You can’t escape cause and effect, but there is a way of viewing human agency that is motivating, plausible and humane.We feel that we are free, the originators of our own choices, not just conduits through which the chain of cause and effect flows. But think about it a little more and this ‘voluntarist’ conception of free will starts to look untenable.

Thinking About Free Will

A lot of the time, you might feel as though you have freedom to act as you wish (a view known as ‘voluntarism’), but taking into account your history, personality, mood and other factors, there is in fact an inevitability to everything you do.

All Your Choices Are in A Sense Inevitable

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.

There’s No Escaping the Chain of Cause and Effect

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.

Having Voluntarist Free Will Would Mean Being Entirely Capricious

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.

Praise and Blame Don’t Depend on Absolute Freedom

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.

It’s Useful to Feel You Could Have Done Things Differently, Even if It’s a Fiction

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.

The Constraints upon Our Choices Allow for The Concept of Character

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.

Don’t Reject the Concept of Free Will, Rethink It

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.

Achieve a Free Will Worth Having by Aligning Your First- and Second-Order Desires

You can’t escape cause and effect, but there is a way of viewing human agency that is motivating, plausible and humane