a way forward that preserves both the inspiring power of belief in free will and the compassionate understanding that comes with determinism?

Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency.

Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will , he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.

For Waller, it simply doesn’t matter that these processes are underpinned by a causal chain of firing neurons. In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.

Waller believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.

Waller’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it. One 2010 study found that people mostly thought of free will in terms of following their desires, free of coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head). As long as we continue to believe in this kind of practical free will, that should be enough to preserve the sorts of ideals and ethical standards examined by Vohs and Baumeister.

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

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30 Existence of Free Will

Determinism and freedom.

Determinism and free will are often thought to be in deep conflict. Whether or not this is true has a lot to do with what is meant by determinism and an account of what free will requires.

First of all, determinism is not the view that free actions are impossible. Rather, determinism is the view that at any one time, only one future is physically possible. To be a little more specific, determinism is the view that a complete description of the past along with a complete account of the relevant laws of nature logically entails all future events. 1

Indeterminism is simply the denial of determinism. If determinism is incompatible with free will, it will be because free actions are only possible in worlds in which more than one future is physically possible at any one moment in time. While it might be true that free will requires indeterminism, it’s not true merely by definition. A further argument is needed and this suggests that it is at least possible that people could sometimes exercise the control necessary for morally responsible action, even if we live in a deterministic world.

It is worth saying something about fatalism before we move on. It is really easy to mistake determinism for fatalism, and fatalism does seem to be in straightforward conflict with free will. Fatalism is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. If fatalism is true, then nothing that we try or think or intend or believe or decide has any causal effect or relevance as to what we actually end up doing.

But note that determinism need not entail fatalism. Determinism is a claim about what is logically entailed by the rules/laws governing a world and the past of said world. It is not the claim that we lack the power to do other than what we actually were already going to do. Nor is it the view that we fail to be an important part of the causal story for why we do what we do. And this distinction may allow some room for freedom, even in deterministic worlds.

An example will be helpful here. We know that the boiling point for water is 100°C. Suppose we know in both a deterministic world and a fatalistic world that my pot of water will be boiling at 11:22am today. Determinism makes the claim that if I take a pot of water and I put it on my stove, and heat it to 100°C, it will boil. This is because the laws of nature (in this case, water that is heated to 100°C will boil) and the events of the past (I put a pot of water on a hot stove) bring about the boiling water. But fatalism makes a different claim. If my pot of water is fated to boil at 11:22am today, then no matter what I or anyone does, my pot of water will boil at exactly 11:22am today. I could try to empty the pot of water out at 11:21. I could try to take the pot as far away from a heating source as possible. Nonetheless, my pot of water will be boiling at 11:22 precisely because it was fated that this would happen. Under fatalism, the future is fixed or preordained, but this need not be the case in a deterministic world. Under determinism, the future is a certain way because of the past and the rules governing said world. If we know that a pot of water will boil at 11:22am in a deterministic world, it’s because we know that the various causal conditions will hold in our world such that at 11:22 my pot of water will have been put on a heat source and brought to 100°C. Our deliberations, our choices, and our free actions may very well be part of the process that brings a pot of water to the boiling point in a deterministic world, whereas these are clearly irrelevant in fatalistic ones.

Three Views of Freedom

Most accounts of freedom fall into one of three camps. Some people take freedom to require merely the ability to “do what you want to do.” For example, if you wanted to walk across the room, right now, and you also had the ability, right now, to walk across the room, you would be free as you could do exactly what you want to do. We will call this easy freedom.

Others view freedom on the infamous “Garden of Forking Paths” model. For these people, free action requires more than merely the ability to do what you want to do. It also requires that you have the ability to do otherwise than what you actually did. So, If Anya is free when she decides to take a sip from her coffee, on this view, it must be the case that Anya could have refrained from sipping her coffee. The key to freedom, then, is alternative possibilities and we will call this the alternative possibilities view of free action.

Finally, some people envision freedom as requiring, not alternative possibilities but the right kind of relationship between the antecedent sources of our actions and the actions that we actually perform. Sometimes this view is explained by saying that the free agent is the source, perhaps even the ultimate source of her action. We will call this kind of view a source view of freedom.

Now, the key question we want to focus on is whether or not any of these three models of freedom are compatible with determinism. It could turn out that all three kinds of freedom are ruled out by determinism, so that the only way freedom is possible is if determinism is false. If you believe that determinism rules out free action, you endorse a view called incompatibilism. But it could turn out that one or all three of these models of freedom are compatible with determinism. If you believe that free action is compatible with determinism, you are a compatibilist.

Let us consider compatibilist views of freedom and two of the most formidable challenges that compatibilists face: the consequence argument and the ultimacy argument.

Begin with easy freedom. Is easy freedom compatible with determinism? A group of philosophers called classic compatibilists certainly thought so. 2  They argued that free will requires merely the ability for an agent to act without external hindrance. Suppose, right now, you want to put your textbook down and grab a cup of coffee. Even if determinism is true, you probably, right now, can do exactly that. You can put your textbook down, walk to the nearest Starbucks, and buy an overpriced cup of coffee. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you want to do. Determinism does not seem to be posing any threat to your ability to do what you want to do right now. If you want to stop reading and grab a coffee, you can. But, by contrast, if someone had chained you to the chair you are sitting in, things would be a bit different. Even if you wanted to grab a cup of coffee, you would not be able to. You would lack the ability to do so. You would not be free to do what you want to do. This has nothing to do with determinism, of course. It is not the fact that you might be living in a deterministic world that is threatening your free will. It is that an external hindrance (the chains holding you to your chair) is stopping from you doing what you want to do. So, if what we mean by freedom is easy freedom, it looks like freedom really is compatible with determinism.

Easy freedom has run into some rather compelling opposition, and most philosophers today agree that a plausible account of easy freedom is not likely. But, by far, the most compelling challenge the view faces can be seen in the consequence argument. 3  The consequence argument is as follows:

• If determinism is true, then all human actions are consequences of past events and the laws of nature.
• No human can do other than they actually do except by changing the laws of nature or changing the past.
• No human can change the laws of nature or the past.
• If determinism is true, no human has free will.

This is a powerful argument. It is very difficult to see where this argument goes wrong, if it goes wrong. The first premise is merely a restatement of determinism. The second premise ties the ability to do otherwise to the ability to change the past or the laws of nature, and the third premise points out the very reasonable assumption that humans are unable to modify the laws of nature or the past.

This argument effectively devastates easy freedom by proposing that we never act without external hindrances precisely because our actions are caused by past events and the laws of nature in such a way that we not able to contribute anything to the causal production of our actions. This argument also seems to pose a deeper problem for freedom in deterministic worlds. If this argument works, it establishes that, given determinism, we are powerless to do otherwise, and to the extent that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, this argument seems to rule out free action. Note that if this argument works, it poses a challenge for both the easy and alternative possibilities view of free will.

How might someone respond to this argument? First, suppose you adopt an alternative possibilities view of freedom and believe that the ability to do otherwise is what is needed for genuine free will. What you would need to show is that alternative possibilities, properly understood, are not incompatible with determinism. Perhaps you might argue that if we understand the ability to do otherwise properly we will see that we actually do have the ability to change the laws of nature or the past.

That might sound counterintuitive. How could it possibly be the case that a mere mortal could change the laws of nature or the past? Think back to Quinn’s decision to spend the night before her exam out with friends instead of studying. When she shows up to her exam exhausted, and she starts blaming herself, she might say, “Why did I go out? That was dumb! I could have stayed home and studied.” And she is sort of right that she could have stayed home. She had the general ability to stay home and study. It is just that if she had stayed home and studied the past would be slightly different or the laws of nature would be slightly different. What this points to is that there might be a way of cashing out the ability to do otherwise that is compatible with determinism and does allow for an agent to kind of change the past or even the laws of nature. 4

But suppose we grant that the consequence argument demonstrates that determinism really does rule out alternative possibilities. Does that mean we must abandon the alternative possibilities view of freedom? Well, not necessarily. You could instead argue that free will is possible, provided determinism is false. 5  That is a big if, of course, but maybe determinism will turn out to be false.

What if determinism turns out to be true? Should we give up, then, and concede that there is no free will? Well, that might be too quick. A second response to the consequence argument is available. All you need to do is deny that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise.

In 1969, Harry Frankfurt proposed an influential thought experiment that demonstrated that free will might not require alternative possibilities at all (Frankfurt [1969] 1988). If he’s right about this, then the consequence argument, while compelling, does not demonstrate that no one lacks free will in deterministic worlds, because free will does not require the ability to do otherwise. It merely requires that agents be the source of their actions in the right kind of way. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here is a simplified paraphrase of Frankfurt’s case:

Black wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid unnecessary work. So he waits until Jones is about to make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is an excellent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide not to do what Black wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide to do something other than what Black wanted him to do, Black will intervene, and ensure that Jones decides to do, and does do, exactly what Black wanted him to do. Whatever Jones’ initial preferences and inclinations, then, Black will have his way. As it turns out, Jones decides, on his own, to do the action that Black wanted him to perform. So, even though Black was entirely prepared to intervene, and could have intervened, to guarantee that Jones would perform the action, Black never actually has to intervene because Jones decided, for reasons of his own, to perform the exact action that Black wanted him to perform. (Frankfurt [1969] 1988, 6-7)

Now, what is going on here? Jones is overdetermined to perform a specific act. No matter what happens, no matter what Jones initially decides or wants to do, he is going to perform the action Black wants him to perform. He absolutely cannot do otherwise. But note that there seems to be a crucial difference between the case in which Jones decides on his own and for his own reasons to perform the action Black wanted him to perform and the case in which Jones would have refrained from performing the action were it not for Black intervening to force him to perform the action. In the first case, Jones is the source of his action. It the thing he decided to do and he does it for his own reasons. But in the second case, Jones is not the source of his actions. Black is. This distinction, thought Frankfurt, should be at the heart of discussions of free will and moral responsibility. The control required for moral responsibility is not the ability to do otherwise (Frankfurt [1969] 1988, 9-10).

If alternative possibilities are not what free will requires, what kind of control is needed for free action? Here we have the third view of freedom we started with: free will as the ability to be the source of your actions in the right kind of way. Source compatibilists argue that this ability is not threatened by determinism, and building off of Frankfurt’s insight, have gone on to develop nuanced, often radically divergent source accounts of freedom. 6  Should we conclude, then, that provided freedom does not require alternative possibilities that it is compatible with determinism? 7 Again, that would be too quick. Source compatibilists have reason to be particularly worried about an argument developed by Galen Strawson called the ultimacy argument (Strawson [1994] 2003, 212-228).

Rather than trying to establish that determinism rules out alternative possibilities, Strawson tried to show that determinism rules out the possibility of being the ultimate source of your actions. While this is a problem for anyone who tries to establish that free will is compatible with determinism, it is particularly worrying for source compatibilists as they’ve tied freedom to an agent’s ability to be source of its actions. Here is the argument:

• A person acts of her own free will only if she is the act’s ultimate source.
• If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.
• Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will. (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 148) 8

This argument requires some unpacking. First of all, Strawson argues that for any given situation, we do what we do because of the way we are ([1994] 2003, 219). When Quinn decides to go out with her friends rather than study, she does so because of the way she is. She prioritizes a night with her friends over studying, at least on that fateful night before her exam. If Quinn had stayed in and studied, it would be because she was slightly different, at least that night. She would be such that she prioritized studying for her exam over a night out. But this applies to any decision we make in our lives. We decide to do what we do because of how we already are.

But if what we do is because of the way we are, then in order to be responsible for our actions, we need to be the source of how we are, at least in the relevant mental respects (Strawson [1994] 2003, 219). There is the first premise. But here comes the rub: the way we are is a product of factors beyond our control such as the past and the laws of nature ([1994] 2003, 219; 222-223). The fact that Quinn is such that she prioritizes a night with friends over studying is due to her past and the relevant laws of nature. It is not up to her that she is the way she is. It is ultimately factors extending well beyond her, possibly all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe that account for why she is the way she is that night. And to the extent that this is compelling, the ultimate source of Quinn’s decision to go out is not her. Rather, it is some condition of the universe external to her. And therefore, Quinn is not free.

Once again, this is a difficult argument to respond to. You might note that “ultimate source” is ambiguous and needing further clarification. Some compatibilists have pointed this out and argued that once we start developing careful accounts of what it means to be the source of our actions, we will see that the relevant notion of source-hood is compatible with determinism.

For example, while it may be true that no one is the ultimate cause of their actions in deterministic worlds precisely because the ultimate source of all actions will extend back to the initial conditions of the universe, we can still be a mediated source of our actions in the sense required for moral responsibility. Provided the actual source of our action involves a sophisticated enough set of capacities for it to make sense to view us as the source of our actions, we could still be the source of our actions, in the relevant sense (McKenna and Pereboom 2016, 154). After all, even if determinism is true, we still act for reasons. We still contemplate what to do and weigh reasons for and against various actions, and we still are concerned with whether or not the actions we are considering reflect our desires, our goals, our projects, and our plans. And you might think that if our actions stem from a history that includes us bringing all the features of our agency to bear upon the decision that is the proximal cause of our action, that this causal history is one in which we are the source of our actions in the way that is really relevant to identifying whether or not we are acting freely.

Others have noted that even if it is true that Quinn is not directly free in regard to the beliefs and desires that suggest she should go out with her friends rather than study (they are the product of factors beyond her control such as her upbringing, her environment, her genetics, or maybe even random luck), this need not imply that she lacks control as to whether or not she chooses to act upon them. 9  Perhaps it is the case that even though how we are may be due to factors beyond our control, nonetheless, we are still the source of what we do because it is still, even under determinism, up to us as to whether we choose to exercise control over our conduct.

Free Will and the Sciences

Many challenges to free will come, not from philosophy, but from the sciences. There are two main scientific arguments against free will, one coming from neuroscience and one coming from the social sciences. The concern coming from research in the neurosciences is that some empirical results suggest that all our choices are the result of unconscious brain processes, and to the extent choices must be consciously made to be free choices, it seems that we never make a conscious free choice.

The classic studies motivating a picture of human action in which unconscious brain processes are doing the bulk of the causal work for action were conducted by Benjamin Libet. Libet’s experiments involved subjects being asked to flex their wrists whenever they felt the urge to do so. Subjects were asked to note the location of a clock hand on a modified clock when they became aware of the urge to act. While doing this their brain activity was being scanned using EEG technology. What Libet noted is that around 550 milliseconds before a subject acted, a readiness potential (increased brain activity) would be measured by the EEG technology. But subjects were reporting awareness of an urge to flex their wrist around 200 milliseconds before they acted (Libet 1985).

This painted a strange picture of human action. If conscious intentions were the cause of our actions, you may expect to see a causal story in which the conscious awareness of an urge to flex your wrist shows up first, then a ramping up of brain activity, and finally an action. But Libet’s studies showed a causal story in which an action starts with unconscious brain activity, the subject later becomes consciously aware that they are about to act, and then the action happens. The conscious awareness of action seemed to be a byproduct of the actual unconscious process that was causing the action. It was not the cause of the action itself. And this result suggests that unconscious brain processes, not conscious ones, are the real causes of our actions. To the extent that free action requires our conscious decisions to be the initiating causes of our actions, it looks like we may never act freely.

While this research is intriguing, it probably does not establish that we are not free. Alfred Mele is a philosopher who has been heavily critical of these studies. He raises three main objections to the conclusions drawn from these arguments.

First, Mele points out that self-reports are notoriously unreliable (2009, 60-64). Conscious perception takes time, and we are talking about milliseconds. The actual location of the clock hand is probably much closer to 550 milliseconds when the agent “intends” or has the “urge” to act than it is to 200 milliseconds. So, there’s some concerns about experimental design here.

Second, an assumption behind these experiments is that what is going on at 550 milliseconds is that a decision is being made to flex the wrist (Mele 2014, 11). We might challenge this assumption. Libet ran some variants of his experiment in which he asked subjects to prepare to flex their wrist but to stop themselves from doing so. So, basically, subjects simply sat there in the chair and did nothing. Libet interpreted the results of these experiments as showing that we might not have a free will, but we certainly have a “free won’t” because we seem capable of consciously vetoing or stopping an action, even if that action might be initiated by unconscious processes (2014, 12-13). Mele points out that what might be going on in these scenarios is that the real intention to act or not act is what happens consciously at 200 milliseconds, and if so, there is little reason to think these experiments are demonstrating that we lack free will (2014, 13).

Finally, Mele notes that while it may be the case that some of our decisions and actions look like the wrist-flicking actions Libet was studying, it is doubtful that all or even most of our decisions are like this (2014, 15). When we think about free will, we rarely think of actions like wrist-flicking. Free actions are typically much more complex and they are often the kind of thing where the decision to do something extends across time. For example, your decision about what to major in at college or even where to study was probably made over a period of months, even years. And that decision probably involved periods of both conscious and unconscious cognition. Why think that a free choice cannot involve some components that are unconscious?

A separate line of attack on free will comes from the situationist literature in the social sciences (particularly social psychology). There is a growing body of research suggesting that situational and environmental factors profoundly influence human behavior, perhaps in ways that undermine free will (Mele 2014, 72).

Many of the experiments in the situationist literature are among the most vivid and disturbing in all of social psychology. Stanley Milgram, for example, conducted a series of experiments on obedience in which ordinary people were asked to administer potentially lethal voltages of electricity to an innocent subject in order to advance scientific research, and the vast majority of people did so! 10  And in Milgram’s experiments, what affected whether or not subjects were willing to administer the shocks were minor, seemingly insignificant environmental factors such as whether the person running the experiment looked professional or not (Milgram 1963).

What experiments like Milgram’s obedience experiments might show is that it is our situations, our environments that are the real causes of our actions, not our conscious, reflective choices. And this may pose a threat to free will. Should we take this kind of research as threatening freedom?

Many philosophers would resist concluding that free will does not exist on the basis of these kinds of experiments. Typically, not everyone who takes part in situationist studies is unable to resist the situational influences they are subject to. And it appears to be the case that when we are aware of situational influences, we are more likely to resist them. Perhaps the right way to think about this research is that there all sorts of situations that can influence us in ways that we may not consciously endorse, but that nonetheless, we are still capable of avoiding these effects when we are actively trying to do so. For example, the brain sciences have made many of us vividly aware of a whole host of cognitive biases and situational influences that humans are typically subject to and yet, when we are aware of these influences, we are less susceptible to them. The more modest conclusion to draw here is not that we lack free will, but that exercising control over our actions is much more difficult than many of us believe it to be. We are certainly influenced by the world we are a part of, but to be influenced by the world is different from being determined by it, and this may allow us to, at least sometimes, exercise some control over the actions we perform.

No one knows yet whether or not humans sometimes exercise the control over their actions required for moral responsibility. And so I leave it to you, dear reader: Are you free?

Chapter Notes

• I have hidden some complexity here. I have defined determinism in terms of logical entailment. Sometimes people talk about determinism as a causal relationship. For our purposes, this distinction is not relevant, and if it is easier for you to make sense of determinism by thinking of the past and the laws of nature causing all future events, that is perfectly acceptable to do.
• Two of the more well-known classic compatibilists include Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. See: Hobbes, Thomas, (1651) 1994, Leviathan , ed. Edwin Curley, Canada: Hackett Publishing Company; and Hume, David, (1739) 1978, A Treatise of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• For an earlier version of this argument see: Ginet, Carl, 1966, “Might We Have No Choice?” in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Keith Lehrer, 87-104, Random House.
• For two notable attempts to respond to the consequence argument by claiming that humans can change the past or the laws of nature see: Fischer, John Martin, 1994, The Metaphysics of Free Will , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; and Lewis, David, 1981, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria 47: 113-21.
• Many philosophers try to develop views of freedom on the assumption that determinism is incompatible with free action. The view that freedom is possible, provided determinism is false is called Libertarianism. For more on Libertarian views of freedom, see: Clarke, Randolph and Justin Capes, 2017, “Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/ .
• For elaboration on recent compatibilist views of freedom, see McKenna, Michael and D. Justin Coates, 2015, “Compatibilism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ .
• You might be unimpressed by the way source compatibilists understand the ability to be the source of your actions. For example, you might that what it means to be the source of your actions is to be the ultimate cause of your actions. Or maybe you think that to genuinely be the source of your actions you need to be the agent-cause of your actions. Those are both reasonable positions to adopt. Typically, people who understand free will as requiring either of these abilities believe that free will is incompatible with determinism. That said, there are many Libertarian views of free will that try to develop a plausible account of agent causation. These views are called Agent-Causal Libertarianism. See: Clarke, Randolph and Justin Capes, 2017, “Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/ .
• As with most philosophical arguments, the ultimacy argument has been formulated in a number of different ways. In Galen Strawson’s original paper he gives three different versions of the argument, one of which has eight premises and one that has ten premises. A full treatment of either of those versions of this argument would require more time and space than we have available here. I have chosen to use the McKenna/Pereboom formulation of the argument due its simplicity and their clear presentation of the central issues raised by the argument.
• For two attempts to respond to the ultimacy argument in this way, see: Mele, Alfred, 1995, Autonomous Agents , New York: Oxford University Press; and McKenna, Michael, 2008, “Ultimacy & Sweet Jane” in Nick Trakakis and Daniel Cohen, eds, Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility , Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 186-208.
• Fortunately, no real shocks were administered. The subjects merely believed they were doing so.

Frankfurt, Harry. (1969) 1988. “Alternative Possibilities and moral responsibility.” In The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays , 10th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Libet, Benjamin. 1985. “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 529-566.

McKenna, Michael and Derk Pereboom. 2016. Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Mele, Alfred. 2014. Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mele, Alfred. 2009. Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Milgram, Stanley. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371-378.

Strawson, Galen. (1994) 2003. “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.” In Free Will, 2nd ed. Edited by Gary Watson, 212-228. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Inwagen, Peter. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Further Reading

Deery, Oisin and Paul Russell, eds. 2013. The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings from the Contemporary Debates . New York: Oxford University Press.

Mele, Alfred. 2006. Free Will and Luck. New York: Oxford University Press.

Attribution

This section is composed of text taken from Chapter 8 Freedom of the Will created by Daniel Haas in Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind , edited by Heather Salazar and Christina Hendricks, and produced with support from the Rebus Community. The original is freely available under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license at https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-of-mind/ . The material is presented in its original form, with the exception of the removal of introductory material Introduction: Are We Free?

A Brief Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © 2021 by Southern Alberta Institution of Technology (SAIT) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Foreknowledge and Free Will

Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

Fatalism seems to be entailed by infallible foreknowledge by the following informal line of reasoning:

For any future act you will perform, if some being infallibly believed in the past that the act would occur, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed what he believed since nobody has any control over past events; nor can you make him mistaken in his belief, given that he is infallible. Therefore, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed in a way that cannot be mistaken that you would do what you will do. But if so, you cannot do otherwise than what he believed you would do. And if you cannot do otherwise, you will not perform the act freely.

The same argument can be applied to any infallibly foreknown act of any human being. If there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future, no human being has any control over the future.

This theological fatalist argument creates a dilemma for anyone who thinks it important to maintain both (1) there is a deity who infallibly knows the entire future, and (2) human beings have free will in the strong sense usually called libertarian. But it has also fascinated many who have not shared either of these commitments, because taking the argument’s full measure requires rethinking some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, especially ones concerning time, truth, and modality. Those philosophers who think there is a way to consistently maintain both (1) and (2) are called compatibilists about infallible foreknowledge and human free will. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Incompatibilists accept the incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and human free will and deny either infallible foreknowledge or free will in the sense targeted by the argument.

1. The argument for theological fatalism

2.1 the denial of future contingent truth, 2.2 god’s knowledge of future contingent truths, 2.3 the eternity solution, 2.4 god’s forebeliefs as “soft facts” about the past, 2.5 the dependence solution, 2.6 the transfer of necessity, 2.7 the necessity and the causal closure of the past.

• 2.8 The rejection of Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

3. Incompatibilist responses to the argument for theological fatalism

4. logical fatalism.

• 5. Beyond fatalism

Other Internet Resources

Related entries.

There is a long history of debate over the soundness of the argument for theological fatalism, so its soundness must not be obvious. Nelson Pike (1965) gets the credit for clearly and forcefully presenting the dilemma in a way that produced an enormous body of work by both compatibilists and incompatibilists, leading to more careful formulations of the argument.

A precise version of the argument can be formulated as follows: Choose some proposition about a future act that you think you will do freely, if any act is free. Suppose, for example, that the telephone will ring at 9 am tomorrow and you will either answer it or you will not. So it is either true that you will answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow or it is true that you will not answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow. The Law of Excluded Middle rules out any other alternative. Let T abbreviate the proposition that you will answer the phone tomorrow morning at 9, and let us suppose that T is true. (If not- T is true instead, simply substitute not- T in the argument below).

Let “now-necessary” designate temporal necessity, the type of necessity that the past is supposed to have just because it is past. This type of necessity plays a central role in the argument and we’ll have more to say about it in sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.7 , and 5 , but we can begin with the intuitive idea that there is a kind of necessity that a proposition has now when the content of the proposition is about something that occurred in the past. To say that it is now-necessary that milk has been spilled is to say nobody can do anything now about the fact that the milk has been spilled.

Let “God” designate a being who has infallible beliefs about the future, where to say that God believes p infallibly is to say that God believes p and it is not possible that God believes p and p is false. It is not important for the logic of the argument that God is the being worshiped by any particular religion, but the motive to maintain that there is a being with infallible beliefs is usually a religious one.

One more preliminary point is in order. The dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and human free will does not rest on the particular assumption of fore knowledge and does not require an analysis of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist, which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge. She has knowledge just in case what she believes is true and she satisfies the other conditions for knowledge, such as having sufficiently strong evidence. Ordinary knowledge does not require that the belief cannot be false. For example, if I believe on strong evidence that classes begin at my university on a certain date, and when the day arrives, classes do begin, we would normally say I knew in advance that classes would begin on that date. I had foreknowledge about the date classes begin. But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge because events could have proven me wrong even though as events actually turned out, they didn’t prove me wrong. Ordinary foreknowledge does not threaten to necessitate the future because it does not require that when I know p it is not possible that my belief is false. The key problem, then, is the infallibility of the belief about the future, and this is a problem whether or not the epistemic agent with an infallible belief satisfies the other conditions required by some account of knowledge, such as sufficient evidence. As long as an agent has an infallible belief about the future, the problem arises.

Using the example of the proposition T , the argument that infallible foreknowledge of T entails that you do not answer the telephone freely can be formulated as follows:

Basic Argument for Theological Fatalism

This argument is formulated in a way that makes its logical form as perspicuous as possible, and there is a consensus that this argument or something close to it is valid. That is, if the premises are all true, the conclusion follows. The compatibilist about infallible foreknowledge and free will must therefore find a false premise. There are four premises that are not straightforward substitutions in definitions: (1), (2), (5), and (9). All four of these premises have come under attack in the history of discussion of theological fatalism. Aristotle’s concern about future contingent truth has motivated an increasing number of compatibilists to challenge premise (1). Boethius and Aquinas also denied premise (1), but on the grounds that God and his beliefs are not in time, a solution that has always had some adherents. William of Ockham rejected premise (2), arguing that the necessity of the past does not apply to the entire past, and God’s past beliefs are in the part of the past to which the necessity of the past does not apply. This approach to the problem was revived early in the debate stirred up by Pike’s article, and has probably attracted more attention, in its various incarnations, than any other solution. There are more radical responses to (2) as well. Premise (5) has rarely been disputed and is an analogue of an axiom of modal logic, but it may have been denied by Duns Scotus and Luis de Molina. Although doubts about premise (9) arose relatively late in the debate, inspired by contemporary discussions of the relation between free will and the ability to do otherwise, the denial of (9) is arguably the key to the solution proposed by Augustine. In addition to the foregoing compatibilist solutions, there are two incompatibilist responses to the problem of theological fatalism. One is to deny that God (or any being) has infallible foreknowledge. The other is to deny that human beings have free will in the libertarian sense of free will. These responses will be discussed in section 3 . The relationship between theological fatalism and logical fatalism will be discussed in section 4 . In section 5 we will consider whether the problem of theological fatalism is just a theological version of a more general problem in metaphysics that isn’t ultimately about God, or even about free will.

2. Compatibilist responses to theological fatalism

One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will is to deny that the proposition T can be true, on the grounds that no proposition about the contingent future is true: such propositions are either false (given Bivalence), or neither true nor false. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up. Since God wouldn’t believe a proposition unless it were true, premise (1) is, on this account, a non-starter. The idea behind this response is usually that propositions about the contingent future become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of De Interpretatione IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers have used Aristotle’s move to solve the dilemma we are addressing here.

This approach to the problem had already been endorsed, three years before Pike’s seminal article, by A.N. Prior (1962), but it received little initial attention. John Martin Fischer’s first anthology of essays on the problem (1989) does not contain a single paper advocating this solution. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when it was defended by Joseph Runzo (1981), Richard Purtill (1988), and J.R. Lucas (1989), that it began to gain traction in the debate. More recently, Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt (2006) have argued for the “Peircean” semantics favored by Prior (1967, 113–36), on which the predictive use of the word ‘will’ carries maximal causal force and all future contingents turn out false, while Dale Tuggy (2007) has defended the position that future contingents are neither true nor false. A critique of both Rhoda et al . and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Another supporter of the all-future-contingents-are-false solution to the problem of theological fatalism is Patrick Todd (2016a), whose recent book (2021) offers a vigorous defense of this approach against various objections. Many (but not all) of those who reject future contingent truth base their position, at least in part, on presentism, according to which only the present exists. Statements about the future, especially the contingent future, would then arguably lack the grounding necessary for truth. D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both logical and theological fatalism, as has Dean Zimmerman (2008). A measure of how much the debate has shifted in this direction is that Fischer’s second anthology (Fischer and Todd 2015) contains an entire section on “The Logic of Future Contingents.” The connection between this solution and “open theism” will be discussed in section 3 .

While there is considerable prima facie appeal to the idea that statements about the contingent future aren’t yet true, and that they become true only when the future arrives, both the semantic and the metaphysical justifications for this idea can be challenged. A semantics that collapses truth into necessity and falsehood into impossibility, at least for propositions about the future, may appear insufficiently attentive to people’s actual use of the predictive ‘will’, not to mention logically problematic. The true futurist theory (“the thin red line”), allowing for future contingent truth, is defended by Øhrstrøm (2009) and by Malpass and Wawer (2012). Presentist opponents of future contingent truth, for their part, need to explain how there can be contingent truths about the past but not about the future, given that, on presentism, the past is no more real than the future. (This is not a problem on the growing block theory.) Rhoda (2009) and Zimmerman (2010), for example, have independently suggested that truths about the past could be grounded in God’s present beliefs about the past; but if this move is allowed, it would seem just as legitimate to assume God has present beliefs about the future and use this to ground truths about the contingent future. The semantic and metaphysical issues surrounding future contingent truth are complex and highly contested, so it isn’t possible to do more than note them here.

It is not clear, however, that the denial of future contingent truth is sufficient to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. Hunt (2020) suggests that future contingents that fail to be true for presentist reasons alone might nevertheless qualify as “quasi-true” (Sider 1999, Markosian 2004), and argues that the quasi-truth of God’s beliefs about the future is enough to generate the problem. The following consideration tends in the same direction. According to the definition of infallibility used in the basic argument, if God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is false. But there is a natural extension of the definition of infallibility to allow for the case in which T lacks a truth value but will acquire one in the future: If God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is either false or becomes false. If so, and if God believes T , we get an argument for theological fatalism that parallels our basic argument. Premise (4) would need to be modified as follows:

(6) becomes:

The modifications in the rest of the argument are straightforward.

It is open to the defender of this solution to maintain that God has no beliefs about the contingent future because he does not infallibly know how it will turn out, and this is compatible with God’s being infallible in everything he does believe. It is also compatible with God’s omniscience if omniscience is the property of knowing the truth value of every proposition that has a truth value. But clearly, this move restricts the range of God’s knowledge, so it has religious disadvantages in addition to its disadvantages in logic.

If T is true, there is still the question how God could come to believe T rather than not- T , and believe it without any possibility of error, given that T concerns the contingent future. T is contingent only insofar as it is still possible for you to refrain from answering the phone at 9 tomorrow morning, though we’re supposing for the sake of argument that you will answer the phone at 9. But then it’s still possible for T to turn out false (though it won’t), and still possible for the belief that T to be incorrect (though it isn’t). This is hard to square with the claim in premise (1) that God’s belief that T was infallible.

This problem for infallible belief about a contingent future parallels a problem for God’s knowledge of a contingent future. Though the argument for theological fatalism rests only on divine belief rather than knowledge (since the additional conditions for knowledge, beyond true belief, don’t play any role in the argument), God nevertheless wouldn’t believe without knowing. But it’s unclear what could have been cognitively available to God yesterday, when your answering the phone at 9 am tomorrow was still future and contingent, to raise his belief that T from a correct guess to genuine knowledge. Prior (1962) held this to be a further problem for premise (1), beyond the nonexistence of future contingent truths. For William Hasker (1989, 186–88), Richard Swinburne (2006, 22–26), and Peter van Inwagen (2008), who maintain (contrary to Prior) that there are future contingent truths, the impossibility of foreknowing them is the problem with premise (1). This “limited foreknowledge” view has been critiqued by Arbour (2013) and Todd (2014a), among others.

Defenders of divine foreknowledge need something to say in response to skeptical questions about how such knowledge could be available to God. One possible response is that it’s a conceptual truth that God is omniscient, and his knowledge, including his knowledge of future contingent truths, is simply innate (Craig 1987). Skeptics might regard this response as closer to a non-response. But others have offered detailed if speculative proposals. These include Ryan Byerly (2014), whose book-length treatment of the issue grounds God’s infallible foreknowledge in a divine “ordering of times” that is supposed to leave human free will intact.

It is relatively easy to see how God can know what is (contingently) “going to” happen if this refers to the present tendency of things. All it takes is exhaustive knowledge of the present. But what is “going to” happen can change, as the present tendency of things changes, and what God foreknows on this basis (his knowledge of what is going to happen ) will change along with this change in present tendencies. This “mutable future” position, defended by Peter Geach, has been revived by Patrick Todd (2011, 2016b). On the “Geachian” view, God’s beliefs about the contingent future constitute genuine knowledge, because they track the changing truth about where the future is headed. What this view doesn’t provide is the infallibility required by premise (1).

Fischer (2016, 31–45) tries to fill the gap with his “boot-strapping” account of divine foreknowledge. Even human beings are sometimes in a “knowledge-conferring situation,” or KCS, with respect to the contingent future. Since God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, God is in a position to know (some) future contingents in the same way that human beings can know them: by being in the appropriate KCS. But this presupposes a fallibilist theory of knowledge. What accounts for the infallibility of God’s beliefs? Fischer argues that God can “bootstrap” his way to certainty by combining his beliefs about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own infallibility. Hunt (2017b) objects that the account is circular, and that it couldn’t support anything close to exhaustive foreknowledge, since most future contingent truths will lack KCS’s at any given time. Fischer (2017, and forthcoming) elaborates and defends the view.

The most straightforward account of the matter, accommodating the infallibility of God’s beliefs, is that he simply “sees” the future. If God is in time, this requires that he be equipped with something like a “time telescope” that allows him to view what is temporally distant. A hurdle faced by time telescopes is that they probably involve retrocausation. If God is not in time, however, he wouldn’t need a time telescope to view the future along with the present and past. This brings us to the next solution.

A third challenge to premise (1), independent of the first two, is that it misrepresents God’s relation to time. What is denied according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and not that God believes the content of proposition T , but that God believed T yesterday . This solution probably originated with the 6 th century philosopher Boethius, who maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before the mind of God at once. To say “at once” or “simultaneously” is to use a temporal metaphor, but Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of temporal reality as being before God’s mind in a single temporal present. It is an atemporal present in which God has a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.

Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius. One is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the center of a circle is present to each and every point on its circumference ( SCG I, 66). In contemporary philosophy an important defense of the Boethian idea that God is timeless was given by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who applied it explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991). Recently it has been defended by Katherin Rogers (2007a, 2007b), Kevin Timpe (2007), Michael Rota (2010), Joseph Diekemper (2013), and Ciro De Florio (2015).

Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself, arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling, such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121–129; Wolterstorff 1975; Swinburne 1977, 221). Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 2 and 2011) that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be reformulated as follows:

Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as God’s timeless knowing are now -necessary, yet we have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowing. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows T . The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do about what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything about the future.

The Boethian solution does not solve the problem of theological fatalism by itself, but since the nature of the timeless realm is elusive, the intuition of the necessity of the timeless realm is probably weaker than the intuition of the necessity of the past. The necessity of the past is deeply embedded in our ordinary intuitions about time; there are no ordinary intuitions about the realm of timelessness. One possible way out of this problem is given by K.A. Rogers, who argues (2007a, 2007b) that the eternal realm is like the present rather than the past, and so it does not have the necessity we attribute to the past.

If God’s timeless knowledge doesn’t threaten free will, there’s still the question whether it can be confined to the timeless realm; if not, it might still cause trouble for free will. Van Inwagen (2008) argues against the Boethian solution on the grounds that a timeless deity could still bring about the existence in time of a “Freedom-denying Prophetic Object,” for example, a stone slab on which are inscribed the words, “Peter van Inwagen will answer the phone at 9:00 am on May 27, 2034.” An interesting puzzle for Christian defenders of the Boethian solution is the problem of whether the knowledge of Jesus Christ during his time on earth was infallible. The problem here is that the incarnate Christ was in time even if God is timeless. A particular problem discussed by Timothy Pawl (2014a, 2014b) is whether Christ had infallible foreknowledge of his own future choices, and if so, whether his created will was free. Pawl defends the compatibility of Christ’s infallible foreknowledge and the freedom of his created will.

The next solution is due to the fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham, and was revived in the contemporary literature by Marilyn Adams (1967). This solution rejects premise (2) of the basic argument in its full generality. Following Ockham, Adams argues that premise (2) applies only to the past strictly speaking, or the “hard” past. A “soft” fact about the past is one that is in part about the future. An example of a soft fact about the past would be the fact that it was true yesterday that a certain event would occur a year later, or the fact that you saw Paris for the last time. Adams argues that God’s existence in the past and God’s past beliefs about the future are not strictly past because they are facts that are in part about the future.

Adams’s argument was unsuccessful since, among other things, her criterion for being a hard fact had the consequence that no fact is a hard fact (Fischer 1989, introduction), but it led to a series of attempts to bolster it by giving more refined definitions of a “hard fact” and the type of necessity such facts are said to have—what Ockham called “accidental necessity” (necessity per accidens ). The resulting formulations became so refined and elaborate, in an effort to avoid possible counterexamples, that they risked becoming detached from the simple intuition they were intended to capture. Recent discussions of the hard fact/soft fact distinction may be found in Todd (2013) and Pendergraft and Coates (2014). Plantinga (1986) argued that a successful Ockhamist response to theological fatalism needn’t await the definitive formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for soft facthood, because paradigm examples of soft facts--facts that are surely soft, if any facts are soft--are enough for the job. It’s clear that proposition T , for example--that you will answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am--does not express a hard fact about the past. (It doesn’t express a fact about the past at all.) But if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient, this fact about what you will do tomorrow both entails, and is entailed by, God’s yesterday believing T . Assuming that hard and soft facthood are closed under logical equivalence, it follows that God’s having believed T is not a hard fact about yesterday, a conclusion that doesn’t rely on any particular answer to the general question how the hard fact/soft fact distinction is to be articulated. Responses to this defense of Ockhamism may be found in Brant (1997) and Hunt (2002).

There was considerable debate over Ockhamism in the eighties and nineties. Some of the defenses in this period appear in Freddoso (1983), Kvanvig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Wierenga (1989), and Craig (1990). Some of the criticisms appear in Fischer (1983, 1985a, 1991), Hasker (1989), Widerker (1990), Zagzebski (1991), and Pike (1993). The Ockhamist strategy, relying as it does on the distinction between facts about the past that are really about the past and facts about the past that are really (at least in part) about the future, is intertwined with work on the reality of the past and future. Finch and Rea (2008) have argued that the Ockhamist solution requires the rejection of presentism.

Perhaps the toughest obstacle confronting the Ockhamist solution is that it is very difficult to give an account of the necessity of the past that preserves the intuition that the past has a special kind of necessity in virtue of being past, but which has the consequence that God’s past beliefs do not have that kind of necessity. The problem is that God’s past beliefs seem to be as good a candidate for something that is strictly past as almost anything we can think of, such as an explosion that occurred last week. If God’s past beliefs about the future are soft facts, but the past explosion is a hard fact, that must be because of something special about God’s past beliefs that is intuitively plausible apart from the attempt to avoid theological fatalism. Perhaps God’s doxastic states are best understood in terms of “wide content” or a functionalist account of the mental (Zemach and Widerker 1987); perhaps divine omniscience is dispositional rather than occurrent (Hunt 1995), or doesn’t involve beliefs at all (Alston 1986). If God’s foreknowledge is special in any of these ways, premise (2) is arguably false. But there are theological costs to these conceptions of divine omniscience. The appeal to Putnam’s point that “meanings ain’t in the head” conflicts with the “incompatibilist constraint” in Fischer (1983); see also Hasker (1988) for a response to Alston, and Hughes (1997) for a response to Hunt. Since these accounts of divine foreknowledge aren’t independently plausible, however interesting they might be theoretically, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ockhamist solution is ad hoc .

One of the best-known Ockhamist proposals after Adams was made by Alvin Plantinga (1986), who defined the accidentally necessary in terms of lack of counterfactual power. For someone, Jones, to have counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs, the following must be true:

Plantinga argued that counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs about human free choices is coherent and if it occurs, these beliefs are not accidentally necessary; they do not have the kind of necessity the past is alleged to have in premise (2) of the basic argument.

Notice that counterfactual power over the past is not the same thing as changing the past. Under the assumption that there is only one time line, changing the past is incoherent since it amounts to there being one past prior to t 2 in which God has a certain belief at t 1 , and then Jones does something to make a different past. That requires two pasts prior to t 2 , and that presumably makes no sense. What (CPP) affirms instead is that there is only one actual past, but there would have been a different past if Jones acted differently at t 2 . (CPP) also does not require the assumption that what Jones does at t 2 causes God to have the belief he has at t 1 . There is much debate about the way to analyze the causal relation, but it is generally thought that causation does not reduce to a counterfactual dependency of an effect on its cause. The dependency of God’s belief on Jones’ act need not be a causal dependency. (CPP) is therefore weaker than the claim that Jones’ act at t 2 causes God’s belief at t 1 . A discussion of the counterfactual dependence of God’s past belief on human future acts is given in Zagzebski (1991, chap 4).

The idea that God’s past beliefs depend upon our future free acts has been enlivened by Trenton Merricks (2009), who argues that the idea appears in Molina (see section 2.6). There is some question how distinct Merricks’ approach is from classic Ockhamism: Fischer and Todd (2011, 2013) argue that Merricks’ solution is simply a form of Ockhamism and suffers from the same defects, while Merricks (2011) replies that the dependency relation between God’s past beliefs and human acts is different from the one at work in Ockham’s approach. The idea, in any case, is that the dependence of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents on the foreknown events themselves, including future exercises of human free will, along with the in dependence of human actions from God’s foreknowledge of them, is the key to defending the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This “Dependence Solution” has gained sufficient currency that it deserves a section of its own, regardless of its relationship to the original Ockhamist strategy.

The Ur -text for this approach is the following passage in Origen of Alexandria’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans:

it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by God before it happens.

The because-relationship in question is stronger than counterfactual dependence, because it can be absent even when counterfactual dependence is present, as in the case of divine foreknowledge. (Though you won’t answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am because God foreknew you would do so, your answering it at 9 tomorrow is nevertheless counterfactually dependent on God’s foreknowledge: were God to have believed yesterday that you won’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, you wouldn’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, and were God to have believed that you will answer at 9, you would answer at 9.) What’s needed is the stronger relationship of explanatory dependence.

Fischer and Tognazzini (2014), in a response to Merricks (2009, 2011), McCall (2011), and Westphal (2011), ask how the dependence point alone shows that the hard past isn’t fixed. That would require that the agent upon whose action the past depends really can act otherwise, and this is just asserted rather than argued. After all, this is the very point at issue, so simply assuming it is to beg the question. Cyr and Law (forthcoming) defend the dialectical appropriateness of the assumption that doing and refraining are both open to the agent.

Todd (2013) challenges the courage of dependence theorists’ convictions with a scenario in which, instead of simply foreknowing that you will perform a certain action tomorrow, God prepunished you for it yesterday. The explanatory relations are the same in the two cases, but your undergoing that punishment yesterday is surely a fixed fact about the past, and your performing that action tomorrow is surely unavoidable. We have no less reason to think that God’s foreknowledge belongs to the fixed past and that foreknown actions are unavoidable. Swenson (2016) and Law (2020) dispute the moral Todd draws from his prepunishment case, appealing to time travel scenarios in which some fact about the past depends on what might yet happen in the future, where our intuitions are supposedly more open to the possibility that the past isn’t entirely fixed.

Swenson (2016) argues that what’s fixed isn’t the past in toto , but so much of the past as isn’t dependent on the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past is fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most other defenders of the dependence solution. After reviewing modal, counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, Wasserman (2021) concludes that causal dependence is the best model for understanding how God can foreknow what you will do because you will do it, and in Wasserman (forthcoming) he argues that the defense of libertarian freedom against theological fatalism is best served by emphasizing the independence of future actions from God’s foreknowledge rather than the dependence of God’s foreknowledge on the foreknown actions.

The dependence solution redirects attention from the temporal to the explanatory order, in which divine foreknowledge depends on future events while future events do not depend on divine foreknowledge. It then proposes that what’s relevant to assessing libertarian agency is the explanatory order--the temporal order is relevant only insofar as it follows the explanatory order, and (when it does follow it) because it follows it. Thus a fact about the past, such as God’s believing yesterday that T , is irrelevant to the libertarian status of a future action if that fact does not explain, and is instead explained by, that future action. This much is consistent with the past’s being fixed and necessary in just the way that premise (2) requires, and consistent with the solution we’ll look at in 2.8 . What the dependence solution adds is that openness in the explanatory order overrides the necessity of the past: any facts about the past that aren’t yet explanatorily fixed, aren’t yet temporally fixed either. So (2) isn’t true in its full generality, and divine foreknowledge is one of the exceptions, blocking the inference to (3).

Whether this additional move is plausible depends on the strength of one’s intuitions about the necessity of the past. If the police are already on the way, summoned by the tachyonic alarm system the bank teller is about to activate, not everyone will share the intuition that the teller still has the option not to press the alarm button.

The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses the “transfer” of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4). Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future. Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment: □ p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ q . But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote 1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the argument for theological fatalism, is rule β (van Inwagen 1983). The necessity-operator featured in this principle is N , where N p is to be read, “ p , and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p .” Rule β states that, given N p and N ( p ⊃ q ), it follows that N q . Counterexamples to rule β were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument to rest on N p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ N q , and this principle appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for theological fatalism is □ t p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ t q , where □ t p is to be read, “p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer avoidable, etc., relative to time t .” This principle, too, seems to have no counterexample.

Duns Scotus (Kenny 1979, 56–58) appears to have challenged this principle. Fischer (1985b) responds to the challenge. But the theory of divine omniscience that has been most closely associated with the denial of (5) is the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. This doctrine was vehemently debated in the 16 th century, with the version of Luis de Molina, referred to as “Molinism,” getting the most attention in the contemporary literature. Recently the doctrine has received strong support by Thomas Flint (1998) and Eef Dekker (2000). Unlike the other compatibilist solutions we are considering, which aim only at showing that infallible foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible, Molinism provides an account of how God knows the contingent future, along with a strong doctrine of divine providence. Middle knowledge is called “middle” because it is said to stand between God’s knowledge of necessary truths and his knowledge of his own creative will. The objects of Middle Knowledge are so-called counterfactuals of freedom:

If person S were in circumstances C , S would freely do X .

Middle knowledge requires that there are true counterfactuals of this form corresponding to every possible free creature and every possible circumstance in which that creature can act freely. These propositions are intended to be contingent (a claim that has been disputed by some objectors), but they are prior to God’s creative will. God uses them in deciding what to create. By combining his Middle Knowledge with what he decides to create, God knows the entire history of the world.

There are a number of objections to Middle Knowledge in the contemporary literature. Robert Adams (1991) argues that Molinism is committed to the position that the truth of a counterfactual of freedom is explanatorily prior to God’s decision to create us. But the truth of a counterfactual to the effect that if I were in circumstance C I would do A is strictly inconsistent with my refraining from A in C , and so my refraining from A in C is precluded by something prior in the order of explanation to my act in C . This is inconsistent with my acting freely in C . Climenhaga and Rubio (forthcoming) clarify the nature of explanatory priority and in so doing affirm the essential correctness of Adams’ analysis. There are a number of other objections to Middle Knowledge in the literature, as well as replies by its defenders. William Hasker (1989, 1995, 1997, 2000) has offered a series of objections and replies to William Craig, who defends Middle Knowledge (1994, 1998). Yet other objections have been proposed by Walls (1990) and Gaskin (1993). Recent critical discussions of Molinism appear in Fischer (2008), Guleserian (2008), and Fales (2010). Defenses of Molinism appear in Brüntrup & Schneider (2011) and Kosciuk (2010), and a critique in Shieber (2009). Perszyk (2011) is a collection of essays examining Molinism and its future direction, while Perszyk (2013) provides a survey of the recent literature.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is defensible. How does that avoid the conclusion of the argument for theological fatalism? Middle Knowledge does not entail the falsehood of any premise of the basic argument. Freddoso (1988, 53–60) argues that Molina rejects the closure of accidental necessity under entailment, but for reasons closer to those inspiring the Dependence Solution (though Molina does not dispute the necessity of the past). Flint (1998) rejects some of the steps of the fatalist argument in addition to defending Middle Knowledge, and more recently blends of Ockhamism and Molinism have been defended (Kosciuk 2010), which suggests that even though the theory of Middle Knowledge is a powerful theory of divine knowledge and providence, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid theological fatalism by itself.

Doubts about premises (2) and (5) can be combined into a more radical critique of the argument. We have already discussed the Ockhamist response, which accepts (2) as applied to what is strictly past, but rejects it as applied to that part of the past that is not wholly or strictly past. It is worth asking, however, whether there is any such thing as the necessity of the past at all. What do we mean when we say that the past, the strict past, is necessary? When people say, “There is no use crying over spilled milk,” they presumably mean that there is nothing anybody can do now about the spilled milk; the spilling of the milk is outside the realm of our causal control. But it is not at all clear that pastness per se puts something outside the realm of our causal control. Rather, it is pastness in conjunction with the metaphysical law that causes must precede their effects. If we decided that effects can precede their causes, it’s quite possible that we would no longer speak of the necessity of the past.

So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future. But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are causally necessary. If a future event E is necessary, it is causable, and not E is not causable. But if the necessity of the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an allegedly distinct kind of necessity since some of the future has that same kind of necessity.

This leads to a deeper problem in the idea of the necessity of the past. Zagzebski (2014) argues that the interpretation of the necessity of the past as a purely temporal modality is confused. What people generally mean by the necessity of the past is that the past is causally closed, meaning the past is neither causable nor preventable. Understood that way, the necessity of the past is not a purely temporal modality, and it is not a form of necessity. The categories of causability and non-causability do not correspond to the standard modal categories of the necessary, possible, and impossible. The attempt to assimilate the causal categories to modal categories is a mistake.

Let us see what happens to the argument for theological fatalism if the necessity of the past is understood as the causal closure of the past.

Let us begin with a definition of causal closure :

E is causally closed = df There is nothing now that can cause E , and there is nothing now that can cause not E .

To use this principle in an argument for fatalism, the principle of the necessity of the past will need to be replaced with the following principle:

Principle of the Causal Closure of the Past : If E is an event in the past, E is causally closed.

We will then need to replace the transfer of necessity principle by the following:

Transfer of Causal Closure Principle : If E occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if E occurs then F occurs), then F is causally closed.

To recast the argument for theological fatalism, let us again consider the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am and call it T :

But (6) denies that there are causes of the future. Certainly we believe that something now, whether agents or events, can cause future events, and the fatalist does not deny that. What the fatalist denies is that we can cause something other than what we cause. So the relevant half of the principle of the causal closure of the past is as follows:

Principle of the Unpreventability of the Past : If E is an event in the past, nothing now can cause not E .

To use this principle in a fatalist argument, we need the following:

Transfer of Unpreventability Principle : If E occurs and it is not now causable that E does not occur, and necessarily (if E occurs, then F occurs), then it is not now causable that F does not occur.

This principle is virtually identical to the transfer of unpreventability principle proposed by Hugh Rice (2005), and is similar to a strengthened form of the well-known principle Beta first proposed by Peter van Inwagen (1983).

Using this principle, we get the following argument for theological fatalism:

From the Principle of the unpreventability of the past we get:

From the definition of divine infallibility we get:

From 2, 3, and the transfer of unpreventability principle we get:

From a variation of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, we get:

From (4) and (5), we get:

This argument for theological fatalism is better than the standard argument if a purely temporal necessity is problematic. The second premise of the above argument is only the principle that the past is unpreventable, not a questionable premise that the past has a special kind of necessity distinct from the causal structure of the universe simply in virtue of being past. But since the unpreventability of the past is not a form of necessity in the formal sense, then the transfer principle licensing the crucial inference to (4) is not a transfer of necessity. Unlike the transfer of temporal necessity principle in our original argument, it is not a variation of an axiom of logic, and is far from indisputable. This suggests that the idea of the necessity of the past may be confused. On the one hand, we have inherited from Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of necessity for which we can formulate an analogue of the formal principles of logical necessity. But the intuitions supporting such a form of necessity are largely intuitions about causability, and the modalities of causability/non-causability do not parallel necessity, possibility, and impossibility. If this is correct, then if there is a true transfer of causability or non-causability principle, it is not because it is like logical necessity in its formal structure. The problem, then, is that the fatalist argument needs a kind of necessity that the past has and which is also transferred to the future via a valid transfer of necessity principle. In section 5 we will look at how this is a general problem that extends beyond the issue of fatalism.

2.8 The rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

Compatibilists who hold that it’s possible for an agent to do otherwise, in the sense required for free will, even if her action is causally determined, will probably be untroubled by an argument purporting to show that no one can do otherwise, given divine foreknowledge. The relevant interlocutors for the argument for theological fatalism are those who endorse a libertarian conception of free will (Alston 1985).

With that in mind, let us now look at premise (9). This is a form of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a principle that has become well-known in the literature on free will ever since it was attacked by Harry Frankfurt (1969) in some interesting thought experiments. The point of Frankfurt’s paper was to drive a wedge between responsibility and alternate possibilities, and to thereby drive a wedge between responsibility and libertarian freedom. In general, those defending libertarian freedom also defend PAP, and those attacking PAP, like Frankfurt, defend determinism, but some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of an incompatibilist about free will and determinism can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Hunt (1999b), Zagzebski (1991, 2000), Pereboom (2000), and Shabo (2010). This view was originally called hyper-incompatibilism by John Martin Fischer, but has recently been called source incompatibilism. For a recent critique of this version of incompatibilism for solving the foreknowledge problem, see Werther (2005) and Talsma (2013).

Here is an example of a typical Frankfurt case intended to show that an agent can act freely even when she lacks alternate possibilities:

Black, an evil neurosurgeon , wishes to see Smith dead but is unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also despises Smith and will have a single good opportunity to kill him, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain that enables Black to monitor and to control Jones’s neurological activity. If the activity in Jones’s brain suggests that she is on the verge of deciding not to kill Smith when the opportunity arises, Black’s mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder Smith on her own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the occasion arises, Jones decides to kill Smith without any “help” from Black’s mechanism. In the judgment of Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act. Nonetheless, it appears that she is unable to do otherwise since if she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by Black’s device.

Most commentators on examples like this agree that the agent is both morally responsible for her act and acts freely in whatever sense of freedom they endorse. They differ on whether she can do otherwise at the time of her act. Determinists generally interpret the case as one in which she exercises compatibilist free will and has no alternate possibilities. Most libertarians interpret it as one in which she exercises libertarian free will and has alternate possibilities, contrary to appearances. As mentioned above, some philosophers have interpreted it as a case in which she exercises libertarian free will but does not have alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt cases can be successfully interpreted in this third way, then they can be used to show the compatibility of infallible foreknowledge and libertarian freedom. Hunt (1999a) argues that this is essentially the solution put forward by Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will III.1–4, though Augustine’s own considered position on free will was not libertarian.

But there is another way Frankfurt cases can be used to argue for the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. There is an important disanalogy between a Frankfurt case and infallible foreknowledge that might lead one to doubt whether an agent really lacks alternate possibilities when her act is infallibly foreknown. A crucial component of the standard Frankfurt case is that the agent is prevented from acting freely in close possible worlds. That aspect of the case is not in dispute. Black’s device is counterfactually manipulative even if it is not actually manipulative. In contrast, infallible foreknowledge is not even counterfactually manipulative. There is no close possible world in which foreknowledge prevents the agent from acting freely. Of course, if theological fatalism is true, nobody ever acts freely, but the point is that there is no manipulation going on in other possible worlds in the foreknowledge scenario. The relation between foreknowledge and human acts is no different in one world than in any other. But it is precisely the fact that the relation between the Frankfurt machine and Mary’s act differs in the actual world from what it is in other close worlds that is supposed to make the Frankfurt example work in showing the falsity of PAP.

To make this point clear, let us look at how the standard Frankfurt case would have to be amended to make it a close analogy to the situation of infallible foreknowledge. As Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 6, sec. 2.1), the device implanted in Mary’s brain would have to be set in such a way that no matter what Mary did, it never intervened. It is not even true that it might have intervened. Any world in which Mary decides to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to make her commit the murder should she not decide to do it, and any world in which she does not decide to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to prevent her from deciding to do it if she is about to decide to do it. Now of course this might be an impossible device, but it would have to be as described to be a close analogy to the foreknowledge scenario. And our reactions to this amended Frankfurt case are very different from typical reactions to the standard Frankfurt case. In the standard case it at least appears to be true that the agent cannot do otherwise, whereas in the case amended to be parallel to the foreknowledge case there is a very straightforward sense in which the agent can do otherwise because her will is not thwarted by Black in any reasonably close possible world. The machine is ready to manipulate her, but it does not manipulate her, nor might it have manipulated her since it does not even manipulate her in counterfactual circumstances. We might think of the machine as a metaphysical accident—an extraneous addition to the story that plays no part in the sequence of events in any possible world. Possibly it is not clear in the amended story whether or not Mary has alternate possibilities. What the story shows, then, is that alternate possibilities are not always relevant to the possession of libertarian freedom.

Disanalogies between the cases are relevant, however, only if the prospects for exempting divine foreknowledge from PAP depend on how closely it mimics Frankfurt-type counterexamples. That assumption may be unwarranted. Augustine’s counterexample to PAP was divine foreknowledge itself, not a proto-Frankfurtian thought experiment featuring a counterfactual intervener. Since God infallibly believed yesterday that you will answer the phone at 9:00 am tomorrow, there is no alternative possibility on which you fail to answer the phone at 9:00 tomorrow morning; but since “a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin” ( CG V.10) and, more generally, “God’s foreknowledge does not force the future to happen” ( FCW III.4), we can still regard your action as free, even in the libertarian sense. So PAP is false, for the same reasons Frankfurt pronounced it false in his story about Black, Smith and Jones: God’s foreknowledge, no less than Black’s mechanism, played no role at all in leading the agent to perform the action, could have been subtracted from the situation without making any difference to what happened or why it happened, and is completely irrelevant to understanding why the agent acted as she did (Frankfurt 1969, 836–7). Divine foreknowledge constitutes its own counterexample to PAP (Hunt 2003).

If this is correct, the following dilemma critique of theological fatalism becomes available (Hunt 2017a). Either the argument fails somewhere along the way to (8), or it succeeds up through (8). If it fails at one of these earlier steps, it fails full stop. That’s the obvious horn of the dilemma. But if it reaches step (8) successfully, and reaches it for those reasons , we have a case in which you cannot do otherwise than answer the phone tomorrow morning, but you are presumptively free in doing so, since you are acting on your own, and the circumstances that deprive you of alternatives do not in any way explain your action. So (9) is false, and it’s falsified by (8). Whether (1)-(8) succeeds or fails, then, the fatalistic inference to (10) is blocked.

Note that this solution shares an intuition with the dependence response surveyed in 2.5, namely, that God’s foreknowledge is explanatorily dependent on future events, and not the other way around. The difference is that the Dependence Solution retains PAP by denying the general necessity of the past, while the Augustinian/Frankfurtian approach is to abandon PAP and stick with the necessity of the past.

Ever since the dilemma of this article was identified, there have been philosophers who thought that something like our basic argument succeeds in demonstrating that infallible foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. If they are incompatible, one of them must be given up. It’s possible to give up both, of course, but that’s more than the argument requires, and one reason the dilemma has attracted so much attention in the history of philosophy is that both the belief in a being with infallible foreknowledge and belief in the existence of libertarian free will are strongly entrenched in the world view of many philosophers. To give up either of these beliefs is difficult and often has many ramifications for one’s other beliefs.

The denial of libertarian freedom has always had many supporters. The idea of making causal determinism the focal point of discussions of free will is modern in origin, and some philosophers think that the modern framing of the issue is confused. Philosophers who deny libertarian freedom may affirm a type of free will compatible with determinism, or they may instead simply accept the consequence that human beings lack free will. It is worth noting, however, that theists who deny libertarian freedom are typically theological determinists rather than fatalists; it’s primarily considerations of divine omnipotence or sovereignty, rather than foreknowledge, that motivate them. When Augustine, for example, rejected human freedom apart from divine control—“I tried hard to maintain the free decision of the human will, but the grace of God was victorious” ( Retractationes 2.1)—it wasn’t because of the fatalist argument from divine foreknowedge, which (as we’ve seen) he regarded as a complete failure. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, based his Calvinist denial of libertarian freedom, in part, on a sophisticated version of the argument for theological fatalism ( FW II.12).

The other incompatibilist position is to affirm libertarian free will along with the principle of alternate possibilities (premise 9), and to deny the possibility of infallible foreknowledge. This position has recently come into prominence through its association with “open theism” (Pinnock et al . 1994). Open theists reject divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible foreknowledge, arguing that not only should foreknowledge be rejected because of its fatalist consequences, but the view of a God who takes risks, and can be surprised and even disappointed at how things turn out, is more faithful to Scripture than the classical notion of an essentially omniscient and foreknowing deity (Sanders 1998, Boyd et al 2001, 13–47). See Rhoda et al (2006) for an argument that the key issue in the open theism debate is the nature of the future, and Tuggy (2007) for an overview of the different positions open theists can take on this question. A reply to both Rhoda et al. and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Fischer, Todd and Tognazzini (2009) offers a wide-ranging appraisal of responses to Pike's argument, paying special attention to open theism and issues in the philosophy of time. For an argument that open theism necessitates the view that propositions about the future lack truth value, see Arbour (2013). Todd disagrees on behalf of the open theist, defending (but without endorsing) the mutability of the future (2016a), and arguing that future contingents are all false rather than truth-valueless (2016b). Boyd (2015) attempts to turn the tables against critics on the grounds that the openist God’s knowledge of all the ways the future might go represents more knowledge than the classical theistic God’s knowledge of the way the future will go. Arbour (2019) is a recent collection of commisioned essays criticizing open theism on philosophical grounds.

One influential argument that open theists use against defenders of foreknowledge who do not also accept Molinism is that foreknowledge without middle knowledge is useless for divine providence. In a number of papers (1993, 1997, 2009), David Hunt has defended the providential utility of foreknowledge without middle knowledge, describing cases in which foreknowledge enhances God’s providential prospects without generating the “metaphysical problem” of explanatory circles, and arguing that the “doxastic problem” of agential impotence when one already knows what one is going to do rests on a principle that is in fact false. Responses to Hunt include Kapitan (1993), Basinger (1993), Robinson (2004a, 2004b), and Hasker (2009). Zimmerman (2012) is friendlier to Hunt’s position.

A related objection to foreknowledge without middle knowledge is that prophecy requires middle knowledge. See Pruss (2007) for a defense of a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. Another issue related to divine providence is the efficacy of past-directed prayers. Kevin Timpe (2005) argues that adherents of simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge and Molinists have the resources to explain the efficacy of prayers about the past, but open theism does not.

A form of fatalism that is even older than theological fatalism is logical fatalism, the thesis that the past truth of a proposition about the future entails fatalism. Aristotle discusses this form of fatalism in his famous Sea Battle Argument, mentioned in section 2.1 above. A clearer and more sophisticated form of the argument was proposed by Diodorus Cronus, whose argument is remarkably similar in form to our basic argument for theological fatalism. The logical fatalist argument parallels our basic argument as follows:

Argument for logical fatalism

Let S = the proposition that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Unlike the argument for theological fatalism, the argument for logical fatalism has few defenders. One reason is that (2L) is less plausible than (2). (3L) is a soft fact about the past, if anything is. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Susan Haack (1974) and William Lane Craig (1987), have maintained that theological fatalism is just a gussied up version of logical fatalism, and that the former is no more impressive than the latter once one looks past the theological window-dressing. This seems to be Merricks’ (2009) position as well, since he holds that theological fatalism fails for essentially the same reason as logical fatalism. Warfield (1997) has argued for the equivalence of the two forms of fatalism if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient. Responses have been given by Hasker (1998) and Brueckner (2000), and Warfield (2000) offers a rejoinder to both. Hunt (2002) links Warfield’s argument with Plantinga’s (1986), discussed in 2.4 , inasmuch as both exploit the logical equivalence of propositions about the contingent future with God’s believing those propositions, and argues that they both fall prey to the same reductio: the closure principles they invoke (closure of consistency under logical equivalence for Warfield, closure of hard/soft facthood under logical equivalence for Plantinga) would equally support the compatibility of free will with divine determinism, an unacceptable result for a libertarian. Peter Graham (2008) argues that the consensus about consistency to which Warfield appeals emerged against the backdrop of an assumption that there is no necessarily existent being, and is therefore question-begging.

5. Beyond theological fatalism

There’s more at stake here than the coherence of libertarian theism, as evidenced by the many non-libertarians and non-theists who have contributed to the debate. A comparison might be helpful. There’s more at stake in Zeno’s Achilles paradox than the fleetness of Achilles and the torpidity of tortoises. If that’s all there was to it, the discovery that Achilles was actually a quadraplegic, or that the tortoises of ancient Greece were as fast as jack rabbits, would resolve the puzzle. But that would simply exempt Achilles and/or the tortoise from complicity in the problem; it would do nothing to address the real issues presented by Zeno’s argument. The situation is arguably the same when it comes to the argument for theological fatalism (Hunt 2017a). If the argument gets God wrong by assuming that he’s in time when he isn’t, the problem possibly goes away for God, once the mistake is corrected, but it’s easily reinstated by replacing God with Gud, an infallibly omniscient being who exists in time. If the argument gets human beings wrong by assuming that they have (libertarian) free will when they don’t, the problem can be reformulated in terms of Gud’s infallible beliefs about the future actions of Eleutherians, a race of extraterrestrials stipulated to possess libertarian freedom. This is to understand the argument for theological fatalism as a thought experiment. Whether or not divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are real, we’re being asked, what if? Could libertarian freedom really be incompatible with divine foreknowledge for the reasons given in the argument ? The answer to this question may involve rethinking more than God and free will.

Zagzebski has argued that the dilemma of theological fatalism is broader than a problem about free will. The modal or causal asymmetry of time, a transfer of necessity principle, and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge are mutually inconsistent. (1991, appendix). If there is a distinct kind of necessity that the past has qua past, and which is not an implicit reference to the lack of causability of the past, then it is temporally asymmetrical. The past has it and the future does not. The necessity of the past and the contingency of the future are two sides of the same coin. To say that the future is contingent in the sense of temporal modality does not imply that we have causal control over the entire future, of course. We lack control over part of the future because part (or even all) of it is causally necessary. But if the necessity of the past is distinct from the lack of causability, and is a type of necessity the past has just because it is past, the future must lack that particular kind of necessity.

The idea that there is temporally asymmetrical modality is inconsistent with the transfer of necessity principle and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge of an essentially omniscient deity. The inconsistency can be demonstrated as follows:

Dilemma of Foreknowledge and Modal Temporal Asymmetry

Again, let T = the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am.

(1f) and the Principle of the Necessity of the Past tells us that

From (1f) and the definition of an EOF it follows that

By the Transfer of Necessity Principle (TNP), (2f) and (3f) entail

(4f) is logically equivalent to

From the Principle of the Contingency of the Future we get

But (6f) contradicts (5f).

The inconsistency shown in this argument has nothing to do with free will or fatalism. In fact, the problem is even more general than this argument illustrates. The reason essential omniscience conflicts with temporal modality and the transfer principle is that the existence of an EOF requires that a proposition about the past entails a proposition about the future. But it straightforwardly follows from TNP that a proposition that is now-necessary cannot entail a proposition that is not now-necessary. So if the past is now-necessary and the future is not, a proposition about the past cannot entail a proposition about the future. The conclusion is that if asymmetrical temporal modality is coherent, it can obey TNP, or it can permit a proposition about the past to entail a proposition about the future, but not both.

The root of the problem, then, is that it is impossible for there to be a type of modality that has the following features:

So the problem of the alleged incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and free will is a special case of a more general problem about time and necessity. It was suggested in section 2.6 that the problem may be (a) above. There is no temporally asymmetrical necessity. But regardless of what one thinks of fatalist arguments, the general problem in the logic of time and causation needs to be addressed. Both the alleged modal asymmetry of time and the causal asymmetry should be examined in more detail.

The problem of foreknowledge and fatalism has been around for a long time, but the amount of philosophical attention it has attracted since 1965 is truly remarkable. The literature on this problem is enormous, and it continues to grow.

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Aristotle | Augustine, Saint | Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus | fatalism | freedom: divine | free will | God: and other ultimates | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | Ockham [Occam], William | voluntarism, theological

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Thinking about Free Will

Peter van Inwagen, Thinking about Free Will , Cambridge University Press, 2017, 232pp., $99.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781316617656.

Reviewed by Peter A. Graham, University of Massachusetts Amherst

No one writes more sensibly about the traditional philosophical problem of free will than does Peter van Inwagen. This book, a collection of his essays on free will, ought to join his An Essay on Free Will , the best modern treatment of the topic, on the shelf of anyone seriously considering the cluster of issues which constitute the traditional philosophical problem of free will. It is an excellent volume.

In what follows I’ll first very briefly canvas some of the main issues touched upon in the essays and then discuss one of them -- the most important, in my view -- in a bit more depth.

Among that which is defended in Thinking about Free Will are the theses that:

• Frankfurt’s famous counterexample notwithstanding, whether being able to do otherwise than one in fact does is compatible with determinism is relevant to the question whether blameworthiness and determinism are compatible (chapters 1 and 6),
• because of the joint plausibility of the Consequence Argument and the Mind Argument, free will remains a mystery (chapters 7 and 10),
• the terminology used in much of the contemporary free will debate (including the phrase “free will” itself) obscures the real philosophical issues at play in the traditional philosophical problem of free will (chapters 12 and 13),
• the notion of ability central to the traditional philosophical problem of free will is one intimately connected with a certain conception of a defective promise (chapters 7, 11, and 14),
• rarely are we ever in a situation such that we are able to do otherwise than we in fact do (chapter 5), and
• David Lewis’s response to the Consequence Argument in his “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” fails (chapter 9).

This is not all that is defended in the essays, but it constitutes, in my view, that of what is defended therein which is most interesting. There is indeed a fair amount of overlap across the various essays, but this is a feature rather than a bug, for much of what is repeated bears repeating. Aside from the last of them, I don’t propose to explore in any detail van Inwagen’s arguments for the above-listed theses. I do, however, want to push back on van Inwagen’s response to Lewis’s reply to the Consequence Argument, and I’ll spend the rest of this review doing just that.

I share van Inwagen’s admiration for David Lewis’s “Are We Free to Break the Laws?”. (I concur with him in his assessment that it is “the finest essay that has ever been written in defense of compatibilism -- possibly the finest essay that has ever been written about any aspect of the free will problem” (p. 152)). In what follows I shall reiterate the reply to the Consequence Argument Lewis presents in that paper [1] and offer a rebuttal on behalf of Lewis to van Inwagen’s response to it in his “Freedom to Break the Laws” (chapter 9).

The Consequence Argument, in whichever form one considers, derives the incompatibility of determinism and our having the ability to act otherwise than we in fact act from our inabilities both to affect the past and to affect the laws of nature. The essence of Lewis’s reply to this argument is to point out that there is a sense -- and, importantly, a nonstandard sense -- of having the ability to affect the past and having the ability to affect the laws of nature which is such that it is not at all counterintuitive to suppose that we have those abilities, and that it is only our having those abilities in such a nonstandard sense that our having the ability to do otherwise in a deterministic world entails.

It most certainly is intuitive that I’m unable to affect or change the past. For instance, I’m not able to change or affect the fact that Anne Boleyn was beheaded. It’s also quite plausible that I’m unable to affect or change the laws of nature. For instance, I’m unable to change or affect the fact that angular momentum is conserved. Lewis concurs. But Lewis also points out that my being able to affect or change something, in its standard sense, is my having the ability to make it the case that the thing in question is otherwise than it in fact is. And this notion of making something the case, as we ordinarily understand it, is one that has either a causal or a constitutive sense. I am able to make it the case that a certain window is broken -- i.e., I am able to break the window -- only in virtue of my being able to do something such that were I to do it my doing it would cause the window’s breaking. I am able to make it the case that my arm rises -- i.e., I am able to raise my arm -- only in virtue of my being able to do something such that were I to do it my doing it would be my raising my arm. Whenever we make it the case that something happens, we do so by doing something that either causes that thing to happen or constitutes that thing’s happening, and so our having the ability to make something happen is our having the ability to do something that causes or constitutes that thing’s happening.

What is intuitive about our inabilities with respect to the laws of nature and the past is that we aren’t able to make it the case that these things are otherwise than they actually are. But, and here’s Lewis’s point, we needn’t be able to make it the case that a law of nature is broken, or that the past is different from how it actually was for us, to be able to have the ability to do otherwise than we in fact do in a deterministic world.

Suppose the actual world, @, is deterministic and that I fail to raise my hand at t 1 . Supposing also that I have the ability to raise my hand at t 1 , though it does entail that I have the ability to do something such that, were I to do it, a law of nature would be broken, [2] needn’t entail that I have the ability to make it the case that a law of nature is broken. Remember, my having the ability to make it the case that a law of nature is broken would be for me to have the ability to do something such that, were I to do it, my doing it either would be or would cause a law-breaking event. But we can suppose that I am able to raise my hand at t 1 in @ without supposing that I am able to do something such that, were I to do it, my doing it either would be or would cause a law-breaking event. All we need suppose is that were I to exercise the ability I have in @ to raise my hand at t 1 , the miraculous event, m , in non-actual possible world, w , that would indeed occur were I to exercise my ability to raise my hand would occur sometime shortly prior to t 1 , at t 0 , say, and not be caused by my raising of my hand at t 1 in w . So long as the event of my raising my hand, r , is neither identical with, nor causes, m in w (rather, it would be m which causes r in w ), my having the ability in @ to raise my hand at t 1 doesn’t entail that I am able to make it the case that m , or any other law-breaking event, occurs.

Van Inwagen complains of this reply that it is, in effect, to attribute to us, ordinary everyday agents such as you and me, the ability to perform miracles. And no one has the ability to perform a miracle. Lewis would agree that no one has the ability to perform miracles. But, he’d go on to note, having the ability to perform a miracle is the ability to make it the case that a miracle happens, and as he’s shown, one can have the ability to do something other than what one actually does in a deterministic world without thereby having the ability to make it the case that a miracle happens. On Lewis’s view having the ability to do otherwise than one in fact does in a deterministic world also entails having the ability to do something such that, were one to do it, the recent (though not the distant) past would have been different from how it actually was. But again, as m would occur prior to, and not be caused by, r in w , this ability would not be an ability to make it the case that the past is different from how it actually was.

I imagine van Inwagen would respond to this as follows: “Fine. Having the ability to do otherwise than one in fact does in a deterministic world doesn’t entail having the ability to make it the case that a miracle occurs. Nevertheless, it does entail that one have the ability to do something such that were one to do it a miracle would occur. And that -- just that! -- is implausible.” Here, Lewis would demur. “No, it’s not implausible that one have such an ability. All that’s intuitive is that we’re unable to make it the case that a miracle occurs. And that’s because our ordinary and intuitive notion of being able to do something -- the only notion we can be said to have any robust intuitions with respect to -- is the constitutive/causal notion of being able to make something be the case. We have no robust intuitions (if we have any intuitions at all) as regards other purely counterfactual relations between our abilities to do things and the laws of nature and the past.”

What’s more, we can even give some support to Lewis’s contention that we have the ability to do something such that, were we to do it, the past would have been different from how it in fact was, and thereby support the claim that we have the ability to do something such that, were we to do it, the laws of nature would have been different from how they in fact are. Consider the following. In front of Alice is a button. She has no desire whatsoever to press the button at or before t 1 . In fact, she has no desire whatsoever that could rationalize (to use Davidson’s phrase) her pressing the button at or before t 1 . And so, she doesn’t press the button at t 1 . But then we ask her: “Hey Alice, were you able to press the button at t 1 ?” Her reply: “Of course! In fact, I was indeed musing about pressing the button right up until t 1 , but, having no desire whatsoever to press it, opted against it.” We say: “You say you had no desire to press the button leading up to t 1 ?” “True enough,” she replies. “So would you have wanted to press the button at t 1 just prior to t 1 had you pressed the button at t­ 1 ?” “Yeah, I would. Why would I press it if I didn’t?” “So you’re saying you had the ability to do something such that, were you to have done it, the past prior to your doing it would have been slightly different than it actually was -- you would have had a desire which you in fact lacked?” “Yeah. That seems right. I guess I did have that ability.”

In our story above we conclude that Alice has the ability to do something, namely press the button, such that, were she to do it, the (very recent) past would have been different from how it actually was. And we reasoned our way to that conclusion from some innocuous assumptions: that she was able to press the button at t 1 and that she lacked a desire to press it at and before t 1 . [3] (Note, in our story, nowhere did we assume either that determinism was true or that it was false.) But if we can support the thought that Alice might indeed have the ability to do something such that, were she to do it, the (recent) past would have been different from how it actually was despite the utter obviousness that she doesn’t have the ability to make it the case that the past (even the recent past) is different from how it actually was, then so too can we see how we might have the ability to do something such that, were we to do it, a law of nature would have been broken, even despite the sheer obviousness of our being unable to make it the case that a law of nature is broken.

(We can most certainly describe the ability to do something such that, were one to do it, a miracle would occur, as a way of being able to perform a miracle, if we like. But so describing it would not be the ordinary, standard understanding of what it is to have the ability to perform a miracle. And so, as that’s the case, Lewis can grant the proponent of the Consequence Argument that being able to do otherwise than one in fact does in a deterministic world entails having the ability to perform a miracle in that sense. But granting that is not a serious cost, because it isn’t intuitive that people lack the ability to perform miracles in that nonstandard sense of the phrase.)

Lewis’s reply to the Consequence Argument is subtle, but it is decisive. He has located its Achilles heel and shot an arrow straight through it. Does the demise of the Consequence Argument establish Compatibilism? Certainly not. At most, the Lewisian reply merely undermines the best argument for Incompatibilism extant. That’s no small feat, however. And in the absence of any argument for Incompatibilism, Compatibilism’s prospects are no worse than that of its denial. [4]

Lewis gets the better of van Inwagen when it comes to the Consequence Argument. This notwithstanding, van Inwagen’s defenses of the Consequence Argument and of all the theses for which he advocates in Thinking about Free Will are significant and very important. For anyone interested in the traditional philosophical problem of free will, one can do no better, aside from reading Lewis’s “Are We Free to Break the Laws?”, than study closely van Inwagen’s An Essay on Free Will and Thinking about Free Will .

[1] Though I shall do this using terminology somewhat different from that used by Lewis in his presentation of the reply, I take it that what I shall present is his reply in its essence. To the degree that I fail to do it justice, that is more a reflection of my own limited philosophical acumen than it is of the merits of the Lewisian reply itself.

[2] More precisely, it entails that I have the ability to do something such that, were I to do it, either a law would be broken or the entire past would have been different from how it in fact was. But if we also suppose (as Lewis does) that I don’t have the ability to do something such that, were I to do it, the entire past would have been different from how it in fact was, we can grant that having the ability to do otherwise than one in fact does in a deterministic world does entail having the ability to do something such that were one to do it a law of nature would be broken.

[3] This is not the conclusion van Inwagen would draw from our story. In fact, he’d say that because she had no desire to press the button, Alice was not able at t 1 to press the button. This, after all, is one of the conclusions of his “When Is the Will Free?” (chapter 5). But here we’ve reached an important philosophical decision point. Which is more plausible: that a person have the ability to do something even when they lack a desire to do it, or that one not be able to do something such that were she to do it the (recent) past would have been slightly different from how it actually was? Because it seems quite plausible that having the ability to do something at a time does not simply vanish when one lacks a desire to do it, reasoning from that to the claim that one sometimes is able to act in such a way that the (recent) past would have been slightly different from how it actually was (an ability it is not intuitive that we don’t have) is on surer ground than is arguing the other way around from the impossibility of being able to act in such a way that the (recent) past would have been slightly different from how it actually was to its being impossible to have the ability to do something when one lacks a desire to do it.

[4] In fact, one might think that in the absence of an argument for Incompatibilism, Compatibilism’s prospects are even slightly better than those of its denial. For, on very general philosophical grounds, you might think, in the absence of a reason to think that two things are incompatible, it’s more plausible to think that they’re compatible rather than not.

Free Will Skepticism: Current Arguments and Future Directions

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• Published: 11 July 2014
• Volume 7 , pages 383–386, ( 2014 )

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Offered here is a review of Gregg D. Caruso’s edited volume, Exploring the Illusion of Free will and Moral Responsibility [ 1 ]. Assembled here are essays by nearly all the major contributors to the philosophical free will debate on the denial and skeptical side. The volume tells us where the field currently is and also gives us a sense of how the free will debate is actually advancing toward greater understanding. Perhaps we can even discern some glimmer of hope for a resolution or a degree of consensus that could, in the near future, underlie or give rise to practical engagements to bring about significant social transformations and innovations toward a more humane society.

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Free will is the idea that humans have the ability to make their own choices and determine their own fates. Is a person’s will free, or are people's lives in fact shaped by powers outside of their control? The question of free will has long challenged philosophers and religious thinkers, and scientists have examined the problem from psychological and neuroscientific perspectives as well.

• Does Free Will Exist?
• Why Beliefs About Free Will Matter

Scientists have investigated the concept of human agency at the level of neural circuitry, and some findings have been taken as evidence that conscious decisions are not truly “free.” Free will skeptics argue that the subjective sense of free will is an illusion. Yet many scholars, as well as ordinary people, still profess a belief in free will, even if they acknowledge that choices are partly shaped by forces outside of one's control.

Behavioral science has made plain that individuals’ behavioral tendencies are influenced by genetics , as well as by factors in the environment that may be outside of a person’s control. This suggests that there are, at least, some constraints on the range of decisions and behaviors a person will be inclined to make (or even to consider) in any given situation. Challengers of the idea that people act the way they do due to conscious, unconstrained choices also point to evidence that unconscious brain activity can partly predict a choice before a conscious decision is made. And some have sought to logically refute the argument that choices necessarily demonstrate free will.

While there are many reasons to believe that a person’s will is not completely free of influence, there is not a scientific consensus against free will. Some use the term “free will” in a looser sense to reflect that conscious decisions play a role in the outcomes of a person’s life—even if those are shaped by innate dispositions or randomness. (Critics of the concept of free will might simply call this kind of decision-making “will,” or volition.) Even when unconscious processes help determine a person’s conscious behavior, some argue, such processes can still be thought of as part of an individual’s will.

Determinism is the idea that every event, including every human action, is the result of previous events and the laws of nature. A belief in determinism that includes a rejection of free will has been called “hard determinism.”

From a deterministic perspective, there is only one possible way that future events can unfold based on what has already occurred and the rules that govern the universe—though that doesn’t mean such events can necessarily be predicted by humans. Someone who believes in free will because they do not take determinism for granted is called, in philosophy , a “libertarian.”

Yes. This is called “compatibilism” or “soft determinism.” A compatibilist believes that even though events are predetermined, there is still some version of free will at work in decision-making . An incompatibilist argues that only determinism or free will can be true.

Whether free will exists or not, belief in free will is very real. Does it matter if a person believes that her choices are completely her own, and that other people’s choices are freely made, too? Psychologists have explored the connections between free will beliefs—often gauged by agreement with statements like “I am in charge of my actions even when my life’s circumstances are difficult” and, simply, “I have free will”—and people’s attitudes about decision-making, blame, and other variables of consequence.

The more people agree with claims of free will , some research suggests, the more they tend to favor internal rather than external explanations for someone else’s behavior. This may include, for example, learning of someone’s immoral deed and agreeing more strongly that it was a result of the person’s character and less that factors like social norms are to blame. (A study of whether reducing free-will beliefs influenced sentencing decisions by actual judges, however, did not show any effect. )

One idea proposed in philosophy is that systems of morality would collapse without a common belief that each person is responsible for his actions—and thus deserves reward or punishment for them. In this view, there is value in maintaining belief in free will, even if free will is in fact an illusion. Others argue that morality can exist in the absence of free-will belief, or that belief in free will actually promotes harmful outcomes such as intolerance and revenge-seeking. Some psychology research has been cited as suggesting that disbelief in free will increases dishonest behavior, but subsequent experiments have called this finding into question.

Mental illness can be thought of, in a sense, as involving additional constraints on the freedom of a person’s will (in the form of rigid thought patterns or compulsions, for instance), beyond the usual factors that shape thinking and behavior. Belief in free will, it has been argued, may contribute to the stigma attached to mental illness by obscuring the role of underlying biological and environmental causes.

There is limited evidence that people who believe more strongly in free will may tend to perceive at least some kinds of choices—such as buying electronics or deciding what to watch on TV—as easier to make, and that they may enjoy making choices more.

Two concepts from psychology that bear similarity to belief in free will are “ locus of control ” and “ self-efficacy .” Locus of control refers to a person’s belief about how much power he has over his life—how important factors like intentions and hard work seem to be compared to external forces such as good luck or the actions of others. Self-efficacy is a person’s sense of her ability to perform at a certain level so as to influence events that affect them. While all of these concepts relate to the factors that steer a person’s life, they are distinct—one can doubt that humans have free will, for example, and still be confident in her ability to win a competition .

As initiatives are discussed surrounding involuntary psychiatric care, an important element is ignored. The quality of treatment in the hospital is often poor.

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Kierkegaard's philosophy offers insights into living authentically and finding fulfillment amidst the distractions and pressures of the modern world.

If the days of bettering oneself through a liberal arts education have transformed into simply “making more money,” then let’s just teach kids to write ransom notes.

As brains evolved in complexity, they acquired top-down control systems, such that bottom-up inputs cannot completely predict behavioral outputs. Does this mean we have free-will?

New theoretical work helps us understand which aspects of emotional processing can and cannot be controlled.

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The "mysteries" of concern to Freud and Jung were restricted to semantic processes, which today are not a mystery. But consciousness remains a true mystery.

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Dopamine is the molecule that makes us feel good about expending effort. Motivation neurobiology reveals ways to enhance effort without extra calories, drugs, or risk.

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The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays

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Student Writing Sample: “Do We Have Free Will?”

Do we have free will? CISL San Francisco students were asked this question last month for our writing contest. The winning entry, from Maxime Bindzi, is a wonderful example of a five-paragraph English essay. Enjoy his musings on free will. Congratulations, Maxime! Your writing skills are truly impressive!

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Hypothesis and theory article, free will and neuroscience: from explaining freedom away to new ways of operationalizing and measuring it.

• Neuroethics, Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo, Italy

The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life. For centuries people have wondered how freedom is possible in a world ruled by physical determinism; however, reflections on free will have been confined to philosophy until half a century ago, when the topic was also addressed by neuroscience. The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. (1983) , which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions taking place in decisions regarded as free and voluntary. Libet’s interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) seems to favor a sort of deflation of freedom ( Soon et al., 2008 ). However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors ( Schurger et al., 2016 ). This interpretation seems to bridge the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it ( Roskies, 2010b ), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. The article therefore, proposes to start from an operationalizable concept of free will ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases. This new way to conceptualize free will should be linked to the idea of “capacity”: that is, the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without moment by moment conscious control. The capacity index, which is also able to take into account the differences of time scales in decisions, includes reasons-responsiveness and is related to internal control, understood as the agent’s ownership of the mechanisms that trigger the relevant behavior. Cognitive abilities, needed for one to have capacity, might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Subsequently, a free will index would allow for the search of the underlying neural correlates of the capacity exhibited by people and the limits in capacity exhibited by each individual.

Introduction—Free Will as a Problem (Not Only) for Science

The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life ( Kane, 2005 ). Free will can be the reason why someone is not sent to jail during a trial upon appealing to insanity: the subject was not “free” when they committed the crime, not because someone was pointing a gun to their head, but because a psychiatric illness prevented them from controlling their actions. According to a long-standing philosophical tradition, if someone was not “free” when they did something, they cannot be held responsible for their deed ( Glannon, 2015 ). And the freedom in question is both “social” freedom (linked to constraints imposed by our peers or by external factors), and the one indicated by the term free will .

Free will can be defined by three conditions ( Walter, 2001 ). The first one is the “ability to do otherwise.” This is an intuitive concept: to be free, one has to have at least two alternatives or courses of action between which to choose. If one has an involuntary spasm of the mouth, for example, one is not in the position to choose whether to twist one’s mouth or not. The second condition is the “control over one’s choices.” The person who acts must be the same who decides what to do. To be granted free will, one must be the author of one’s choices, without the interference of people and of mechanisms outside of one’s reach. This is what we call agency, that is, being and feeling like the “owner” of one’s decisions and actions. The third condition is the “responsiveness to reasons”: a decision can’t be free if it is the effect of a random choice, but it must be rationally motivated. If I roll a dice to decide whom to marry, my choice cannot be said to be free, even though I will freely choose to say “I do”. On the contrary, if I choose to marry a specific person for their ideas and my deep love for them, then my decision will be free.

Thus defined, free will is a kind of freedom that we are willing to attribute to all human beings as a default condition. Of course there are exceptions: people suffering from mental illness and people under psychotropic substances ( Levy, 2013 ). Nevertheless, the attribution of free will as a general trend does not imply that all decisions are always taken in full freedom, as outlined by the three conditions illustrated above: “We often act on impulse, against our interests, without being fully aware of what we are doing. But this does not imply that we are not potentially able to act freely. Ethics and law have incorporated these notions, adopting the belief that usually people are free to act or not to act in a certain way and that, as a result, they are responsible for what they do, with the exceptions mentioned above” ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ).

It is commonly experienced that the conditions of “ability to do otherwise”, “control” and “responsiveness to reasons” are very rarely at work all at once. Moreover, they would require further discussion, because there is wide disagreement on those conditions as regards their definition and scope ( Kane, 2016 ). But for the purposes of this article, this introductory treatment should suffice. In fact, the description of free will that I have sketched here is the one that dominated the theoretical discourse on, and practical applications of, the evaluation of human actions. From a philosophical point of view, however, starting with Plato, the main problem has been that of the actual existence of freedom, beyond the appearances and the insights that guide our daily life. The main challenge to free will has been determinism: the view that everything that happens (human decisions and actions included) is the consequence of sufficient conditions for its occurrence ( Berofsky, 2011 ). More specifically, “It is the argument that all mental phenomena and actions are also, directly or indirectly, causally produced—according to the laws of nature (such as those of physics and neurobiology)—by previous events that lie beyond the control of the agents” ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). Determinism was first a philosophical position; then, the birth of Galilean science—founded on the existence of immutable laws that are empirically verifiable—has increased its strength, giving rise to the concept of incompatibilism, namely the idea that free will and natural determinism cannot coexist. Only one of them can be true.

Throughout the centuries, despite its conceptual progress, philosophy hasn’t been able to solve this dilemma. As a result, today there are different irreconcilable positions about human free will: determinism is not absolute and free will exists; free will does not exist for a number of reasons, first of all (but not only) determinism; free will can exist even if determinism is true ( Kane, 2011 ). A little more than 30 years ago, neuroscience and empirical psychology came into play. Although biological processes cannot be considered strictly deterministic on the observable level of brain functioning (nerve signal transmission), new methods of investigation of the brain, more and more precise, have established that the cerebral base is a necessary condition of behavior and even of mental phenomena. On the basis of these acquisitions, neuroscience has begun to provide experimental contributions to the debate on free will.

In order to better understand the neural bases of free will, provided that there are any, in this article I’ll review and integrate findings from studies in different fields (philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, experimental and clinical psychology, neuropsychology). Unlike previous reviews on free will and neuroscience ( Haggard, 2008 , 2009 ; Passingham et al., 2010 ; Roskies, 2010a ; Brass et al., 2013 ), I have no claim of being exhaustive. My goal is to highlight a paradigm shift in the analysis and interpretation of the brain determinants preceding and/or causing free or voluntary action ( Haggard, 2008 takes voluntary decision to be non-stimulus driven, as much as possible). Firstly, following Libet’s experiments, a widespread interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) went in the direction of a deflation of freedom ( Crick, 1994 ; Greene and Cohen, 2004 ; Cashmore, 2010 ; Harris, 2012 ). Indeed, the discovery of the role of the RP has been taken as evidence of the fact that free will is an illusion, since it seems that specific brain areas activate before we are aware of the onset of the movement. However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors ( Schurger et al., 2016 ). This interpretation seems to bridge, at least partially, the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it ( Roskies, 2010b ), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. After analyzing the change of paradigm of these perspectives, I’ll propose to start from an operationalizable concept of free will ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases.

Neuroscience: Purporting to Explain Free Will

The discovery of the readiness potential.

As a preliminary consideration, it is important to underline that the idea of using an experiment (or a series of experiments) to establish whether the human being can be said to have free will implies accepting a direct link between a measurement of brain functioning and a pre-existing theoretical construct. This direct connection, as it is known, presents several problems and as we shall see, needs conceptual refinement to avoid simplifications and unfounded claims. What one can see and measure in brain activity may in fact only grasp a part of the idea of free will that we would like to test. This was one of the main criticisms to the experiments conducted so far ( Mele, 2009 ; Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ). What is measured at the level of brain functioning in the laboratory does not match the concept of free will we refer to, for example, to determine whether someone who engaged in violent behavior could have done otherwise in that specific circumstance.

The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. (1983) , which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions affecting decisions regarded as free and voluntary. It should be noted that the concepts involved—“conscious intentions”, “voluntary decisions”, “free decisions”—have no clear and shared definition ( Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ), and the experiments themselves have been differently interpreted and often criticized ( Lavazza and De Caro, 2010 ). In any case, Libet’s experiments and their variants have been repeated several times until very recently, confirming their findings with a sufficient degree of reliability.

Libet based his work on Kornhuber and Deecke’s (1965) discovery of the bereitschaftpotential : the RP, a slow build-up of a scalp electrical potential (of a few microvolts), mainly measured through electroencephalography (EEG), that precedes the onset of subjectively SVM ( Kornhuber and Deecke, 1965 ). According to its discoverers, the RP is “the electro-physiological sign of planning, preparation, and initiation of volitional acts” ( Kornhuber and Deecke, 1990 ). “The neurobiologist John Eccles speculated that the subject must become conscious of the intention to act before the onset of this RP. Libet had the idea that he should test Eccles’s prediction” ( Doyle, 2011 ).

In his experiments, Libet invited the participants to move their right wrist and to report the precise moment when they had the impression that they decided to do so, thanks to a big clock they had in front of them ( Libet et al., 1983 ). In this way, it was possible to estimate the time of awareness with respect to the beginning of the movement, measured using an electromyogram (which records the muscle contraction). During the execution of the task, brain electrical activity was recorded through electrodes placed on the participants’ scalps. The attention was focused on a specific negative brain potential, namely the RP, originated from the supplementary motor area (SMA): a brain area involved in motor preparation, which is visible in the EEG signal as a wave that starts before any voluntary movement, while being absent or reduced before involuntary and automatic movements.

When one compares the subjective “time” of decision and what appeared at a cerebral level, the result appears as a striking blow to the traditional view of free will ( Libet, 1985 , 2004 ). In the experiment, the RP culminating in the execution of the movement starts in the prefrontal motor areas long before the time when the subject seems to have made the decision: participants became aware of their intention to take action about 350 ms after the onset of such potential. The volitional process is detected to start unconsciously 550 ms before the action is made in the case of non-preplanned acts and 1000 ms before in the case of preplanned acts. Thus these findings seem to show that our simple actions (and therefore, potentially, also more complex ones) are triggered by unconscious neural activity and that the awareness of those actions only occurs at a later time, when we think we are willing to act.

In the first phase of its intervention in the debate on free will, therefore, neuroscience seemed to argue for a deflation of freedom. Neuroscientists identified a specific aspect of the notion of freedom (the conscious control of the start of the action) and researched it: the experimental results seemed to indicate that there is no such conscious control, hence the conclusion that free will does not exist. However, it is important to highlight that this interpretation strongly depends on the idea that free choices or actions are fully internally generated, in the sense that they are not externally determined—where “external” means outside the subject’s conscience and the subject is something akin to the self. As we shall see, though, this distinction seems to be neither relevant nor truly informative when considering if and how choices are free.

In fact, Libet left the subject some time to veto: about 150 ms. This is the time needed for the muscles to flex in response to the command of the primary motor cortex (M2) through the spinal motor nerve cells. In the last 50 ms the action is realized with its external manifestations (bending the wrist) without any more possible intervention by the prefrontal brain areas (see “The Veto Power” Section). Libet thought there was a role for conscious will precisely in this situation: conscious will can let the action go to completion or it can block it with the explicit veto of the movement implemented by the prefrontal areas ( Doyle, 2011 ). But the intentional inhibition of an action (a decision itself) is preceded by neural activity as well ( Filevich et al., 2012 , 2013 ). So it cannot be a completely different decision from that to take a positive decision to act.

In their experiments, Haggard and Eimer (1999) used Libet’s method, but asked the participants to perform a different task. They had to move at will either the right index finger or the left in a series of repeated trials. The authors have compared the RP and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) in trials in which awareness appeared in shorter or longer time, that is, considering the latency of awareness compared to the RP. In their words, “the RP tended to occur later on trials with early awareness of movement initiation than on trials with late awareness, ruling out the RP as a cause of our awareness of movement initiation. However, the LRP occurred significantly earlier on trials with early awareness than on trials with late awareness, suggesting that the processes underlying the LRP may cause our awareness of movement initiation” ( Haggard and Eimer, 1999 ). From this, one can deduce that the awareness of the intention to move one finger or the other comes after the decision was “taken by the brain”, as reflected in the LRP.

Sirigu et al. (2004) and Desmurget et al. (2009) have shown that, repeating Libet’s experiments on patients with parietal lesions, it appears that they become aware of their decision to take action only when the action itself is being carried out. In these subjects the awareness of the decision does not even come before the beginning of the movement, as it tends to coincide with the motor action. It seems that in such cases the brain alteration has reduced, if not cancelled altogether, the interval of consciousness preceding the actual implementation of the action. The authors proposed that when a movement is planned, activity in the parietal cortex, as part of a cortical sensorimotor processing loop, generates a predictive internal model of the upcoming movement. And this model might form the neural correlate of motor awareness.

Fried et al. (2011) recorded the activity of 1019 neurons as 12 subjects performed self-initiated finger movements. They found progressive neuronal recruitment, particularly in the SMA, over 1500 ms before subjects reported making the decision to move. A population of 256 SMA neurons was sufficient to predict in single trials the impending decision to move: 700 ms before the participants became aware of the decision, the accuracy of the prevision was higher than 80%. Fried et al. (2011) were also able to predict, “with a precision of a few 100 ms, the time point of that voluntary decision to move”, and they implemented a computational model thanks to which “volition emerged when a change in the internally generated firing rate of neuronal assemblies crossed a certain threshold”.

Unreliability of the Conscious Intention

A slightly different trend of research compared to Libet’s comprises studies suggesting that the conscious intention of an action is strongly influenced by events that occur after the action itself was performed. In this sense, intentions are therefore partially reconstructed according to a process of inference, based on elements that come after the action. For instance, a study by Lau et al. (2006) has produced results that empirically support this hypothesis. The authors have used transcranic magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the pre-supplementary motor (pre-SM) area, while the subjects were performing Libet’s task. The stimulation of the pre-SM through TMS happened at different time intervals, in relation to a simple voluntary movement. When the stimulation was applied 200 ms after the movement, the judgment W was moved back in time, indicating that the perception of the intention was influenced by the neural activity of the pre-SM after the motor action was made (cf. also Lau et al., 2004 ; Lau and Passingham, 2007 ).

In another experiment, Banks and Isham (2009) have set a slightly different version of Libet’s task: participants were asked to push a button whenever they wanted, and later they had to indicate the precise moment when they had the intention to do so. When they pushed the button, subject received an auditory feedback with a delay from 5 to 60 ms, so as to give them the impression that the response happened after they pushed the button. Even though the subjects weren’t aware of the delay between the action and the auditory feedback, the intention to press the button was reported as happening later in time, according to a linear function with the delay of the auditory signal feedback. The identification of the moment in which the subject had intended to press the button—measured by judgment W—was therefore largely determined by the apparent time of the subject’s response, and not the actual answer. This result indicates that the people evaluate the time when they have had the intention to take an action based on the consequences of their action and not just on the motor action itself.

Kühn and Brass (2009) conducted an experiment combining the paradigm of the stop signal ( Logan et al., 1984 ) with an intentional action paradigm. The subjects had to react in the quickest possible way by pushing a button as soon as a stimulus (e. g., a letter) was displayed at the center of a computer screen. Sometimes, just after the presentation of the stimulus, either a stop signal or a decision signal was shown: in the first case, the subjects had to try to stop responding; in the second case they could decide whether to press the button or stop responding. In the decision trials in which subjects had provided an answer, the subjects were asked if it had actually been the result of a decision, or if it had been inhibited—that is, if they had not been able to stop before the decision signal was presented.

The results have shown that in some instances, the subjects judged as intentional responses—i.e., as the result of a decision—those answers that in reality, on the basis of reaction times, were failed inhibitions. In other words, sometimes the subjects had a subjective experience of having intentionally decided to perform an action that they had actually not decided to take. These studies have empirically supported the hypothesis that the intentions to take voluntary actions are strongly influenced by events occurring after the execution of the action. In addition, they seem to confirm that the brain motor system produces a movement as the final result of its inputs and outputs; consciousness would be “informed” of the fact that a movement is going to occur and this would produce the subjective perception that the movement was decided voluntarily ( Hallett, 2007 ).

Predicting Choices

More recently, studying the activity of the frontal and parietal cortex, other neuroscientists of the group coordinated by Soon et al. (2008 , 2013) have managed to detect the “rise” of a behavioral or abstract choice/decision (to move either the right finger or the left one; to perform a mathematical operation or another with two numbers) a few seconds before the subject becomes aware of it. An unconscious brain process has already “decided” what to do when the subject still does not know what she would choose and thinks she still has the power to decide. More precisely, Soon et al. (2008) studied “free decisions” between many behavioral options using the multivariate pattern classification analysis (MVPA) which, combined with fMRI, allows one to identify specific contents of cognitive processes. “A pattern classifier, usually adopted from machine learning, can be trained on exemplars of neural patterns acquired when participants make different decisions and can learn to distinguish between these. If the activation patterns contain information about the decisions, the trained classifier can then successfully predict decision outcomes from independent data” ( Bode et al., 2014 ).

In Soon et al.’s (2008) experiment, subjects carried out a freely paced motor-decision task (choosing to press a button with either the left or the right index finger) while their brain activity was being measured using fMRI. The subjects then had to report the moment of the decision, not by using a clock as in Libet’s experiment, but by selecting a letter in a stream that was being presented during the task. Soon et al. (2008) used fMRI signals to find local neural patterns and draw from such patterns all possible information decoded second by second thanks to the statistical techniques of pattern recognition. The brain areas that were mostly involved in the performance of the actions are the primary M2 and the SMA, while two other brain regions encoded the subject’s motor decision ahead of time and with high accuracy. Indeed, the frontopolar cortex (BA10) and a portion of the cingulate cortex can be monitored to understand what kind of choice will be made by the person before they are conscious of having taken a specific decision in the task they were given. The prediction can be made, with a relevant approximation (60% mean accuracy), up to 7 s before the conscious choice is experienced by the subject, thanks to the fMRI signals detected in the BA10 (one should take into account that the subjects are asked to think hard about the choice before making it, whereas usually simple choices do not require long subjective reflection). “The temporal ordering of information suggests a tentative causal model of information flow, where the earliest unconscious precursors of the motor decision originated in frontopolar cortex, from where they influenced the buildup of decision-related information in the precuneus and later in SMA, where it remained unconscious for up to 10 s” ( Soon et al., 2008 ).

This seems to revive the old issue of God’s foreknowledge that forced theologians to wonder if man can be considered free, if someone already knows his future choices. Indeed, the authors speak of “free” decisions determined by brain activity ahead of time by placing “free” between inverted commas, as freedom is taken to be a commonsensical hypothesis. In this regard, the authors claim: “we found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness” ( Soon et al., 2008 ).

Another interesting study is that conducted by Alexander et al. (2016) : using a new experimental design, it found that the RP also occurs in the absence of movement. It suggests that “the RP measured here is unlikely to reflect preconscious motor planning or preparation of an ensuing movement, and instead may reflect decision-related or anticipatory processes that are non-motoric in nature” ( Alexander et al., 2016 ). The experimental design used a modified version of Libet’s task. Subjects had to choose between four letters whenever they wanted, by taking note of the exact moment of their choice. Later, in half the trials, the subjects had to push a button as soon as they made the decision, whereas in the other half subjects had to do nothing to mark their choice. At the end of the task, all subjects had to report when they had made their decision. In this way, by EEG, electrooculography (EOG) and electromyography (EMG), it was possible to see the RP of the decision-making both in motor and non-motor contexts.

The authors did not find any strong differences between the two RPs, thereby affirming that there is a pure cognitive contribution to RP that does not reflect processes related to movement. They thus suggest that cognitive RP might reflect action preparation, general anticipation and spontaneous neural fluctuations. Interestingly, they exclude that the RP reflects action preparation since it is a non-motor processing. And as to anticipation they cannot exclude that RP may be specifically associated with free choice. So the RP could merely reflect the average of spontaneous fluctuations (see “Other Neuroscientific Hypotheses on Free Will” Section).

Free Will as an Illusion

All these experiments seem to indicate that free will is an illusion. Yet, these relevant experiments can be interpreted in many ways. A possible view is that, in some way, determinism can be observed directly within ourselves. This interpretation might lead to the conclusion that free will is just an illusion. In fact, if one considers as a condition of free will the fact that it should be causa sui (i.e., it should be able to consciously start new causal chains), such a condition is incompatible with determinism as it is usually defined. For it, in fact, all events are linked by casual relations in the form of natural laws, which started long before we were born and which we cannot escape.

However, determinism has generally been regarded as a metaphysical claim, not refutable by empirical findings. One could properly talk of automatism in the brain, not of determinism, based on the evidence available. (In any case, endorsing indeterminism might lead to consider our behavior as the causal product of choices that every time produce different results, as if we rolled a dice. This doesn’t seem to make us any freer than if determinism were overturned; cf. Levy, 2011 ). Most importantly, another feature of freedom seems to be a pure illusion, namely the role of consciousness. The experiments considered thus far heavily question the claim that consciousness actually causes voluntary behavior. Neural activation starts the decisional process culminating in the movement, while consciousness “comes after”, when “things are done”. Therefore, consciousness cannot trigger our voluntary decisions. But the role of consciousness in voluntary choices is part of the definition of free will (but the very definition of consciousness is a matter of debate, cf. Chalmers, 1996 ).

Empirical research in psychology also shows that our mind works and makes choices without our conscious control. As proposed by psychologist Wegner (2002 , 2003 , 2004) and Aarts et al. (2004) , we are “built” to have the impression to consciously control our actions or to have the power to freely choose, even though all that is only a cognitive illusion. Many priming experiments show that people act “mechanically” (even when their behavior might appear suited to the environment and even refined). Automatic cognitive processes, of which we aren’t always aware, originate our decisions, and they were only discovered thanks to the most advanced scientific research. Ultimately, consciousness, which should exercise control and assess the reasons for a choice, is thus allegedly causally ineffective: a mere epiphenomenon, to use the terminology of the philosophy of mind. This is what has been called Zombie Challenge , “based on an amazing wealth of findings in recent cognitive science that demonstrate the surprising ways in which our everyday behavior is controlled by automatic processes that unfold in the complete absence of consciousness” ( Vierkant et al., 2013 ).

These experiments have triggered a huge debate and led scientists, philosophers and intellectuals to claim (or insist even more, if they already denied free will) that free will doesn’t exist ( Greene and Cohen, 2004 ; Cashmore, 2010 ; Harris, 2012 ). It seemed as though neuroscience had produced empirical evidence against free will, so that the century-long debate on it could be considered solved. However, Libet’s experiments have been also criticized. Much criticism was directed to the philosophical interpretation of these studies ( Mele, 2014 ) or to their theoretical assumptions ( Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ), which are important but not relevant here. Among the forms of criticism, one has to mention the theories of action that separate the deciding from the initiating ( Gollwitzer, 1999 ; Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006 ). In that case, free and conscious deliberating could still have a relevant casual role, long before the actual performance of the action.

Other objections, more markedly neuroscientific, were made for instance by Trevena and Miller (2010) . They argued that the RP is not an intention to move, but only indicates that an attentional process is in place in the brain, since when subjects “attended to their intention rather than their movement, there was an enhancement of activity in the pre-SMA” ( Lau et al., 2004 ). In any case, “there was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation”, ( Trevena and Miller, 2010 ). Others have noted that the introspective estimates of event timing are disputable or inaccurate, and measures in general are not sufficiently exact ( Dennett, 1984a , b , 2003 ).

More than Explaining Away

Other studies using multivariate pattern analysis with EEG confirmed that the subjectively free decisions might be made in the brain in the same way as evidence-based perceptual decisions ( Bode et al., 2012a , b , 2013 ). Indeed, Bode et al. (2012b) wrote,

we directly decoded choice-predictive information from neural activity before stimulus presentation on pure noise trials on which no discriminative information was present. Choice behavior on these trials was shown to be primed by the recent choice history. Modelling of sequential effects in RT and accuracy confirmed that such choice priming biased the starting point of a diffusion process toward a decision boundary, as conceptualized in evidence accumulation models of perceptual decision making ( Bode et al., 2012b ).

In other words, the authors found that internally (and maybe stochastically) generated neural activity can bias decisions that are expected to be stimulus-responsive or (possibly) reason-responsive. In this case, as in others that I will consider below, the understanding that we begin to have of the neuronal processes in play shows us that there is a complexity of factors at work. Some of these factors seem to be genuinely random, due to the pure noise produced by the default brain activity, while other factors can be traced back to the previous history of decisions taken in similar situations or related to the present one. Therefore, there is no “mysterious” start of the action as a linear process that, from the initial command, is then executed, as in Libet’s simplified model. Rather, this outcome is the result of a multiplicity of causal elements, which are homogeneous from the viewpoint of proximal mechanisms but of different relevance from the viewpoint of interpretation in terms of intentional psychology.

Another study has shown that attempts to account for (make sense of) insufficient perceptive clues use the same neural networks as those involved in “free” decision-making ( Bode et al., 2013 ). An fMRI-based pattern classifier can be trained to differentiate between different perceptual guesses and try to predict the outcome of non-perceptual decisions, like those made by the participants in the experiments considered so far. Specific activation patterns detected in the medial posterior parietal cortex have allowed the authors to make correct predictions on the participants’ free choices based on the previously decoded perceptual guesses decoded, and the other way round.

The task was the following: the participants were given a masked stimulus and had to say what category the stimulus belonged to. They had to freely choose among many categories. Thanks to the multivariate pattern analysis it was possible to identify the model of “free decisions” to make correct predictions in the context of perceptual judgments and identify the model of the “guess decisions”, to make correct predictions in the context of “free decisions”. It thus seems that a similar neural code for both types of decision is present. In those cases one could say that guessing is similar to making a free decision, since the brain, in the absence of sufficient external cues, has to decide internally. So perceptual decisions can be predicted from specific preceding neural activity when the brain doesn’t have enough internal elements to reach the threshold of perceptive decision.

Studies and commentaries have nevertheless drawn attention to possible confounds and bias in those experiments, namely they might be affected by previous choices with a form of auto-correlation in spontaneous decisions. In particular, Lages and Jaworska (2012) “trained a linear classifier to predict “spontaneous decisions” and “hidden intentions” from responses in preceding trials and achieved comparable prediction accuracies as reported for multivariate pattern classification based on voxel activities in frontopolar cortex”. Lages et al. (2013) have stressed a possible sequential information processing between trials that can introduce a confound, and recommended that “rather postulating a 50% chance level, prediction should be tested with a permutation test and/or separate multivariate classification analyses conditional on the previous response”.

The prediction of perceptual decisions from specific preceding neural activity is linked to what is defined “evidence accumulator model for free choice” ( Bode et al., 2014 ). The explanation starts with the fact that predictive activation patterns preceding decisions become increasingly similar to the patterns detected when the decision is consciously experienced by the subject. This could mean that a slow build-up of decision-related activity occurs, as it happens in accumulation of decision-related evidence to a decision threshold ( Ratcliff, 1978 ; Ratcliff and McKoon, 2008 ). Also, as already noted, when no external feedback is available, the previous choice is used as external feedback ( Akaishi et al., 2014 ). The history of previous decisions has a systematic effect on subsequent choices, related to the activity in medial posterior parietal cortex/posterior and posterior cingulate cortex ( Bode et al., 2011 , 2013 ). And the systematic effect can go in the direction of repetition or of avoidance of repetition depending on the task ( Mochizuki and Funahashi, 2014 ).

Here is an important point that deserves study from the neuroscientific point of view but also from that of a philosophical interpretation of free will. It consists in the fact that the internally generated brain activity has to do both with the stochastic noise and with the history of the subject’s choices. On the one hand, the stochastic noise comes both from the configuration that the brain has on average as a result of evolution (adaptive significance) and from individual development, resulting from random processes and environmental influences. On the other hand, the history of the choices is derived from the same process (in part stochastic) that I have just described.

In any case, if (at least some) very short-term decisions have a genesis similar to that described here, these decisions contribute to shaping the brain activity, and then, presumably, also to influencing decisions on a longer time scale that it is not yet possible to investigate experimentally. Ultimately, this could mean that there is a confluence of causal factors at the level of microdecisions. These factors add up in a way that it is hardly possible to tackle for current science. Then also the reasons motivating an action, typical of free actions, such as “I punched the stalker because it is right to punish those who behave in this way and because I wanted to set an example for all”, encoded in neural activity, can be part of the sum of neural causes.

In fact, experimental psychology has been trying to take into account long-term influences. In the so-called marshmallow experiment, researchers focused on delayed gratification ( Mischel et al., 1972 , 1989 ). A child was given a choice between one small, immediate reward and two small rewards (i. e. a larger reward) if they were able to wait some minutes while the psychologist left the room and then came back. Children who waited longer for the their rewards tended to have better life outcomes and accomplishments. Such experiments are relevant in terms of explanations and predictions, but it seems hard to trace behavioral profiles back to specific profiles of cerebral activation, once we are aware of the complexity of causal chains in the evidence accumulation model.

As Bode et al. (2014) write, in the hypothesis of an evidence accumulator that collects sensory evidence until a decision threshold is reached,

task instructions, participants’ internal motivation, and previous choices all have a strong influence on how decision tasks are performed when external information is either unavailable (as in free decisions), or unhelpful (as in perceptual guessing). In the case of free decision tasks, fluctuating intention for one or the other option may result from active competition between neural representations of both options in decision networks (or rather although not consciously monitored by the participants, the previous choice history, embodied in dynamic states of decision networks, can become the primary determinant of behavior, simply because nothing else is available ( Bode et al., 2014 ).

However, in this way things get more complicated and at a macroscopic level of behavioral observation, this blurs but doesn’t do away with the idea of free behaviors and behaviors that could be taken as unconscious decisions, of which we become aware only when the action has been performed. What remains to be solved is the problem of the distinction between external stimuli that trigger a stimulus-response circuit, and internal self-paced intentions and decisions that trigger voluntary circuit ( Haggard, 2008 ).

Other Neuroscientific Hypotheses on Free Will

Beyond determinism and consciousness.

The concept of free will relevant to our moral and legal, personal and social practices is much more complex than that captured by the experiments considered up to now. But here what matters are not so much theoretical considerations or those derived from experimental psychology (such as the role played in decisions by implementation intentions, which then re-evaluate the active role of consciousness; Gollwitzer, 1999 ), but those that originate from the neuroscientific research itself. In what might be called a new phase of empirical investigation on free will, the problem of determinism and the role of consciousness is left in the background, and the focus goes to other factors that enter the brain mechanisms of decision-making, without asking first if those processes (necessarily the most simple, at least for now) are deterministic or stochastic. On the other side, neuroscientists are trying to confine the concept of free will to operationalizable situations, so as to measure it and be able to identify, at least as a goal, its neural correlates.

There is a line of research on non-human primates, but more recently also on humans, which studies fine decision-making at the neuronal level, bringing it back to a mechanistic process that might be the neuronal interface of our common sense descriptions. This trend has been well described by Roskies (2010a , b , 2013) , who is one of the major supporters of this approach. For example, in Shadlen and Newsome’s (2001) experiments, monkeys are trained to look at stimuli consisting of points that move randomly to the right and to the left and to “indicate” the overall direction of the points. The monkeys give this indication moving their eyes (with a saccade) to the right or to the left. What emerges is that the activity of the neurons of the lateral interparietal (LIP) area increases with the information in the sensory cells of the middle temporal (MT) area and upper middle temporal (MST) area. The discharge rates rise up to reaching a given level, at which the monkey performs the saccade and the neurons stop discharging. This is the threshold for a decision to take place. The time taken to reach the threshold level depends on the perceptual characteristics of the stimulus (the strength of the movement over time) and the discharges stop after the answer was given.

The discharges also depend on whether the monkey is asked to answer when he wishes, or rather to hold back the response until the signal is given for the saccade. If the monkey is asked to wait until the signal is given to respond, LIP neurons continue to discharge even in the absence of the visual stimulus ( Gold and Shadlen, 2007 ). According to Roskies (2010b) , this is the discharge scheme of a neuron involved in the decision-making process; the levels of discharge can be maintained in the absence of the stimulus, signifying the independence of the decision from the inputs on which it operates, and the activity continues until it reaches the critical level at which the response is generated, or until the neurons that represent the elements accumulated in favor of a different choice lead to eye movement. In addition, electrical stimulation of LIP neurons can influence the monkey’s decision, indicating that LIP cells causally contribute to the process that triggers decision and action ( Hanks et al., 2006 ). It remains, however, to be established whether this role is that of deliberation that leads to a decision or that of the decision itself.

The reaction times and the accuracy in the evaluation are very similar between monkeys and humans, with the probability of choice and the response time connected in a similar way to the difficulty of discriminating the stimulus, so that it can be assumed that also in humans these neural processes are similar. A mathematical description of the dynamics of this system allows one to talk about the race towards the critical threshold ( Gold and Shadlen, 2007 ; Wong et al., 2007 ). According to this model, the neuronal populations with specific response properties represent different “hypotheses”. The discharge rates represent the strength of the evidence in favor of those hypotheses based on evidence gathered from the environment. When the evidence for and against each hypothesis is integrated, the discharge rates reach or move away from the critical level, which represents the decision point. This is the point at which the animal “made a choice” about the overall direction of movement. The first group that reaches this threshold “wins”, leading the motor response.

Schurger et al. (2012) proposed a different interpretation of the premovement buildup of neuronal activity preceding voluntary self-initiated movements in humans as well. They used “a leaky stochastic accumulator to model the neural decision of “when” to move in a task where there is no specific temporal cue, but only a general imperative to produce a movement after an unspecified delay on the order of several seconds”. According to their model, “when the imperative to produce a movement is weak, the precise moment at which the decision threshold is crossed leading to movement is largely determined by spontaneous subthreshold fluctuations in neuronal activity. Time locking to movement onset ensures that these fluctuations appear in the average as a gradual exponential-looking increase in neuronal activity” ( Schurger et al., 2012 ).

The model proposed by Schurger et al. (2012) accounts for the behavioral and EEG data recorded from human subjects performing the task and also makes a specific prediction that was confirmed in a second electroencephalography experiment: fast responses to temporally unpredictable interruptions should be preceded by a slow negative-going voltage deflection beginning well before the interruption itself, even when the subject was not preparing to move at that particular moment. The task was to repeatedly push a button, sometimes at will, sometimes in response to a sound produced by the experimenters according to a causal sequence. The speed of response (pressing the button) when the sound is produced is related to the proximity to the peak of the background brain activity, which appears to be random, an ebb and flow that has its highest point in the threshold at which it produces the decision to push the button.

According to this explanation, “the RP does not reflect processing within a specific action domain. Our finding that movement does not significantly modulate RP amplitude supports this aspect of their claim by extending the RP to the domain of covert decisions” ( Alexander et al., 2016 ). Another consequence is the fact that the neural decision to move at a specific time happens much later compared to Libet’s hypothesis, and the RP is only a by-product of a drift diffusion process. But the RP would still be predictive in that it precedes action and conscious awareness of both motor and cognitive action. However, the RP is predictive with regards the whether and the when, if a known task is performed, but not with regards to the what of the action ( Brass and Haggard, 2008 ).

Jo et al. (2013) seems to go in the same direction with their work: they considered both the positive and the negative potential shifts in a “self-initiated movement condition” as well as in a no-movement condition. The comparison of the potential shifts in different conditions showed that the onset of the RP appeared to be unchanged. “This reveals that the apparently negative RP emerges through an unequal ratio of negative and positive potential shifts. These results suggest that ongoing negative shifts of the SCPs facilitate self-initiated movement but are not related to processes underlying preparation or decision to act” ( Jo et al., 2013 ).

Murakami et al. (2014) confirmed those findings. They used rats, who had to perform a specific task: wait for a tone (which was purposely delayed) and decide when to stop waiting for it. The rats’ neuronal activity of the secondary M2 was recorded and resulted consistent with the model of integration-to-bound decision. “A first population of M2 neurons ramped to a constant threshold at rates proportional to waiting time, strongly resembling integrator output. A second population, which they propose provide input to the integrator, fired in sequences and showed trial-to-trial rate fluctuations correlated with waiting times” ( Murakami et al., 2014 ). Also, an integration model based on the recorded neuronal activity in the considered brain areas has allowed the researchers to quantitatively foresee the inter-neuronal correlations manifested during the task performance. “Together, these results reinforce the generality of the integration-to-bound model of decision-making. These models identify the initial intention to act as the moment of threshold crossing while explaining how antecedent subthreshold neural activity can influence an action without implying a decision” ( Murakami et al., 2014 ).

Schurger et al. (2016) stress that the main new finding about the brain activity preceding SVM “is that the apparent build-up of this activity, up until about 200 ms pre-movement, may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a “decision” to initiate movement”. The model used is the bounded-integration process, “a computational model of decision making wherein sensory evidence and internal noise (both in the form of neural activity) are integrated over time by one or more decision neurons until a fixed threshold-level firing rate us reached, at which the animal issues a motor response. In the case of spontaneous self-initiated movement there is no sensory evidence, so the process is dominated by internal noise” ( Schurger et al., 2016 ). The stochastic decision model (SDM) used by Schurger et al. (2012) allowed them to claim that bounded integration seems to explain stimulus-response decision as relying on the same neural decision mechanism used for perceptual decisions and internal self-paced intention and decision as “dominated by ongoing stochastic fluctuations in neural activity that influence the precise moment at which the decision threshold is reached” ( Schurger et al., 2016 ). And this mechanism seems to be shared with all animals including crayfish ( Kagaya and Takahata, 2010 ).

The philosophical implications could be that “when one forms an intention to act, one is significantly disposed to act but not yet fully committed. The commitment comes when one finally decides to act. The SDM reveals a remarkably similar picture on the neuronal level, with the decision to act being a threshold crossing neural event that is preceded by a neural tendency toward this event” ( Schurger et al., 2016 ).

The Veto Power

Another recent study has brought back to the center of neuroscientific research the space of autonomy that the subject seems to have compared to the idea of free will as an illusion supported by the experiments based on the alleged unconscious onset of the action. Schultze-Kraft et al. (2016) showed that people are able to cancel movements after elicitation of RP if stop signals occur earlier than 200 ms before movement onset. In the real-time experiment, “subjects played a game where they tried to press a button to earn points in a challenge with a brain–computer interface (BCI) that had been trained to detect their RPs in real time and to emit stop signals” ( Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016 ).

The subjects had to press with their foot a button on the floor after a green light flashed: they could so whenever they wanted after about 2 s. Participants earned points if they pressed the button before the red light to come back (the stop signal). The experiment was composed of three phases. In the first phase, the stop signals were lit at random and the movements of the subjects were not predicted. In the second phase, the authors used data taken from the EEG on the participants in the first phase. In this way a classifier was trained to predict (with imperfect accuracy) the movements (the When and the Whether, not the What). In this phase, the BCI could foresee the fact that the subject would press the button thanks to the detection of the RP and therefore turned on the red light to earn points against the subject if it could not stop the movement. In the third phase, the subjects were informed that the BCI could “see their preparation of the movement” and they had to try to beat the computer by moving in an unforeseeable way.

In all phases of the experiment, there was no difference between RPs. While in the first phase, in 66.5% of the cases, subjects were winning by pressing the button with the green light on, in stages two and three trials in which subjects were able to beat the computer, by not pushing the button with the red light on, decreased to 31%, and warning participants of the prediction of the BCI would not help them do any better. The authors could thus claim that “despite the stereotypical shape of the RP and its early onset at around 1000 ms before EMG activity, several aspects of our data suggest that subjects were able to cancel an upcoming movement until a point of no return was reached around 200 ms before movement onset. If the stop signal occurs later than 200 ms before EMG onset, the subject cannot avoid moving” ( Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016 ). The explanation of the minimum threshold of 200 ms could reflect the time necessary for the stop signal to light up, the subject to perceive it and cancel the movement that was already being prepared.

As to which cortical areas are involved in vetoing an already initiated movement, some studies have tried to identify them. Brass and Haggard (2007) examined the voluntary inhibition using an experimental paradigm that was based on the Libet task. The subjects were asked to press a button while watching a cursor moving along the face of a clock. Every time, after pressing the button, the subjects had to signal the precise moment when they thought they decided to press the button. In addition, the instructions specified that the participants had to inhibit the execution of the response in some tests of their choice. Comparing this voluntary inhibition condition with the condition in which the action had not been inhibited, the authors observed an activation of the dorsal fronto-medial cortex (DFM). This area is different from the brain regions involved in the stop signal tasks, in which the inhibition is controlled by external signals. Furthermore, the DFM cortex is also distinct from the brain regions controlling the activity linked to the when and what components of voluntary action. Brass and Haggard (2007) have interpreted this finding as evidence that there is a mechanism of voluntary inhibition that can be dissociated, in neuroanatomo-functional terms, from an “environmental” inhibiting mechanism, which involves the lateral prefrontal cortex.

This finding was replicated in a subsequent study of Kühn et al. (2009) , in which the subjects had to avoid dropping a ball sliding down a ramp, by pressing a button before the ball came down and broke. In some tests of their choice, they could choose to voluntarily inhibit the response. The comparison of the condition of voluntary inhibition with the condition of voluntary action still showed activation of the DFM cortex, supporting the idea that this area is involved in the inhibition of voluntary action ( Schel et al., 2014 ).

Finally, Schultze-Kraft et al. (2016) declared to be agnostic about the interpretation of their data in regards of RP. As the RP is predictive of the subsequent movement, it could be read as “the leaky integration of spontaneous fluctuations in autocorrelated neural signals”. Theoretically, the question remains about the departure of the intention to block the action while the movement is being prepared, along with the possible coexistence of two intentions suggested by the commands of the experimenters. The participants in the experiment, in fact, want to win against the computer, therefore they want to push the button, and also have the intention, partly contrasting, not to push the button when the computer turns the red light on.

A More Realistic Model

This novel perspective offered by the line of research by Schurger et al. (2012) here described works on very simple decision-making processes and could be exposed to the same criticism in this regard have been made to Libet’s research line. But Roskies (2010b) has suggested some tracks along which to develop research on more complex decision-making processes, close to those relevant to social life. First, one must introduce the value of the decision, seen as a subjective or moral feature that drives action. By manipulating the expected rewards for correct action or for a particular type of decisions, or by manipulating the probabilities of the outcomes, both the decision and the activity levels of LIP neurons are altered ( Platt and Glimcher, 1999 ; Glimcher, 2002 ; Dorris and Glimcher, 2004 ; Sugrue et al., 2004 ). In this way it is possible to change the monkey’s choice about the objective of the saccade by offering her favorite reward. Although it is not known how the figures are represented, it seems that the Lip neurons can integrate the information on the value or on the reward in the decision-making process, and that information has a causal role.

As for the reasons, and the responsiveness to them, Roskies (2010b) suggests that also the reasons, albeit discursive and propositional, may be encoded as information at the neuronal level. Simplifying, in her view one might think that in a situation where, say, there is little food and many people, different populations of neurons represent the content “I am hungry”, while others represent “others need this more than I do”, others “the weak come first” and so forth, weighing reasons in terms of activation and modulation of the response of the populations of neurons delegated to the choice and the final decision. However, such a model ( Dorris and Glimcher, 2004 ) should be considered as purely hypothetical because first we do not know what are the specific populations of neurons, we don’t yet have the instruments to identify them, and we do not know their interactions (also considering the recent failures of naturalized semantics).

Secondly—and perhaps most importantly—it is unclear how what we externally call “reasons” could be activated and weighed by the decision-maker understood as a unitary subject or self, according to the description for which we truly act based on reasons. In this case, I believe one cannot seek a simple neural interface for commonsensical concepts and notions. In fact, the idea of a deep and unitary self—the idea of a conscious subject controlling her behavior instant by instant—has been strongly challenged by evidence coming from empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience ( Dennett, 1991 ; Metzinger, 2004 , 2009 ). Therefore, one should avoid the temptation to reproduce such a description in neural levels. But if we trace back the reasons to populations of neurons in a mechanistic model—if we trace them back to thresholds—it is not easy to figure out who makes the decisions and why. If it is true that some people seem to be more sensitive to specific reasons, other than those to which other people are sensitive, and if people can change over time the reasons by which they are usually motivated, and in certain situations the same people may not to respond to the reasons to which they are usually sensitive, one has to wonder if what prevails are processes that we would call random or that, in any case, are beyond our control.

Here the role of consciousness seems again to be relevant. If experiments à la Libet seemed to have ruled it out from a causal standpoint, the experiment by Schultze-Kraft et al. (2016) on movement vetoing seems to reassess its role in blocking the preparation process triggered in the brain. In this sense, this seems to be a more realistic line of neuroscientific investigation on free will, one that contemplates, even in broad terms, stochastic brain processes, for the most part triggered by environmental stimuli, which often are not aware of (the same as our train of thoughts arising spontaneously without us being able to orientate it from the beginning), but also by spontaneous activity of the brain ( Changeux, 2004 ; Brembs, 2011 ) that creates models of reality. “Learning mechanisms evolved to permit flexible behavior as a modification of reflexive behavioral strategies. In order to do so, not one, but multiple representations and action patterns should be generated by the brain” ( De Ridder et al., 2013 ). And this repertoire is not infinite. Indeed, “our evolutionary-evolved brain potential to generate multiple action plans is constrained by what is stored in memory and by what is present in the environment” ( De Ridder et al., 2013 ). Schurger and Uithol (2015) also argue that the “actions emerge from a causal web in the brain” and that the “proprioceptive feedback might play a counterintuitive role in the decision process”. They, thus recommend the use of dynamical systems approach for the study of the origins of voluntary action.

On these spontaneous processes we can exercise control, which can be considered automatic and unconscious when evaluated with the classical theoretical criteria of conscious control. First, there is an innate behavioral repertoire of provisions linked to survival in the environments within which we evolved. Secondly, there is a repertoire of behavioral provisions that is stratified in terms of conscious repetitions due to environmental stimuli or to internal choices (with all the limitations that this expression has in reference to the brain mechanisms analyzed so far) and then becomes automatic. The control can, however, also be explicit, with obvious limitations and cases of complete control failure. Based on this complex self-construction (which has a neural correlates), we are creatures with a higher or lower degree of free will. This free will may then be better understood and circumscribed, so as to be more objectively operationalized and also measured.

Operazionalizing, Measuring and Verifying: From the Action to the Brain

My view is that a richer conceptualization of free will—one that is able to overcome the stall of the metaphysical debate as well as the current difficulties of neuroscience ( Nachev and Hacker, 2014 ) and empirical psychology ( Nahmias, 2014 )–has to be linked to the idea of “capacity”. In fact, as claimed by Mecacci and Haselager (2015) , the kind of free will investigated by neuroscientific experiments, which is self-generated and defined according to the absence of cues, “does little justice to the common sense practice of holding people responsible for their freely willed actions that consists in asking explanations and justifications from the actor” ( Mecacci and Haselager, 2015 ).

Another important point is that there are differences in time scales between laboratory tasks (the milliseconds to seconds time range) and real life or, better, life as we measure it temporally (seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, years) regarding decisions that really concern us. Even if the underlying mechanism might be the same, the experiments described so far cannot investigate whether decisions with a longer maturation process are free and to what extent they are such. It might be possible to distinguish between proximal and distal mechanisms, but this doesn’t seem feasible lacking the tools to address decisions involving longer time scales. For this reason it might be useful to introduce other and different ways to conceptualize and operationalize (supposedly) free actions.

“By capacity, in the context of free will, we mean the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without the moment by moment conscious control that is required by the second condition of free will we have previously seen” ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). The concept of capacity is related to that of internal control, understood as the agent’s “ownership” of the mechanism that triggers the relevant behavior and the reasons-responsiveness of that mechanism ( Fischer and Ravizza, 2000 ). And reasons-responsiveness must involve a coherent pattern of reasons-recognition. “More specifically, it must involve a pattern of actual and hypothetical recognition of reasons that is understandable by some appropriate external observer. And the pattern must be at least minimally grounded in reality” ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ). The concept of capacity used in this sense, and combined with the idea of reasons-responsiveness, also avoids the objection of determinism that has always weighed on the debate on free will. From a philosophical point of view, the approach related to capacity may fall indeed in the strand of so-called compatibilism, which defends the fact that human freedom can exist even if determinism is true of the physical world.

Cognitive abilities might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Executive functions, also known as control functions, are essential to organize and plan everyday behavior—which is not the instant behavior found in Libet’s experiments. Those skills are necessary to perform the greater part of our goal-oriented actions. They allow us to modulate our behavior, control its development and change it according to the environmental stimuli (the environment being both physical and social). Also, executive functions allow us to change our behavior based on it effects, with a sophisticated feedback mechanism; finally, they are also necessary for tasks of abstraction, inventiveness and judgment. Those who, for whatever reason, have a deficit in their executive functions cannot respond to their social environment appropriately, and struggle to plan their behavior or to choose between alternatives based on their judgment or interest. Sufferers of these deficits in executive functions often fail to control their instinctive responses and to modify their regular courses of action, or are unable to concentrate or persist in the pursuit of a goal ( Barkley, 2012 ; Goldstein and Naglieri, 2014 ).

In general terms, the executive functions refer to the set of mental processes necessary for the development of cognitive-behavioral patterns adaptive in response to new and demanding environmental conditions. The domain of executive functions includes ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 ):

• the ability of planning and evaluation of effective strategies in relation to a specific purpose related to the skills of problem-solving and cognitive flexibility.

• inhibitory control and decision-making processes that support the selection of functional response and the modification of the response (behavior) in relation to changing environmental contingencies.

• attentional control referred to the ability to inhibit interfering stimuli and to activate the relevant information.

• working memory referring to the cognitive mechanisms that can maintain online and manipulate information necessary to perform complex cognitive tasks.

• (and it can be added with regards to free will) creativity and the ability to cope with environmental changes through novel solutions.

Those of empirical psychology are higher order concepts, which act as a bridge between free will, which is something that is not in the brain but can be observed in behavior (along with its causes), and the underlying brain processes. It has been convincingly suggested that in the construction of a hierarchy of mechanisms and explanations ( Craver, 2007 ), also to guide the exploration, one must go from inside to outside and from outside to inside. One goes from measurable skills to their brain basis, and from the tentative index of free will to the underlying (real) mechanisms.

Based on the evidence presented, I believe that a viable proposal is to construct an index related to compatible tests whose relevance can be uniformly ascertained. It would be a kind of IQ-like profile that would allow for the operationalization and quantification of a person’s cognitive skills. All the tests used (for example, Stroop Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Weigl’s Color-Form Sorting Test, Go-No Go Test) should be related to the subject’s age and education and then transformed in new standardized scores (Equivalent Scores, ES) on an ordinal scale, e. g. ranging from 0 to 4, with 0 representing scores below cut-off point and 4 representing scores equal to or better than average. Specific standardized scores exist in many countries or linguistic areas. The subjects would get for each test a raw score (or RS), given by the sum of the scores obtained in each item that makes up the test, which would then be standardized.

A synthetic index such as the one here proposed measures a certain range of cognitive and behavioral control skills that configure a certain kind of free will at the psychological-functional level. These are potential capacities measured with standardized instruments in laboratory situations, which do not consider any other factors that may restrict the freedom of a subject in specific situations, such as those that are relevant in moral scenarios and legal contexts. The same goes for moral judgment. However, an index such as the one I’m proposing here could be the first step, albeit certainly imperfect, towards more objective measures to discriminate between people who have more or less “free will” or, in other words, are more or less capable of self-control and rational choice (i.e., a reasons-responsive choice).

This hypothesis would be in line with the proposals of operationalizing free will advanced so far. According to Vohs (2010) , freedom might be conceived of as the sum of executive functions and goal-directed, future-oriented behaviors, which include rational choice, planning, intelligent thought, and self-control. Free will can be then constituted by a limited stock of energy, devoted to guiding executive functioning processes. The free will index I am proposing is also consistent with Baumeister’s contribution:

Psychologists should focus on what we do best: collecting evidence about measurable variance in behaviors and inner processes and identifying consistent patterns in them. With free will, it seems most productive for psychologists to start with the well-documented observation that some acts are freer than others. As already noted, dissonance, reactance, coping with stress, and other behaviors have been shown in the laboratory to depend on variations in freedom and choice. Hence, it is only necessary to assume that there are genuine phenomena behind those subjective and objective differences in freedom. In a nutshell, we should explain what happens differently between free and unfree actions ( Baumeister, 2008 ).

Empirical research on how human beings work has recently focused on self-control as a feature of free will. Self-control can be defined as the exertion of willpower on behavior. Self-control is thus generally regarded as the capacity to override inappropriate impulses and automatic or habitual responses and to suppress or delay immediate gratification so as to reach a long-term goal ( Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007 ). “Being in control” includes the capacity to maintain goals, to balance long- and short-term values, to consider and evaluate the consequences of a planned action, and to resist being “carried away by emotion” ( Churchland, 2006 ). Self-control can also be regarded as the ability of higher-order functions to modulate the activity of lower-level functions, where higher-order functions manifest themselves externally in complex behavior, adjusted according to the environmental needs, while lower-level functions are manifested in simple and stereotyped behaviors, not adjusted according to the demands of the environment ( Roskies, 2010a ). Everyone exhibits a different degree of self-control compared to other individuals, and for each person the degree of self-control varies over time ( Baumeister et al., 2006 ; Casey et al., 2011 ; Dang et al., 2015 ). The variability of self-control that is manifested in behavior and can be measured with the test has its base in neuronal functioning, which in turn depends on education and habits, external circumstances and the internal neuronal noise.

However, two executive functions turn out to be central:

(i) the ability to predict the future outcomes of a given action; and (ii) the ability to suppress inappropriate, i.e., not sufficiently valuable, actions. Importantly, these two executive functions operate not only during the genesis of an action, but also during the planning of an already selected action. In fact, during the temporal gap between the time when an action has been chosen and the moment when the motor output is going to be generated, the context might have changed, altering the computed value of the action and thus requiring a radical change of the planned motor strategy ( Mirabella, 2014 ).

It seems that the peculiarity of our freedom at the cognitive level is the ability to modulate or block courses of action that environmental stimuli automatically or unconsciously arouse in us—a reproposal in different form of Libet’s free won’t and Schultze-Kraft’s vetoing . These psychological-functional indicators must then lead to their cerebral bases. For instance, one can consider a situation in which one’s needs are satisfied (or not) and the consequent motivation to act based on the evaluation process of the need satisfaction.

This is an essential process and one that is continuously performed by our motor system. In fact, in most places where we live, if not all, we are surrounded by tools whose sight automatically activates motor schemas that would normally be employed to interact with those objects. These actions are prompted by the features of the objects, the so-called affordances ( Gibson, 1979 ). It has been shown that even the simple observation of pictures depicting affordable objects (such as graspable objects) activates a sub-region of the medial frontal cortex, the SMA, even when there is no requirement to actually act on those stimuli ( Grèzes and Decety, 2002 ). These stimulus-driven activations are rapid, involuntary, and unconscious ( Mirabella, 2014 ).

Environmental stimuli, in this case, can induce a subject to make specific choices through a priming process that exploits our action tendencies. Typically, individuals are able to control their behavior, but in some cases they fail to do so; for example if suffering from microlesions of the SMA, people have a tendency to invariably implement a certain type of action, even if the environment, both physical and social, does not require it ( Sumner et al., 2007 ). In fact, “the suppression of a triggered action might be seen not as an active process, but rather as an automatic consequence of the evaluative procedure” ( Mirabella, 2014 ). One could then say that those who have the ability to better monitor, control and direct their own behavior are “freerer” than those who do not have this capability. Individuals affected by disorders of the executive functions are not able to grasp and process environmental stimuli to direct their behavior. For example, these people may not be able to stop the utilization behavior, an automatic mechanism that tends to make us interact with all the objects that are in our perceptual sphere.

Churchland (2006) and Suhler and Churchland (2009) proposed a hypothesis concerning the neural basis for control, which can bridge the gap between higher-order concepts and brain mechanisms. As she wrote,

Perhaps we can identify various parameters of the normal profile of being in control, which would include specific connectivity patterns between amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula, between anterior cingulate gyrus and prefrontal cortex, and so forth. Other parameters would identify, for each of the six non specific systems [identified via the neurotransmitter secreted at the axon terminals: serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, histamine and acetylcholine], the normal distribution of axon terminals and the normal patterns of neurotransmitter release, uptake, and co-localization with other neurotransmitters such as glutamate. Levels of various hormones would specify another set of parameters. Yet other parameters contrast the immature with adult pattern of synaptic density and axon myelinization. At the current stage of neuroscience, we can identify the normal range for these parameters only roughly, not precisely ( Churchland, 2006 ).

This hypothesis would allow for specific brain correlates of a free will index based on the executive functions-guided self-control and even, hypothetically, a direct brain measure of being in control For example, a recent study ( Bartelle et al., 2016 ) highlights the possibility of having MRI imaging of dopamine release thanks to a engineered protein that binds to the neurotransmitter and works as a MRI-visible probe. As the authors put it, “one could imagine a future in which molecular fMRI is used to determine brain-wide neurochemicals maps corresponding to a universe of stimuli and behavioral programs”. Even though one should always consider that there isn’t perfect correspondence between higher-order concepts and putative neural correlates.

In particular, one must consider that what matters in interpersonal relations and in law, to give two examples of practical relevance of free will, is freedom as actually performed: that is, freedom as it can be observed and with some approximation, also measured through a series of psychological tests. This does not mean that the same level of freedom manifested in behavior matches the same level of activation of the related brain areas. However, one can investigate the brain causes of “freedom deficit” compared with the average shown by relevant samples of the population, and so come to a progressive refinement of the research on the neural bases of free will.

Another example is given by the investigation of the role of the cholinergic interneurons in behavioral flexibility ( Aoki et al., 2015 ). This class of neurons seem to be connected to survive in an ever-changing world, which requires behaving flexibly. Flexibility can be assessed (and measured) at a behavioral level, but cerebral mechanisms remain largely unknown. Using conventional tests on behavioral flexibility, which require animals to shift their attention from one stimulus property (e.g., color) to another (e.g., shape), researchers probed the effects of an immunotoxin-induced lesion of cholinergic interneurons in the striatum.

A selective cholinergic ablation was made by means of injections of immunotoxin, which targeted neurons containing choline acetyltransferase in the dorsomedial or ventral striatum. A control group was instead injected with saline. “When encountering a change of behavioral rules after the set-shift, either lesion made animals stick to a previously correct but now invalid response strategy. They also showed less exploratory behavior toward finding a new rule. Most interestingly, ablation of cholinergic neurons in the dorsomedial striatum impaired a shift of set when it required attention to a previously irrelevant cue. On the other hand, ventral cholinergic lesions had an effect on a shift in which a novel stimulus was introduced as a new directional cue” ( Aoki et al., 2015 ). Animals thus can be taken to be “less free” when striatal cholinergic interneurons don’t work properly.

This last example serves to indicate how to bridge the gap between overt behaviors (to which we tend to attribute the property of freedom) with neuronal mechanisms that are clearly identifiable and even manipulable. In fact, it is not so important to look at the conscious aspect of a single proximal mechanism, but rather to consider the manifest behavioral effect that the considered mechanism helps to produce. This way there would be a paradigm shift with respect to the neuroscience research on free will, which seems to have long been too closely linked to the falsification of the theoretical assumption that an action is free only if it has a beginning that is fully controlled by a conscious process. The proposal, I am making here has only the ambition to be a potentially helpful contribution to theoretical debate and empirical research, although its limits are very clear. First, it focuses on a specific part of what is intuitively called “free will”, relating it to the idea of “capacity”. Second, it proposes to measure free will at a psychological level by means of a unitary index that inevitably misses many nuances of the notion and the relative capacity. Furthermore, the search for the neural correlated of such capacities implies not only the identification of causal mechanisms, but also the consideration of many cerebral areas. All of this makes things harder compared to approaches à la Libet. Nevertheless, there is manifest advantage: there is a greater degree of realism and adherence to the actual behavioral manifestation of what we call “free will”.

Free will is an elusive but crucial concept. For many years we have known that the functioning of our brain has to do not only with the belief that we have free will but also with the existence of free will itself. Evidence of the unconscious start of movement, highlighted by the RP signal, has led to believe that we had reached an experimental proof of the non-existence of free will—which many already claimed at a theoretical level based on the argument of the incompatibility between determinism and freedom. Along with other evidence provided by experimental psychology, the branch of studies inaugurated by Libet has contributed to seeing free will as an illusion: this view seemed to be reliably supported by science, and in particular by neuroscience. Recent studies, however, seem to question this paradigm, which sees the initiation and conscious control of the action as the first requirement of free will, allegedly proving that there are no such things.

The stochastic models and the models of evidence accumulation consider decision as the crossing of a threshold of activity in specific brain regions. They do not restore the idea of conscious control but turn away from the previous paradigm. These studies cannot yet fully explain how the intention to perform an action arises in the brain, but they better account for the complexity of the process. In particular, they recognize the role of the spontaneous activity of the brain, of external cues and other factors—including those that might be called “will” and “reasons” (which, however, do not currently have precisely identified neural correlates)—in reaching the critical threshold. Studies that show how we can consciously block movements whose preparation has already begun unconsciously, then, indicate how the subject is able to exercise a form of control, whose genesis however is still unclear.

One could state that free “decision-making draws upon a rich history of accumulated information, manifested in preferences, attitudes and motivations, and is related to the current internal and external environment in which we act. Complete absence of context is impossible” ( Bode et al., 2014 ). In this framework, I have here proposed to integrate neuroscientific research on free will by connecting higher-level concepts with their neural correlates through a psychological operationalization in terms of skills and cognitive functions that do not necessarily imply a continuous conscious control over the decision-making and action process. This may also allow one to create a quantitative index, albeit still quite rudimentary, of the degree of freedom of each subject. This freedom would be specifically defined and therefore may not perfectly coincide with the intuitive concept of free will. Starting from these functional indicators, which psychology has well clarified, one could then move on to investigate the precise neural correlates for a different and (possibly) more fundamental level of explanation in terms of brain processes that enable the executive functions.

According to Craver (2007) , a mechanistic explanation is able to lead to an inter-field integration. There are two relevant aspects to this approach. The functional knowledge that can be drawn from psychological research is a tool to identify neural mechanisms; the knowledge of the brain structure can guide the construction of far more sophisticated psychological models ( Bechtel and Mundale, 1999 ). The index of free will that I am proposing ( Lavazza and Inglese, 2015 )—despite surely needing further refinement—might be useful to explore the brain mechanisms that underlie what appears in behavior as “free will”, which no longer seems to be an illusion, not even for neuroscientific research.

Author Contributions

AL confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: readiness potential, unconscious decision, choice prediction, stochastic processes, measurement of freedom, evidence accumulation

Citation: Lavazza A (2016) Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10:262. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00262

Received: 15 March 2016; Accepted: 18 May 2016; Published: 01 June 2016.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2016 Lavazza. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Andrea Lavazza, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Paradigm shifts and innovations in Neuroscience

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Essays on Free Will

Dive into the depths of one of philosophy's most enduring questions with our curated selection of free will essay samples. This collection is designed to provide students, philosophers, and curious minds with a comprehensive overview of the debates and discussions surrounding the concept of free will. Whether you're examining the determinism versus free will debate, exploring the implications of free will on morality, or seeking inspiration for your own free will essay, our assortment of essays offers valuable perspectives and in-depth analysis.

The Concept of Free Will

Free will touches upon the ability of individuals to make choices that are not predetermined by past events, genetic makeup, or divine intervention. Essays on free will traverse the realms of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience , and ethics, offering insights into how we understand human agency and responsibility. By engaging with these essays, readers can explore various positions within the free will debate, from libertarianism to compatibilism and hard determinism, enriching their understanding of this complex philosophical issue.

Highlights from Our Essay Collection

Our free will essay samples cover a broad spectrum of topics and viewpoints, ensuring that readers can find material that resonates with their specific interests and academic needs. From analytical discussions on the existence and nature of free will to explorations of its implications for legal and ethical responsibility, our essays provide a platform for deep engagement with the question of human autonomy. Each essay not only serves as a resource for academic exploration but also as a source of inspiration for developing nuanced and critical perspectives on free will.

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Engaging with the concept of free will through academic writing offers a profound opportunity to delve into questions of human nature, responsibility, and ethics. Our collection of free will essay samples is here to support you in this intellectual journey, providing a solid foundation for informed and compelling writing. By exploring our essays, you can deepen your understanding of free will and contribute thoughtfully to the ongoing philosophical conversation.

Start your exploration of free will by browsing our essay samples today. Let these essays guide and inspire your academic research and writing, helping you to craft a thoughtful and insightful free will essay.

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Sample essay on free will and moral responsibility.

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Free will is a fundamental aspect of modern philosophy. This sample philosophy paper explores how moral responsibility and free will represent an important area of moral debate between philosophers. This type of writing would of course be seen in a philosophy course, but many people might also be inclined to write an essay about their opinions on free will for personal reasons.

History of free will and moral responsibility

In our history, free will and moral responsibility have been longstanding debates amongst philosophers. Some contend that free will does not exist while others believe we have control over our actions and decisions. For the most part, determinists believe that free will does not exist because our fate is predetermined. An example of this philosophy is found in the Book of Genisis .

The biblical story states God created man for a purpose and designed them to worship him. Since God designed humans to operate in a certain fashion and he knew the outcome, it could be argued from a determinist point of view that free will didn't exist. Because our actions are determined, it seems that we are unable to bear any responsibility for our acts.

Galen Strawson has suggested that “in order to be truly deserving, we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving.”

However, Strawson also has implied that we are unable to be responsible. We are unable to be responsible because, as determinists suggest, all our decisions are premade; therefore, we do not act of our own free will. Consequently, because our actions are not the cause of our free will, we cannot be truly deserving because we lack responsibility for what we do.

Defining free will

Free will implies we are able to choose the majority of our actions ("Free will," 2013). While we would expect to choose the right course of action, we often make bad decisions. This reflects the thinking that we do not have free will because if we were genuinely and consistently capable of benevolence, we would freely decide to make the ‘right’ decisions.

In order for free will to be tangible, an individual would have to have control over his or her actions regardless of any external factors. Analyzing the human brain's development over a lifetime proves people have the potential for cognitive reasoning and to make their own decisions.

Casado has argued “the inevitability of free will is such that if one considers freedom an illusion, the internal perspective – and one’s own everyday life – would be totally contradictory” ( 2011, p. 369).

On the other hand, while we can determine whether or not we will wake up the next day, it is not an aspect of our free will because we cannot control this. Incidentally, determinism suggests everything happens exactly the way it should have happened because it is a universal law ("Determinism," 2013). In this way, our free will is merely an illusion.

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The determinism viewpoint

For example, if we decided the previous night that we would wake up at noon, we are unable to control this even with an alarm clock. One, we may die in our sleep. Obviously, as most would agree, we did not choose this. Perhaps we were murdered in our sleep. In that case, was it our destiny to become a victim of violent crimes, or was it our destiny to be murdered as we slept? Others would mention that the murderer was the sole cause of the violence and it their free will to decide to kill.

Therefore, the same people might argue that the murderer deserved a specific punishment. The key question, then, is the free will of the murderer. If we were preordained to die in the middle of the night at the hand of the murderer, then the choice of death never actually existed. Hence, the very question of choice based on free will is an illusion.

Considering that our wills are absolutely subject to the environment in which they are articulated in, we are not obligated to take responsibility for them as the product of their environment. For example, if we were born in the United States, our actions are the result of our country’s laws. Our constitutional laws allow us the right to bear arms and have access to legal representation. In addition, our constitutional laws allow us the freedom to express our thoughts through spoken and written mediums and the freedom to believe in a higher power or not. We often believe we are free to act and do what we want because of our free will.

Harris (2012) has agreed that “free will is more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot even be rendered coherent” conceptually.

Moral judgments, decisions, and responsibility for free will

Either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are a product of chance, and we are not responsible for them” (p. 46). This being the case, can we be deserving if we can so easily deflect the root of our will and actions? Perhaps, our hypothetical murder shot us. It could be argued that gun laws in the United States provided them with the mean to commit murder.

Either the murderer got a hold of a gun by chance or he or she was able to purchase one. While the purchase is not likely, one would have to assume that someone, maybe earlier, purchased the weapon. Therefore, it was actually the buyer’s action that allowed this particular crime to take place. Essentially, both would ‘deserve’ some sort of punishment.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary (2001), the word “deserving” means "Worthy, as of reward or praise” (p. 236), so it regards to punishments, it seems deserving has a positive meaning.

Free will and changing societal views

However, the meanings will change depending on our position. For example, some would suggest that the murderer acted with his or her own free will. However, once they are caught and convicted, they are no longer free in the sense that they can go wherever they want. On the other hand, they are free to think however they want.

If they choose to reenact their crimes in their thoughts, they are free to do so. Some many say, in the case of the murderer, he or she is held responsible for his or her crime, thus he or she deserves blame. However, if the murderer had a mental illness and was unaware he or she committed a crime, should we still consider that the murderer acted with his or her free will? With that in mind, it seems that Strawson’s argument is valid because the murderer was not acting of his or her free will.

Many would consider Strawson to be a “free will pessimist” (Timpe c. Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Pessimism, 2006, para. 5). Strawson does not believe we have the ability to act on our own free will. However, he does not believe our actions are predetermined either.

Specifically, in his article “Luck Swallows Everything,” Strawson (1998) has claimed that “One cannot be ultimately responsible for one's character or mental nature in any way at all” (para. 33).

Determining when free will is not applicable

While some would agree young children and disabled adults would not hold any responsibility, others would claim that criminals should bear responsibility when they commit a crime. What if the actions are caused by both nature and nurturing of the parents ? Or, what if they're caused by prior events including a chain of events that goes back before we are born, libertarians do not see how we can feel responsible for them. If our actions are directly caused by chance, they are simply random and determinists do not see how we can feel responsible for them (The Information Philosopher Responsibility n.d.).

After all, one would not argue that murderers are worthy of a positive reward; however, Strawson has argued that we, whether good or evil, do not deserve any types of rewards. Instead, our actions and their consequences are based on luck or bad luck. In order to have ultimate moral responsibility for an action, the act must originate from something that is separate from us.

We consider free will the ability to act or do as we want; however, there is a difference between freedom of action and freedom of will. Freedom of action suggests we are able to physically act upon our desire. In a way, some believe that freedom of will is the choice that precedes that action. In addition to freedom of act or will, free will also suggests we have a sense of moral responsibility. This moral responsibility, however, is not entirely specified. For example, is this responsibility to ourselves or those around us? While this is a question that may never be answered, no matter how many essays are written on the subject, it is one that many consider important to ask, nonetheless.

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Our Stories Essays On Life, Death, And Free Will

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In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues (against the Epicureans) that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune-for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad (and even if he does not any longer exist). Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time before we are born, but we regret that we do not live longer. Further, Fischer argues (against the immortality curmudgeons, such as Heidegger and Bernard Williams), that immortal life could be desirable, and shows how the defense of the (possible) badness of death and the (possible) goodness of immortality exhibit a similar structure; on Fischer’ s view, the badness of death and the goodness of life can be represented on spectra that display certain continuities. Building on Fischer’ s previous book, My Way a major aim of this volume is to show important connections between issues relating to life and death and issues relating to free will. More specifically, Fischer argues that we endow our lives with a certain distinctive kind of meaning--an irreducible narrative dimension of value--by exhibiting free will. Thus, in acting freely, we transform our lives so that our stories matter.

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NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

David Folkenflik

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument. Uri Berliner hide caption

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument.

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press . It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization .

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR's journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," she said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

The network noted that "the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions."

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month. Stephen Voss/Stephen Voss hide caption

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month.

He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders and to Maher's predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

A "final warning"

The circumstances surrounding the interview were singular.

Berliner provided me with a copy of the formal rebuke to review. NPR did not confirm or comment upon his suspension for this article.

In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

A few hours after the essay appeared online, NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi reminded Berliner of the requirement that he secure approval before appearing in outside press, according to a copy of the note provided by Berliner.

In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to The New York Times , which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner says he did not seek approval before talking with the Times .

NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: "Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think."

Berliner is a member of NPR's business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He had no involvement in the preparation of this article and did not see it before it was posted publicly.

In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world."

Feelings of anger and betrayal inside the newsroom

His essay and subsequent public remarks stirred deep anger and dismay within NPR. Colleagues contend Berliner cherry-picked examples to fit his arguments and challenge the accuracy of his accounts. They also note he did not seek comment from the journalists involved in the work he cited.

Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.

"The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway."

Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Berliner rejected that critique, saying nothing in his essay or subsequent remarks betrayed private observations or arguments about coverage.

Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper's inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The episode was to focus on a December report on the use of sexual assault as part of the Hamas attack on Israel in October. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

"We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule," Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner's colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired Chief Executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR's workforce as its " North Star ," a moral imperative and chief business strategy.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR's broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

"During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner writes. "In recent years, however, that has changed."

Berliner writes, "For NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model."

NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024."

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR's standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists — clearly pointed at Berliner.

A plan for "healthy discussion"

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network's mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner's critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner's essay offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are."

Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.)

Late Monday afternoon, Chapin announced to the newsroom that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

"Among the questions we'll ask of ourselves each month: Did we capture the diversity of this country — racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc — in all of its complexity and in a way that helped listeners and readers recognize themselves and their communities?" Chapin wrote in the memo. "Did we offer coverage that helped them understand — even if just a bit better — those neighbors with whom they share little in common?"

Berliner said he welcomed the announcement but would withhold judgment until those meetings played out.

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

"Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it," Chapin said. "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

• Katherine Maher
• uri berliner

NPR suspends senior editor Uri Berliner after essay accusing outlet of liberal bias

Npr suspended senior editor uri berliner a week after he authored an online essay accusing the outlet of allowing liberal bias in its coverage..

NPR has suspended a senior editor who authored an essay published last week on an online news site in which he argued that the network had "lost America's trust" because of a liberal bias in its coverage, the outlet reported.

Uri Berliner was suspended Friday for five days without pay, NPR reported Tuesday . The revelation came exactly a week after Berliner publicly claimed in an essay for The Free Press, an online news publication, that NPR had allowed a "liberal bent" to influence its coverage, causing the outlet to steadily lose credibility with audiences.

The essay reignited the criticism that many prominent conservatives have long leveled against NPR and prompted newsroom leadership to implement monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, NPR reported. Berliner's essay also angered many of his colleagues and exposed NPR's new chief executive Katherine Maher to a string of attacks from conservatives over her past social media posts.

In a statement Monday to NPR, Maher refuted Berliner's claims by underscoring NPR's commitment to objective coverage of national issues.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," Maher said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

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Berliner rails against NPR's coverage of COVID-19, diversity efforts

Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, argued in the Free Press essay that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

While he claimed that NPR has always had a "liberal bent" ever since he was hired at the outlet, he wrote that it has since lost its "open-minded spirit," and, hence, "an audience that reflects America."

The Peabody Award-winning journalist highlighted what he viewed as examples of the network's partisan coverage of several major news events, including the origins of COVID-19 and the war in Gaza . Berliner also lambasted NPR's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – as reflected both within its newsroom and in its coverage – as making race and identity "paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

"All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth," he wrote.

Uri Berliner's essay fuels conservative attacks on NPR

In response to the essay, many prominent conservatives and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, launched renewed attacks at NPR for what they perceive as partisan coverage.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo in particular targeted Maher for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network – her  first at a news organization . Among the posts singled out were  a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist .

Trump reiterated on his social media platform, Truth Social, his longstanding argument that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded.

NPR issues formal rebuke to Berliner

Berliner provided an NPR reporter with a copy of the formal rebuke for review in which the organization told the editor he had not been approved to write for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.

NPR also said he publicly released confidential proprietary information about audience demographics, the outlet reported.

Leadership said the letter was a "final warning" for Berliner, who would be fired for future violations of NPR's policies, according to NPR's reporting. Berliner, who is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union, told the NPR reporter that he is not appealing the punishment.

A spokeswoman for NPR said the outlet declined to comment on Berliner's essay or the news of his suspension when reached Tuesday by USA TODAY.

"NPR does not comment on individual personnel matters, including discipline," according to the statement. "We expect all of our employees to comply with NPR policies and procedures, which for our editorial staff includes the NPR Ethics Handbook ."

NPR staffer express dismay; leadership puts coverage reviews in place

According to the NPR article, Berliner's essay also invoked the ire of many of his colleagues and the reporters whose stories he would be responsible for editing.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said in a post last week on social media site X, though he didn't mention Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and [expletive] on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Amid the fallout, NPR reported that NPR's chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom late Monday afternoon that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay in an interview with NPR, adding that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

Orange High School junior earns second place in City Club’s Free Speech Essay Contest

• Updated: Apr. 19, 2024, 4:39 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 19, 2024, 9:08 a.m.

Orange High School junior Lucy Campbell earned second place in the City Club of Cleveland’s 2024 Hope and Stanley Adelstein Free Speech Essay Contest (Photo Courtesy of Orange City Schools)

• Ed Wittenberg, special to cleveland.com

PEPPER PIKE, Ohio -- Orange High School junior Lucy Campbell earned second place and $750 in the 11th/12th-grade category of the City Club of Cleveland’s 2024 Hope and Stanley Adelstein Free Speech Essay Contest.

Winners were announced April 9.

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Uri Berliner, NPR editor who criticized the network of liberal bias, says he's resigning

By Aimee Picchi

Edited By Anne Marie Lee

April 17, 2024 / 12:21 PM EDT / CBS News

Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who had been suspended from his job after claiming the network had "lost America's trust" by pushing progressive views while suppressing dissenting opinions, said he is resigning from the broadcaster.

"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years," Berliner wrote in his resignation letter to NPR CEO Katherine Maher, and which he posted in part on X, the former Twitter. "I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay."

My resignation letter to NPR CEO @krmaher pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK — Uri Berliner (@uberliner) April 17, 2024

Berliner's resignation comes eight days after he published an  essay  in the Free Press that caused a firestorm of debate with his allegations that NPR was suppressing dissenting voices. In response to his critique, some conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, called on the government to "defund" the organization. 

Maher, who became NPR's CEO in March, wrote a staff memo a few days after publication of Berliner's essay addressing his criticisms of the organization's editorial process. Among Berliner's claims are that NPR is failing to consider other viewpoints and that it is fixated on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

"Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning," Maher wrote. 

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues also took issue with the essay, with "Morning Edition" host Steve Inskeep  writing on his Substack  that the article was "filled with errors and omissions."

"The errors do make NPR look bad, because it's embarrassing that an NPR journalist would make so many," Inskeep wrote.

Berliner's suspension, which occurred Friday, was  reported  by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. NPR declined to comment to CBS News about Berliner's resignation. "NPR does not comment on individual personnel matters," a spokesperson said.

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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Senior NPR editor resigns after accusing outlet of liberal bias

An editor for National Public Radio resigned Wednesday just days after he inflamed the ongoing culture war about mainstream media with an essay about what he considers the news outlet’s liberal leanings.

Uri Berliner, who was a senior business editor, wrote an essay for the right-leaning online publication The Free Press in which he said he believes NPR is losing the public’s trust. 

NPR, a nonprofit radio network, has an “absence of viewpoint diversity,” he wrote in the essay, which was published April 9. It “has always had a liberal bent,” but now an “open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR,” he wrote.  

The essay triggered a wave of scrutiny of NPR from conservatives, some of whom responded to it with calls to defund the news organization, which receives federal funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR says on its website that federal funding is “essential” to NPR but that “less than 1% of NPR’s annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.”

In a resignation statement on X, Berliner briefly elaborated on the reason for his departure, which came days after NPR reported that it had suspended him for five days without pay following the op-ed’s release. 

NPR’s chief business editor, Pallavi Gogoi, had told Berliner about its requirement to secure approval before he appeared in outside media, according to NPR’s report.

“I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” Berliner wrote. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.  But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.” 

Berliner did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. A representative for NPR said it “does not comment on individual personnel matters.” 

Berliner’s essay gained traction on X, with many conservatives homing in on his thoughts about NPR’s political makeup. He wrote: “In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.” 

He also criticized NPR’s coverage, or lack thereof, of certain stories, such as the Mueller report, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of Covid-19 and systemic racism following the murder of George Floyd.

High-profile supporters of Berliner’s essay, including former President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk, shared criticism of NPR and its CEO, Katherine Maher. 

“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO ‘DAMAGE TRUMP.’ THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 10.

Musk wrote on X that the “head of NPR hates the Constitution of the USA” in response to a clip of Maher discussing the challenges in fighting disinformation and honoring the First Amendment right to free speech.

Meanwhile, some journalists at NPR pushed back against Berliner’s accusations.

“Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep shared his take in a post on his Substack newsletter , saying he believes Berliner failed to “engage anyone who had a different point of view.”

“Having been asked, I answered: my colleague’s article was filled with errors and omissions,” he wrote, adding, “The errors do make NPR look bad, because it’s embarrassing that an NPR journalist would make so many.”

NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, also denied Berliner’s assessment of the newsroom in a memo to staff members, according to NPR .

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

Maher also said Monday in a statement to NPR : “In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen. What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.”

Daysia Tolentino is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

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NPR Suspends Editor Whose Essay Criticized the Broadcaster

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, said the public radio network’s liberal bias had tainted its coverage of important stories.

By Benjamin Mullin

NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who broke ranks and published an essay arguing that the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage.

Mr. Berliner was suspended by the network for five days, starting Friday, for violating the network’s policy against doing work outside the organization without first getting permission.

Mr. Berliner acknowledged his suspension in an interview with NPR on Monday , providing one of the network’s reporters with a copy of the written rebuke. In presenting the warning, NPR said Mr. Berliner had failed to clear his work for outside outlets, adding that he would be fired if he violated the policy again.

Mr. Berliner’s essay was published last week in The Free Press, a popular Substack publication.

He declined to comment about the suspension. NPR said it did not comment on personnel matters.

The revelation of Mr. Berliner’s punishment is the latest aftershock to rattle NPR since he published his essay. Employees at the public radio network were taken aback by Mr. Berliner’s public condemnation of the broadcaster, and several have said they no longer trust him because of his remarks. Mr. Berliner told The New York Times last week that he did not reach out to the network before publishing his essay.

After Mr. Berliner’s essay was published, NPR’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher, came under renewed scrutiny as conservative activists resurfaced a series of years-old social media posts criticizing former President Donald J. Trump and embracing progressive causes. One of the activists, Christopher Rufo, has pressured media organizations into covering controversies involving influential figures, such as the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president.

NPR said on Monday that Ms. Maher’s social media posts were written long before she was named chief executive of NPR, and that she was not working in the news industry at the time. NPR also said that while she managed the business side of the nonprofit, she was not involved in its editorial process. Ms. Maher said in a statement that “in America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen.”

Several NPR employees have urged the network’s leaders to more forcefully renounce Mr. Berliner’s claims in his essay. Edith Chapin, NPR’s top editor, said in a statement last week that managers “strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism,” adding that the network was “proud to stand behind” its work.

Some employees have begun to speak out. Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor for standards and practices, took issue with many of Mr. Berliner’s claims in an interview with The Times on Tuesday, saying Mr. Berliner’s essay mischaracterized NPR’s coverage of crucial stories.

Mr. Cavin said NPR’s coverage of Covid-19, one of the lines of reporting that Mr. Berliner criticized, was in step with reporting from other mainstream news organizations at the time. The coverage, he said, attributed the origins of the virus to a market in Wuhan, China. He also defended NPR’s coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, another area Mr. Berliner focused on, noting that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the issue, concluded that Russian state actors had made attempts to sway the election.

Mr. Cavin also pointed out that NPR had no way to verify early articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop after the story broke but pursued follow-up stories examining the situation. Mr. Berliner wrote that NPR had “turned a blind eye” to the story about Mr. Biden’s laptop.

“To somehow think that we were driven by politics is both wrong and unfair,” Mr. Cavin said.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin