Do we have free will?
I’d like to share an essay on free will that I originally wrote last year as part of a short philosophy course. I’ve recently revisited and revised it for this blog post. It explores whether human beings can truly act “freely,” and what that means for moral responsibility, drawing on ideas from philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive science. I’m just a curious learner, not an expert, and I’m sharing this in the spirit of thinking out loud with others who enjoy reflecting on big questions.
Can human beings act “freely” and so be held morally responsible for their actions?
Our law-governed society presupposes that every mentally healthy person possesses free will, “the power to perform free actions” (Mele 2009); thus one is considered morally responsible for their actions. However, contrary to this widely accepted assumption, many philosophers and scientists have long questioned whether we are, in fact, free in the way we imagine.
In the free will debate, scholars are traditionally divided based on how they define freedom of action in relation to determinism—the view that every event is causally determined by preceding events and the laws of nature. Compatibilists (or soft determinists) argue that free will is compatible with determinism, while incompatibilists (or hard determinists) deny that we can have free will if determinism is true.
Thomas Hobbes, a notable compatibilist, wrote: “A free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will, and that liberty is the absence of external impediments” (Hobbes 1654, cited in Timpe, no date). Similarly, David Hume stated: “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will […] this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains” (Hume 1748). Both Hobbes and Hume define free action as the absence of physical constraints, allowing individuals to act according to their desires. However, it could be argued that their limited understanding of human cognition led to this overly simplistic account.
Recent advances in cognitive and computer science have fueled a resurgence of determinist thinking. A turning point came with William James’ theory of emotion in his 1884 essay What is an Emotion?, where he argued that emotions result from bodily reactions to stimuli, rather than the other way around. Scarantino and de Sousa observe that this view challenged centuries of Western philosophical thought that treated emotions as mental primitives (2018). James claimed: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful” (James 1884, cited in Scarantino and de Sousa 2018, sec. 3). Though James was a compatibilist, his theory undermines the idea that conscious intention precedes action, suggesting instead that action precedes awareness, thereby casting doubt on traditional views of volition.
Further doubt was cast by Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the 1980s, which found that neural readiness potentials precede conscious decisions to act. As Simon Blackburn summarises:
“Libet discovered an increase of ‘readiness potential’ measurable around one-third of a second before the subject’s conscious decision to move. It seemed to many that this showed that it is not our own acts of will that cause our actions, but unconscious processes […] preceding our conscious decisions.” (Blackburn 2009)
In another field, Alan Turing’s 1936 paper On Computable Numbers introduced the concept of the Turing machine, a hypothetical computing model, that influenced the rise of cognitive science in the 1960s. Michael Rescorla notes that this interdisciplinary field combines philosophy, psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and more to study the mind (Rescorla 2020). One key figure in this tradition is neuroscientist Anil Seth, who argues in Being You (2022) that our perception of the world, including our sense of self, is a “controlled hallucination” generated by the brain through predictive processes grounded in Bayesian inference. According to Seth:
“I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea […] Voluntary actions are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants.” (Seth 2022)
This example illustrates that while we feel we choose our actions freely, our desires themselves are products of countless prior causes, such as biological needs, past experiences, environmental cues, and cultural conditioning. Seth nonetheless describes these as voluntary actions, because they reflect the kind of person we are. In other words, even if we cannot choose our wants, we can act in ways that express them. This reflects a redefinition of freedom: not as uncaused agency, but as coherence between our internal states and our actions.
This idea parallels an earlier view by David Hartley. As Richard Allen explains:
“[In] Hartley’s account, the performance of a voluntary movement is not […] a two-stage process, with an executive ‘faculty’ of the Mind, the Will, first issuing an instruction that the body then carries out. Rather, a movement becomes voluntary through the living being’s interaction with the ‘innumerable’ […] associated circumstances’ of its environment […] ‘Will’ does not name anything substantive: it is a word we use to describe an ‘idea, or state of mind’.” (Allen 2021)
For both Seth and Hartley, then, voluntary actions emerge not from an independent faculty called the will, but from a complex interaction between brain, body, and environment. Seth further suggests that the feeling “we could have done otherwise” is an evolved feature of our cognition: a mechanism useful for adapting to future situations, even if it’s not strictly true. From this standpoint, free will is an illusion that serves a function: it enables forward planning and moral learning, even in a deterministic world.
Critics may argue that such views reduce humans to “mere machines,” devoid of agency or dignity. But this misunderstands the point. We might be machines, but not mere machines. What sets us apart is our capacity for reflection, for prosocial behavior, and for acting in line with values shaped over a lifetime. Even if our desires are determined, we can still act freely when our actions align with who we are. This is the sense in which compatibilists argue that freedom is real: not the power to break causal chains, but the ability to act according to our character, reasoning, and learned experience.
While this account of free action may appear to undermine moral responsibility since our actions arise from causes beyond our control, it opens the door to a redefined basis for it. We should not hold individuals responsible as if they were sovereign wills acting independently of causality. Rather, we should hold them responsible because doing so shapes behavior, maintains social cohesion, and supports justice. Moral responsibility, then, is not a metaphysical truth but a practical institution: a system that reinforces the prosocial tendencies we evolved to possess.
In light of modern neuroscience and philosophy, we must rethink the nature of free will. The evidence suggests that conscious intention does not initiate action but arises from unconscious processes shaped by biology, experience and culture. Yet even in this framework, a meaningful concept of freedom survives: the freedom to act in ways that express who we are. Compatibilist thinkers like Hartley and Seth offer a compelling account of freedom that is compatible with determinism. Moral responsibility, too, survives. Not because we are metaphysically unbound, but because it serves vital roles in shaping moral behaviour, enforcing norms, and cultivating prosocial individuals. In this sense, we are not metaphysically free, but we are morally accountable. And that, perhaps, is freedom enough.
Reference list
Allen, Richard, “David Hartley”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/hartley/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Blackburn, Simon, (2009) The Big Questions — Philosophy. 1st ed. London: Quercus Publishing Plc. pp 34-35.
Hume, David, (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [online] Salt Lake City: Project Gutenberg. (sec 8, para 73) Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662/ (Accessed 05 January 2024).
Mele, A. R., (2009), “Free Will”, Encyclopedia of Consciousness, Academic Press,
William P. Banks (ed.), pp 265-277,
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00031-1/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Rescorla, Michael, “The Computational Theory of Mind”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (sec 1, 2). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/computational-mind/ (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Timpe, K., “Free Will”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, (sec 1), Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/freewill/, (Accessed 05 January 2024)
Seth, Anil, (2022) Being You – A New Science of Consciousness. 1st paperback edition. London: Faber. pp 216-221.
Scarantino, Andrea and Ronald de Sousa, “Emotion”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (sec 3). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/ (Accessed 05 January 2024 )