How to think about free will | Psyche Guides

Even quantum physics and the randomness of quantum causation cannot offer us an escape because the ability to act randomly is not the same as having free will.

To act free of causes would be to act without reason. Such a freedom would be gratuitous, since the only grounds for our choice would be the power to choose itself.

We would have no moral character if we did not strongly feel that there were things we simply could not do, and others we felt we must.

To accept that one has done wrong and take responsibility for it is to resolve to try not to do it again and to put right anything that went wrong. We evidently do have the capacity to do this, and that is all that matters.

It is only because we reflect on the things that could so easily have been done differently if conditions or our frame of mind had been slightly different that we learn to take responsibility and do better next time.

The ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will acknowledges the causal necessity of the physical world, but it also recognises that, if no one ‘made me do it’, I acted freely.

First-order desires include wanting cake or sex or to scratch yourself; second-order desires are your desires about these desires, such as wishing to resist the desire for cake. Free beings are ones who can act on their desires about their desires, and not just automatically on their desires.