Preliminaries

1. If something is an action, then it is a causing of an event by an agent.

2. Will is the faculty by which agents attempt to act.

3. If an agent wills an action, the agent attempts that action. Willings are exercises of the will, or attempts to act. Successful willings bring about the action that the agent attempted.

3.1 If we understand exercises of will in this way, they are similar to what some philosophers call intentions,   which if successfully realized in one’s environment yield intentional actions. For now we leave open the question of what factors within an agent contribute to an agent’s will.

3.2. Willings are temporal events and thus able to cause other temporal events. (This is intended to meet Broad’s objection to the very idea of agent causation.) An agent wills A at t and, if this is successful, A occurs. Thus: S wills A at t and, if S is successful, A occurs at t + Δt.

4. A free will, in the traditional (libertarian) sense, is one whose willings are not always entirely ultimately caused by events external to the agent.

4.1. Not always: a free-willed being may sometimes fail to exercise that freedom without thereby losing his or her free will. We may still possess free will even if many or most of our willings are entirely ultimately caused by events external to us.

4.2. Entirely: it is inescapable that any finite agent’s willings will be partly caused by factors external to that agent. Freedom of the will is not jeopardized by the fact that my will may include factors such as beliefs and desires which were formed in relation to and logically depend on actually existing entities in the world outside of me. The question is whether there is any element of my willings that does not so depend.

4.3. Ultimately: without this condition, we would trivially possess free will any time we acted after reflecting or deliberating over potential actions we might take. For then mental processes internal to us would occur and terminate in willings which did not directly causally depend on anything outside us; only immediate and un-thought actions might be un-free. Free will in the traditional (libertarian) sense requires that at least one of the causal factors leading up to an event has its ultimate origin within that agent.

4.4. Defining free will in this way is consistent with an ‘ultimate origination’ view of free will, as described e.g. by O’Connor (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/). While other views of free will are possible (because actual), I do think this rough analysis captures the ordinary thoughtful person’s understanding of free will. This does not imply that this is the only or only correct conception of free will, much less that free will exists.

4.5. It is often suggested that, in addition to an ultimate control condition, genuine free will also requires alternate possibilities for action on the part of the agent. However, this seems false, as ‘Frankfurt-style’ examples seem to me to show. Consider a person who deliberates and acts as we do, but who is followed by a guardian angel who would without detection cause that person to will the right thing in any circumstance where that person would will otherwise. This person is essentially trapped in a fatalistic micro-universe where he will always do the right thing: there is no other possibility of action for him. However, in the case where this guardian angel has been assigned to a saint, or even where dumb luck produces an entire lifetime of willing the right actions, the guardian angel never actually does intervene, and the person does the right thing through his or her own will alone.

This person has no possibility but to will right actions, but if the angel does not intervene then these willings will spring from him or her rather than from any outside source. And if we have free will, and this person is like us, it does not seem to me that sending such an angel in any way deprives this person of free will. The angel does in a certain sense rob the person of freedom of action, since she cannot do otherwise than as she does, but so long as all that agent’s successful actions spring in part from his or her own will, and so long as that will is not itself determined by any outside factors, it would seem to me to remain free.

The belief that free will requires alternative possibilities may indeed stem from the belief that free will requires an ultimate, jointly sufficient cause of action within the agent. If one had this sort of control, and if the universe one inhabited developed differently over time depending on which prior events occurred – if the future were open, and fatalism were not true – then ultimate control would in such an environment entail that alternative possibilities were open to the agent.

This observation, if correct – and this entry is sketchier than some of the others in this post – would seem to support the idea that a could-have-done-otherwise condition is in no way fundamental to the traditional (libertarian) notion of freedom of the will. For on the one hand we can give cases where agents cannot will otherwise and yet their will is still free, and on the other hand we can explain why someone who believed in a free will involving ultimate control and did not accept an extreme form of fatalism would automatically conclude that alternate possibilities would be available to a free-willed agent.

4.5.1. If the argument sketched above holds up, it would follow that a family of arguments made against incompatibilism (by Ginet, van Inwagen, O’Connor, and others) on the basis of an alternative possibilities condition are irrelevant to the real issue of whether traditional (libertarian) free will exists or is possible. The defender of traditional libertarian free will can jettison alternative possiblities as cheerfully as the compatibilist. The real issue between them would then remain what it has seemed to most thinkers to be historically: whether it is possible for (a) any agents, (b) any physical agents, and/or (c) human agents to possess such a faculty or not, and, if it is possible in case (c), whether human agents actually do possess it under any conditions.

Note. This is a preliminary stab at (one way of) defining free will. Many people think that free will understood this way is in some sense impossible. The next steps in developing the discussion seem to me to be to see what can be said to motivate a belief in the existence of free will in this sense and to consider the main arguments opponents of free will have brought against it.