Skepticism About Free Will

In everyday life, we make decisions effortlessly. Upon waking up, some will deliberately choose to ignore their phone’s alarm to sleep a few more minutes. The more diligent among us will get up immediately and select the clothes they will wear for the day. While examining the nearly overripe bananas on the counter, some will decide to eat them for breakfast, while others will prefer to bake banana bread in the evening. Life is full of these moments where actions follow one another naturally. However, sometimes more significant events force us to pause and deliberate at length. You are offered your dream job abroad, but the offer comes with major personal sacrifices. You have the opportunity to buy a condo downtown at a great price, but that means giving up the lifelong dream of traveling the world. In such situations of uncertainty, it is natural to believe that the future is open and that we are faced with real alternatives. This capacity of rational agents to determine the course of their actions is what we call “free will,” and it is the actions produced in this way that are generally considered “free.”

Free actions thus appear as a particular type of action over which we have a special kind of control. The next step is to precisely define the nature of this control. There is no shortage of options: some invoke the notion of second-order desires, consciousness, rationality, or even indeterministic causality. For example, some argue that an action is free when it is produced by a mechanism that appropriately responds to reasons, while others claim that an action is free when it is caused, in an undetermined way, by preferences. This definitional endeavor is complex but driven by clear motivations: why would we bother deliberating if our decisions were not under our control? Why punish a criminal if they could not have chosen otherwise than to commit their crime? What is the value of a kept promise if we never truly had the possibility of breaking it? And why invest effort in a project if its success does not truly depend on us? As Susan Pockett (2013) puts it, if free will did not exist, we would have to invent it.

Yet, more and more philosophers adopt a skeptical stance on free will. What if it were merely a psychological necessity, a mental construct? While Pockett herself rejects the idea that free will is an illusion, others, like Saul Smilansky (2000), argue that it is a necessary illusion for the proper functioning of societies. But what drives some thinkers to defend this idea? Some threats to free will come directly from science. To begin with, the existence of free will fits poorly with the determinism of physical sciences: if everything is determined, then the future is fixed in advance, and there are no real alternatives when we deliberate. Moreover, even quantum indeterminacy appears too chaotic to be controlled by anyone. Additionally, neuroscience and cognitive sciences are increasingly revealing the brain mechanisms and genetic and environmental influences underlying our decisions, leaving little room for a control capacity unique to rational agents.

Not everyone acknowledges these threats. Some philosophers, the compatibilists, argue that free will can exist even in a determined world. Others, the libertarians, reject determinism and defend an indeterministic conception of free will, claiming that our decisions are not entirely determined. Today, the philosophical literature remains largely dominated by arguments in favor of free will. Skeptics are more numerous than before, but their positions are often reduced to a dialectical role, helping free will defenders refine their own models. Daniel Dennett (2013), for instance, dismisses skeptical views as “hopeless.” Unlike him, I believe that skepticism is a promising and compelling path. In this thesis, I will defend skepticism about free will by evaluating different conceptions of free will and critiquing compatibilist and libertarian models.