Free will: alternativity vs self-determinism

The freedom to do alternative actions and the ability to self-determine actions

Bear in a garden of forking paths

There are two ways to interpret free will:

1) free will as freedom-to-do-otherwise (what I call alternativity) and

2) free will as self-determinism.

Erudite understandings of free will typically make alternativity a necessary condition of free will. Folk notions of free will do not. Many theologians and philosophers treat the assumption that alternativity is constitutive of free will as a given: Mele, Wolf, Fischer, are just some names; however, Peter van Inwagen is the steelman of this position. Van Inwagen claims that since the Laws of Nature are fixed, free will cannot exist, since in order for us to act otherwise, the Laws of Nature would need to be alterable. This of course rules out free will from ever being possible because van Inwagen is arguing for freedom from cause-and-effect. Such a conception of free will would make it impossible to attribute moral responsibility to anything. And at the end of the day, what use is a notion of free will if it is not for the sake of attributing moral responsibility?

Many of these free will philosophers often cite their Christian background as a reason for why they developed their concept of free will in the first place. It is not surprising to find someone with a Calvinist background that ends up becoming one of these philosophers of free will. Implicitly therefore, free will is conceived with this religious worldview in the background. It is taken for granted by these philosophers that free will is more universal than it actually is.

So it should not come off as too surprising that whenever I claim that free will as such does not exist in non-Western or pre-Christian Greek cultures, I get claims to the contrary about how “if you look closely, these cultures also have an analogue of free will, though they might not call it that.”

And my immediate reaction is: No!

These cultures do not have free will in the sense of alternativity. The closest analogue to free will they have is more accurately described as self-determinism. Folk concepts of free will actually refer to self-determinism not freedom-to-do-otherwise! Work done by Berniūnas supports the claim that free will is a WEIRD idea. Berniūnas et al (2021) compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that these lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will.

The observation that free will is not universal and is in fact a notion that is specific to the post-Reformation West is obvious to anyone who has lived in non-WEIRD cultures or studied Christian theology from Augustine to Luther.

The whole compatibilist vs incompatibilist framing of free will and determinism presupposes that free will and determinism antagonistically work against each other. When, as some Kantians might argue, determinism enables free will to be possible in the first place. Free will prerequires determinism, in other words.

Erudite notions of free will seem like a moot intellectual exercise far removed from any practical application of the concept. The idea seems to have been stipulated to serve some narrow ideological agenda rather than to track folk conceptions of free will to actually be serviceable to everyday use. Whereas folk conceptions of free will are actually doing work, the recondite musings on free will by theologians and causalistic naturalists are functioning to defend a particular worldview: a view of reality as intrinsically purposeless (without a god). A tri-omni god capable of perfectly predicting and controlling the future necessitates a will that is free from god’s ability to predict and control. Therefore, much of Christian free will literature amounts to apologia that attempts to defend the goodness of god against accusations of his inactivity in the face of suffering. These Christian solutions to the problem of free will—Boethianism, Ockhamism, Molinism—are all aimed at absolving god. What the ancient Greeks and non-WEIRD cultures want from their theories of agency is to blame those who have wronged them and to hold them morally accountable. Therefore, they have developed other types of idioms to attribute moral responsibility to agent that do not rely on the idiom of free will. Even the Ancient Greek conceptions of agency lack free will and instead takes the idiomatic expression of τὰ ἐφʹ ἡμῖν, τὰ οὐκ ἐφʹ ἡμῖν (what is up to us, what is not up to us) for attributing responsibility. Self-determinism, I argue is what folk are referring to when they talk about free will and therefore the better idiom to rely on if your aim is to understand the moral responsibility of various agents.