Free Will
Florida State University. August 12, 2023.
Early in 2010, I launched the four-year Big Questions in Free Will project. Its primary purpose was to bring scientists and philosophers together to explore big questions about free will. The project also had a theological wing that dealt with questions about divine freedom and the possible bearing of a supreme being on human freedom. The project was funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In all, about fifty scientists, philosophers, and theologians were involved.
The TV series Closer to Truth took an interest in the project. A dozen of their half-hour episodes between 2012 and 2015 are about free will and feature participants in the Big Questions in Free Will project. The Closer to Truth group also made a 97-minute documentary on the project, available on YouTube. The last time I checked, its YouTube views totaled over 1.7 million.
So why is there all this interest in free will – not just among philosophers, scientists, and theologians, but among people in general? One thing I’ve noticed is that some people value free will so deeply that they are terribly upset by news reports that neuroscientists have proved that free will is an illusion. I opened my 2009 book, Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will, with an email message from such a person – someone I didn’t know. Here it is again:
Dear Dr. Mele,
I recently purchased a DVD by Dr. Stephen Wolinsky . . . He explains from the point of neuroscience that there is no such thing as free will, as we can only perceive an action after it has already occurred. Can you please help me with this? I can understand that I don’t know what thought will occur next. But that that has already happened is beyond comprehension. Thank you as I am in a lot of despair.
I have received quite a few messages like this since then, sometimes from people who sound absolutely desperate. What worries them is the thought that they don’t have the control over their behavior that they take themselves to have and value having. They worry that, although it seems to them that it is often up to them what they do, in fact this is an illusion.
Dr. Alfred Mele and his 2009 book, Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will.
I lack the space here to discuss the neuroscience experiments that allegedly prove that free will is an illusion. The argument from neuroscientific data to the skeptical conclusion about free will depends on the claim that we make all our decisions unconsciously. And one thing I take myself to have demonstrated in that 2009 book of mine is that the data don’t support that claim. I mention this now out of a concern for readers who have just now, for the first time, encountered the claim that neuroscientists have proved that there’s no free will and might find that claim distressing. By the way, I’ve never been contacted by a person with an existential worry that some philosophical argument or other proves that there’s no free will. It’s always neuroscience.
What specialists mean by “free will”
There is a lot of disagreement about free will both in philosophy (O’Connor and Franklin 2022) and in psychology (Baer et al. 2008). Jean-Paul Sartre famously contends that “we are condemned to be free” (1943/2018, p. 718), which entails that we are inevitably free (whether or not we see the inevitability as condemnation). And, at the other extreme, another philosopher, Galen Strawson, argues that free will is impossible. Daniel Wegner argues that free will is an illusion (2002) whereas another influential social psychologist, Roy Baumeister, offers an explanation of how free will works (2008).
Why is there so much disagreement about the existence of free will? Part of the answer may be that some of the disputants mean very different things by free will. That possibility is the focus of this essay.
Here is a striking claim by neuroscientist Read Montague:
Free will is the idea that we make choices and have thoughts independent of anything remotely resembling a physical process. Free will is the close cousin to the idea of the soul – the concept that ‘you’, your thoughts and feelings, derive from an entity that is separate and distinct from the physical mechanisms that make up your body. From this perspective, your choices are not caused by physical events, but instead emerge wholly formed from somewhere indescribable and outside the purview of physical descriptions. This implies that free will cannot have evolved by natural selection, as that would place it directly in a stream of causally connected events. (2008, p. 584)
It is easy to see that Montague regards free will as an utterly magical notion.
In his 2011 book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga claims that free will involves a ghostly or nonphysical element and “some secret stuff that is YOU” (p. 108). Obviously, Gazzaniga, like Montague, isn’t reporting a scientific discovery about what free will means. Both scientists are telling us what the expression free will means to them. Given the meaning Gazzaniga assigns to free will, it comes as no surprise that, in his opinion, “free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs . . . that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge about the nature of our universe.”
The overwhelming majority of philosophers currently writing about free will don’t see free will as magical or anti-scientific (Bourget and Chalmers 2014, p. 476). They would reject as radically misguided the descriptions of free will offered by Montague and Gazzaniga. Should the two sides just agree to disagree? I think not. But, then, how should they proceed?
What nonspecialists mean by “free will”
There’s an interesting body of work in experimental philosophy and social psychology on what nonspecialists mean by free will. I’ll review just a bit of it here. In response to claims like Montague’s, I conducted some simple survey studies of my own (first reported in Mele 2012). In the study in which the absence of anything nonphysical – immaterial souls, for example – was made most salient, I polled a group of ninety Florida State University undergraduates taking a basic philosophy course that didn’t deal with free will. The students read the following text: “We’re interested in how you understand free will. Please read the following sentences and answer the questions by circling your answer.” About half then read Story 1 below before they read Story 2; the others read the stories in the opposite order. The students were instructed not to change their answer about the story they read first after reading the other story. The questions were these: “Did John have free will when he made his decision?” and “Is this your first philosophy class after high school?” Participants’ options for answers were yes and no.
Story 1:
In 2019, scientists finally prove that everything in the universe is physical and that what we refer to as “minds” are actually brains at work. They also show exactly where decisions and intentions are found in the brain and how they are caused. Our decisions are brain processes, and our intentions are brain states. Also, our decisions and intentions are caused by other brain processes.
In 2009, John Jones saw a 20 dollar bill fall from the pocket of the person walking in front of him. He considered returning it to the person, who did not notice the bill fall; but he decided to keep it. Of course, given what scientists later discovered, John’s decision was a brain process and it was caused by other brain processes.
Story 2:
In 2019, scientists who work for a secret military organization finally develop a fool-proof compliance drug. The drug is used to make people decide to do various things. Whenever they give a person the drug and then suggest a course of action, that person is irresistibly caused to decide to take that course of action. They make their suggestions through a tiny computer chip that they implant in a person’s brain.
These chemists gave the compliance drug to John Jones, a very honest man. When John saw a 20 dollar bill fall from the pocket of the person walking in front of him, they suggested keeping it. John considered returning it to the person, who did not notice the bill fall; but, of course, he decided to keep it. After all, the combination of the compliance drug and the suggestion forced John to decide to keep it.
Figure 1. Even though John kept the money in both stories, the great majority of respondents did not take a free-will-no-matter-what perspective.
The results, shown in Figure 1, are instructive. Almost three quarters (73%) of the respondents said that John had free will when he made his decision in Story 1, and only about one fifth (21%) said this about John in Story 2. The strong negative response to Story 2 indicates that the great majority of respondents don’t take a free-will-no-matter-what perspective. And Story 1, in which physicalism (the idea that everything that exists is physical) is very salient, yields a strong free will response. That story leaves no place in the universe for nonphysical entities. These findings clash with the claim that ordinary usage of the expression free will treats free will as an anti-scientific, supernatural power that depends on the existence of immaterial souls. Now, I don’t see my polls as foolproof. But they certainly provide better evidence about ordinary usage of free will than does, for example, a randomly selected neuroscientist’s opinion about what that expression means. And when distraught nonspecialists send me email messages like the one I reproduced toward the beginning of this essay it’s free will as they understand it that they think they’re being told they don’t have.
A much larger study by Andrew Vonasch, Roy Baumeister, and me (2018) included a follow-up study on free will and souls. Participants read one of four randomly-assigned probes. Here, I reproduce the two probes that are most relevant for present purposes. (386 participants completed the questionnaire and passed our comprehension check.)
Story A:
Imagine that scientists finally discover that there are no souls. So, for example, they discover that you don’t have a soul, that your friends and neighbors don’t have souls, and so on.
Story B:
Imagine that scientists finally discover that there are no souls. So, for example, they discover that you don’t have a soul, that your friends and neighbors don’t have souls, and so on. Like everyone else, John doesn’t have a soul. One day, he sees a twenty dollar bill fall out of the pocket of the person in front of him. He picks it up and keeps it for himself.
Participants responded to three statements about each story on scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is “strongly disagree” and 7 is “strongly agree.” The following statements accompanied Story A: People have free will in this situation; People can make conscious decisions in this situation; People are morally responsible for their actions in this situation. The statements accompanying Story B were specifically about John: John has free will in this situation; John can make conscious decisions in this situation; John is morally responsible for his actions in this situation. Counting answers of 1, 2, and 3 as expressing disagreement and answers of 5, 6, and 7 as expressing agreement, we calculated the percentage of people who agreed with the statements and the percentage who disagreed.
The results are reported in Figure 2. Here again we have evidence that a substantial majority of nonspecialists don’t believe that free will depends on souls, and the same goes for moral responsibility.
If someone conceives of free will as Montague, Gazzaniga, and some others do, it is likely to seem way too magical to be real. But if one’s conception of free will is in line with ordinary usage, the existence of free will is likely to present itself as – at least – a real possibility.
What I mean by “free will”
How do I myself conceive of free will? And why? Often, an attempt to get a good grip on a concept benefits from an effort to fit it into a web of associated concepts. In ordinary thought, free will is closely associated with moral responsibility. When moral responsibility replaces free will in questions about stories of the kind I’ve been discussing, the percentage figures tend to be very similar, as they are in Figure 2. Free will and moral responsibility also are closely linked to each other in philosophical work. A common claim in the philosophical literature on these topics is that someone who never has free will isn’t morally responsible for anything.
Thinking about free will in connection with moral responsibility can bring some people down to Earth. It’s noteworthy in this connection that although Gazzaniga rejects free will as magical and anti-scientific, he takes a very different view of moral responsibility and accountability. “There is no scientific reason not to hold people accountable and responsible,” he writes (2011, p. 106). Evidently, he sets a much lower bar for responsibility than for free will – one that doesn’t require anything supernatural. But, obviously, he has no neuroscientific grounds for setting the bar for free will where he does. Nothing that comes from neuroscience prevents him from lowering his bar for free will to bring it into line with his naturalistic bar for moral responsibility. If he were to do that, he might start saying that there is no scientific reason to believe that free will is an illusion!
I conceive of free will as I do partly because I regard having free will as a necessary condition for being a morally responsible person – that is, a person who deserves credit or blame from a moral point of view for some of what he or she does – and I see no good reason to think that moral responsibility depends on anything supernatural. I sometimes hear that my written work on free will and neuroscience dodges the idea that anyone who knows what free will means knows that free decisions need to issue from supernatural processes. The reason why survey-style experimental philosophy figures prominently in my discussion of this semantic issue – the meaning of free will – is that I believe this is the best approach to take to make headway with, for example, the occasional neuroscientist who insists that free will is a supernatural concept and isn’t likely to be impressed by philosophical arguments about this conceptual claim. These scientists know that their neuroscientific work doesn’t give them any special insight into what the expression free will means (a semantic issue), and data on how nonspecialists use that expression are relevant to its meaning. I certainly don’t believe that survey-style experimental philosophy can settle such questions as whether free will exists. But it is useful in the present context. It is relevant to the question about the meaning of the expression free will.
For quite a few years I have been on a pair of missions regarding free will. One of them is focused on science: it is to assess the evidence for and against claims that various experiments prove that free will doesn’t exist (Mele 2009, 2014). I think of this mission as a public service, even if my 2009 book is mainly for specialists. The other is to articulate a pair of conceptions of free will that capture two different but related strands of thinking about free will in philosophy and beyond and to argue that the proposition that one or the other of these conceptions is correct and free will exists is more credible than the proposition that free will is an illusion (Mele 1995, 2006, 2017, 2019, 2022). There is no way to do anything like justice to either of these missions in a short essay. So I decided – freely, I believe – to focus on a piece of the puzzle, one apparent source of disagreement about whether free will exists.
Acknowledgment: Work on this article was supported by a grant from the Fetzer Institute. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Fetzer Institute. Parts of this article derive from Mele 2022.
Alfred Mele joined Florida State University in 2000 as the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy. His primary areas of interest revolve around human behavior. His books include Irrationality (1987), Springs of Action (1992), Autonomous Agents (1995), Self-Deception Unmasked (2001), Motivation and Agency (2003), Free Will and Luck (2006), Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (2009), Backsliding (2012), A Dialogue on Free Will and Science (2014), Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will (2014), Aspects of Agency: Decisions, Abilities, Explanations, and Free Will (2017), Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (2019), and Free Will: An Opinionated Guide (2022). Dr. Mele has worked with many talented philosophers and scientists as director of two multi-million dollar, interdisciplinary projects: the Big Questions in Free Will project (2010-13) and the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project (2014-2017). He also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in a variety of areas, including philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion.