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Twenty-six views of free will, answering the same four questions. Filter by group, or read down a column to see where the real disagreements lie. Then answer twelve statements yourself.
| View | Is everything fixed by prior causes? | Is free will compatible with determinism? | Do we have free will? | Does anyone deserve blame? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dennett | Perhaps. Freedom does not depend on the answer. | yesYes. Every kind of freedom worth wanting survives determinism. | yesYes: an evolved capacity to act for reasons, which comes in degrees. | Yes, within a fair system of rules that free agents have reason to accept. |
| Frankfurt | He left it open; his analysis works either way. | yesYes. Free will is a matter of how one's desires are structured. | yesPersons often do, when they act on desires they endorse. | Yes, even when they could not have done otherwise. |
| P. F. Strawson | He professed not to know exactly what the thesis of determinism was. | yesResponsibility is; determinism is simply irrelevant to it. | yesWe are participants who hold one another responsible, and rightly. | Yes. Resentment and indignation are fitting responses to ill will. |
| Fischer | Unknown; responsibility should not hang on the answer. | yesResponsibility is; regulative control perhaps not. | yesWe have guidance control, which is what responsibility needs. | Yes, when they act from their own reasons-responsive mechanism. |
| Mele | Open. Science has not settled it. | openOfficially agnostic; he has defended accounts on both sides. | yesScience has not shown that we lack it, and there are good reasons to think we have it. | Nothing in neuroscience shows that they do not. |
| Aristotle | Disputed; some future events may not yet be settled. | openNot his question; his account of the voluntary does not mention it. | yesMany of our acts, and in part our characters, are up to us. | Yes, for voluntary acts, unless excused by force or ignorance. |
| Epicurus and Lucretius | No. Atoms swerve without cause. | noNo. Fate would make us slaves. | yesYes, thanks to the swerve. | Yes; Epicurus insisted that our acts are our own. |
| The Stoics | Yes. Fate is an unbroken chain of causes. | yesYes. Our acts are fated to come about through our own nature. | yesWhat depends on us is our assent; the wise use it to follow fate willingly. | Yes; assent comes from our own character. |
| Augustine | Everything is known to God, but the will's choices are its own. | openIt is compatible with foreknowledge; the question of physical causes is not his. | yesYes, God's gift, though after the Fall it cannot choose the good without grace. | Yes. Sin is the will's own turning away. |
| Hobbes | Yes. Every motion has a sufficient cause. | yesYes. Liberty is the absence of external impediments. | yesWe have liberty of action; a "free will" in Bramhall's sense is absurd. | Punishment is justified by its use in shaping the will. |
| Spinoza | Yes, with the necessity of a geometrical proof. | openFree will, no; freedom as acting from one's own nature, yes. | noNo. But we can become freer through understanding. | Not as sinners before a judge; we may still restrain the harmful. |
| Hume | Human actions are as regular as natural events, in the only sense of necessity we understand. | yesYes. The dispute was verbal all along. | yesWe have hypothetical liberty, unless in chains. | Yes, because actions flow from durable character. |
| Kant | Everything in experience, yes; things in themselves, unknowable. | noNot with natural causation alone; only through the two standpoints. | yesWe must act under the idea of freedom; the moral law shows we are free. | Yes. Retribution is owed for wrongdoing, as a matter of justice. |
| Laplace | Yes. Uncertainty is only ignorance. | openNot his question; his readers concluded it was not. | openHe did not say. | He did not say. |
| Schopenhauer | Yes. Every act follows from character and motive. | noFreedom of action, yes; freedom of the will, no. | noNot in what we do; perhaps, transcendentally, in what we are. | We are rightly held to account for our character, our very being. |
| William James | He chose to believe not: the universe has real possibilities. | noNo. Soft determinism is a quagmire of evasion. | yesYes, as a postulate we have the right to choose. | Yes, and regret and judgement make sense only if we are free. |
| Libet | Not shown by his experiments; he thought the veto might be free. | openHe left the philosophy open, and believed in free will. | yesPerhaps not to start acts, but to veto them. | Yes, for failing to veto what they should have stopped. |
| Wegner | Behaviour is caused by mechanisms we do not experience. | openThe question is less important than how the experience of will is made. | noConscious will, as experienced, is an illusion, though a useful one. | The feeling of will helps us track authorship and responsibility. |
| Sapolsky | Yes, all the way down; randomness would not help. | noNo. Compatibilism changes the subject. | noNo, not even a little. | No. Blame and retributive punishment are unjustified. |
| Kane | No. Some choices are undetermined, through indeterminacy in the brain. | noNo. Ultimate responsibility needs undetermined self-forming actions. | yesYes, if the brain works as he proposes. | Yes, ultimately, for what flows from self-formed characters. |
| Van Inwagen | No; since we have free will, determinism must be false. | noNo. The consequence argument shows it is not. | yesYes, though how is a mystery. | Yes; denying it is unbelievable. |
| Galen Strawson | It does not matter: either way, no one is self-made. | noThe freedom that matters is incompatible with anything. | noNot of the kind that would make us truly responsible. | Not ultimately. No one deserves punishment or reward in the deepest sense. |
| Pereboom | Possibly; with or without it, we lack basic-desert free will. | noNo, as the four-case argument shows. | noNot the kind needed for basic desert. | Not in the basic desert sense; forward-looking blame remains. |
| Caruso | Perhaps; either way, we lack basic-desert free will. | noNot the free will needed for basic desert. | noNo, not of the kind that matters for desert. | No. Justice should follow the public health-quarantine model. |
| Harris | Yes, or by chance; neither leaves room for free will. | noNo. Compatibilism describes something else. | noNo. It is an illusion, and attention can dispel it. | Not in the retributive sense; we protect ourselves without hatred. |
| Popper | No. The universe is open, even in classical physics. | noNo, though chance alone is not freedom either. | yesYes, through plastic control by ideas. | Yes; we are responsible for our actions and our theories. |
| Deutsch | The multiverse as a whole evolves deterministically, but no single universe has only one future. | openWith a deterministic multiverse, yes; with a single deterministic spacetime, no. | yesYes. Our choices depend on our reasons, across the multiverse. | Not his subject. His stress is on people as creators of new explanations. |
Twenty-four centuries
- c. 350 BC Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- c. 300 BC Epicurus and the early Stoics
- c. 50 BC Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
- c. 395 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will
- 1651 Hobbes, Leviathan
- 1677 Spinoza, Ethics
- 1748 Hume, "Of Liberty and Necessity"
- 1788 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
- 1814 Laplace's demon
- 1839 Schopenhauer's prize essay
- 1884 William James, "The Dilemma of Determinism"
- 1962 P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment"
- 1965 Popper, "Of Clouds and Clocks"
- 1969–71 Frankfurt's counterexamples and higher-order desires
- 1978 Dennett, "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"
- 1983 Libet's timing experiments; van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will
- 1984 Dennett, Elbow Room
- 1986 Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief
- 1996 Kane, The Significance of Free Will
- 1997 Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
- 1998 Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control
- 2001 Pereboom, Living Without Free Will
- 2002 Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
- 2003 Dennett, Freedom Evolves
- 2012 Harris, Free Will
- 2014 Mele, Free
- 2021 Dennett and Caruso, Just Deserts
- 2023 Sapolsky, Determined
Each line is a key work discussed on this site; Dennett's own are highlighted. Most of the debate is crowded into the last four centuries.