ARGUMENTS AGAINST FREE WILL: LAWS AND CAUSES

Before we look at the case against free will, it is a good idea to settle on a definition of what is being attacked and, indeed, what is being defended in this book. The definition by Robert Kane in his excellent The Significance of Free Will captures what matters: “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators (or originators) and sustainers of their own ends and purposes”.

Perhaps “ultimate creators (or originators)” is to make a claim that is difficult to sustain. So let us drop “ultimate” and unpack what is important in a less ambitious idea of free will. It implies:

• 1. That we can truly say of at least some of our behaviour that “I am responsible for this”.

• 2. That our actions have deflected the course of events: we make a difference and that difference is not merely an inflection by our bodies of the predetermined course of events passing through us.

• 3. That our actions express something within us that we can truly own and justifiably own up to.

• 4. That as agents we have explicit ends and purposes that truly belong to us.

• 5. And that what we have done is one of several possibilities genuinely open to us such that we could have done or chosen otherwise.

Since I do not claim that we exercise our freedom by breaking or entirely bypassing the so-called laws of nature, my position is compatibilist: I will argue that determinism in the natural world is compatible with human freedom.

My position is a modest one, in that I do not believe that everything that human agents do is driven by something called the will. Nor does the claim that we are the originators of our actions imply that, unassisted, we magic ourselves and our actions into being.