I suspect that a key issue in discussions and worries about (the absence of) “free will” is the issue of possibilities. I also think it is a major source of confusion. Different people are talking about possibilities in different senses without being clear about it, which leads them to talk past each other, and perhaps even to confuse and dispirit laypeople by making them feel they have no possibilities in any sense whatsoever.

Different Emphases

Thinkers who take different positions on free will tend to emphasize different things. One camp tends to say “we don’t have free will, since our actions emerge from prior causes that are ultimately beyond our own control”.

Another camp, so-called compatibilists, will tend to agree with the latter point about prior causes, but they choose to emphasize possibilities: “complex agents can act within a range of possibilities in a way crude objects like rocks cannot, and such agents truly do weigh and choose between these options”.

In essence, what I think the latter camp is emphasizing is the fact that, when we make decisions, we have ex-ante possibilities: a range of options we can choose from in expectation. For example, in a game of chess, your ex-ante possibilities are the set of moves allowed by the rules of the game. And since compatibilists tend to define free will roughly as the ability to make choices among such ex-ante possibilities, they conclude that we indeed do have free will.

I doubt that any philosopher arguing against the existence of free will would deny that we have ex-ante possibilities. After all, we all conceive of various possibilities in our minds that we weigh and choose between, and we arguably cannot talk meaningfully about ethics, or choices in general, without such a framework of ex-ante possibilities.

Given the apparent agreement on these two core points — (1) our actions emerge from prior causes, and (2) we have ex-ante possibilities — the difference between the two camps mostly appears to lie in how they define the term “free will” and whether they prefer to mostly emphasize point (1) or (2).

The “Right” Definition of Free Will

People in these two camps will often insist that their definition of free will is the one that matches what most people mean by free will. It seems to me that both camps are partly right and partly wrong about this. I think it is misguided to believe that most people have anything close to a clear definition of free will in their minds, as opposed to having a jumbled network of associations that relate to a wide range of notions, including notions of being unconstrained by prior causes and notions of ex-ante possibilities.

Indeed, experimental philosophy seems to paint a nuanced picture of people’s intuitions and conceptions of “free will”, and it reveals these conceptions to be quite unclear and conflicting, as one would expect.

Emphasizing Both

I believe that the two distinct emphases outlined above are both important yet insufficient on their own. The emphasis on prior causes is important for understanding the nature of our choices and actions. In particular, it helps us understand that our choices do not represent a break with physical mechanism, but that they are indeed the product of complex mechanisms of this kind (which include the mechanisms of our knowledge and intentions, as well as the mechanism of weighing various ex-ante possibilities).

This emphasis may help free us from certain bad ideas about human choices, such as naive ideas about how anyone can always pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It may also help us construct better incentives and institutions based on an actual understanding of how we make choices. Lastly, it may help us become more compassionate and understanding toward others, such as by reminding us that we cannot reasonably expect people to act on knowledge that they do not possess.

Likewise, emphasizing our ex-ante possibilities is important for our ability to make good decisions. If we mistakenly believe that we have absolutely no possibilities to choose from, we will likely create highly sub-optimal outcomes, whether it be in a game of chess or a major life decision. Aiming to choose the ex-ante possibility that seems best in expectation is crucial for us to make good choices. Indeed, this is arguably what good decision-making is all about.

Moreover, an emphasis on ex-ante possibilities may help instill in us the healthy and realistic versions of bootstrap-pulling attitudes, namely that hard work and dedication are often worthwhile and they truly can lead us in better directions.

Both Emphases Have Pitfalls in Isolation

Our minds intuitively draw inferences and make associations based on the things we hear. When it comes to “free will”, I suspect most of us have quite leaky conceptual networks, in that the distinct clusters of sentiments that we intuitively tie to the term “free will” readily cross-pollute each other.

So when someone says “we don’t have any non-physical free will”, some people might mistakenly interpret this as implying “we don’t have ex-ante possibilities, and hence we cannot meaningfully think in terms of alternative future possibilities”. This might in turn lead to bad decisions and feelings of disempowerment. It may also lead some people to think that it makes no sense to punish bad behavior, or that we cannot meaningfully say things like “you really should have made a better choice”. Yet these things do make sense. They create incentives by making a promise for the future — “people who act like this will pay a price” — which in turn nudges people toward some of their ex-ante possibilities over others.

Likewise, a naive emphasis on the causal origins of our actions may incline people to think that certain feelings — such as pride, regret, and hatred — are always unreasonable and should never be entertained. Yet this does not follow either. These feelings may have great utility in certain circumstances, even if such circumstances might be rare.

Another source of confusion is to say that our causal nature implies that everything is just a matter of luck. Although this is perhaps true in some ultimate sense, in another sense — the everyday sense that distinguishes between things won through hard effort versus dumb luck — everything is obviously not just a matter of luck. I suspect that we can easily confuse these very different notions of “luck” at an intuitive level. Consequently, unreserved claims about everything being a matter of luck risk having unfortunate effects, such as leading us to downplay the value of effort.

Similar pitfalls exist for the claim “you could not have done otherwise”. What we often mean by this claim is that “this event would have happened even if you had done things differently”. In other words: the environment constrained you, and your efforts were immaterial. This is very different from saying, for example, “you could not have done otherwise because your deepest values compelled you” — meaning: the environment may well have allowed alternative possibilities, but your core values did not. The latter is often true of our actions, yet it is in many ways the opposite of the environment-constrained sense of “you could not have done otherwise”.

Hence, confusion is likely to emerge if someone simply declares “you could not have done otherwise” about all actions without qualification, since it risks obscuring the important distinction between constraints posed by our values versus constraints posed by our environment. Moreover, it may obscure the fact that we in many of our past choices indeed did have other possibilities than the ones we chose, in the sense of alternative possibilities afforded by our environment. Failing to acknowledge such past possibilities can be detrimental to our future choices, as it may keep us acting in needlessly limited and habit-bound ways due to false ideas about which paths are open to us.

Conversely, there are also pitfalls in the opposite direction. For example, when someone says “we have ex-ante possibilities, and such possibilities play a crucial role in our decision-making”, some people might mistakenly interpret this as implying “our actions are independent of prior causes, and this is crucial for our decision-making”. This may in turn lead to the above-mentioned mistakes that the prior-causes emphasis can help us avoid, such as misunderstanding our physical nature and entertaining unreasonable ideas about how we can expect people to act.

Conclusion

In sum, we have good reasons to be careful in our communication about “free will”, and to clearly flag these non sequiturs. “Our actions emerge from prior causes” does not mean “we have no ex-ante possibilities”, and “we have ex-ante possibilities” does not imply “we are independent of prior causes”. Navigating reality effectively requires that we integrate an understanding of prior causes with a pragmatic focus on our ex-ante possibilities.

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Acknowledgments: Thanks to Mikkel Vinding for comments.