“Since all events are causally determined, and we don’t control our past, then we don’t control our future, and if we don’t control our future we have no free will.” The argument is compelling, but fallacious: it depends on an equivocation fallacy, switching from beginning to end between entirely different definitions of “control.” This article is about that. My aim here is to help disentangle you from a semantic confusion that interferes with your ability to make sound judgments about others’ and your own autonomy. And the solution is to abandon the ivory tower and get back in touch with reality—and only use words as they are actually used in everyday life.

I’ve often written on how philosophers and laypeople who think “free will” doesn’t exist are caught in a semantic confusion about what we all even really mean by the term (I’ve also written on how many philosophical disputes are caused by this same failure mode). In the real world, “free will” has nothing to do with defying the laws of causation. It has solely to do with getting to do your will, including allowing your present will to affect your future will—and not having your will thwarted by someone else, or blocked by something in your way. This is what it means in every practical, real-world milieu, from courts of law to medical ethics boards, even everyday moral judgment, self-actualization, and defenses of our personal autonomy.

In no actual application does “free will” ever mean “violating the laws of causation.” That’s just some claptrap theologians and philosophers made up, by forgetting that philosophy should pay attention to reality before trying to make up anything at all. They thus forgot to ask the first and most essential questions of all, “Why do we care? What is this for? And how does it actually work?” In other words, attending to free will in the real world. I’ve covered that in considerable detail already in Sense and Goodness without God (index, “free will”), and in numerous supplementary articles, and in an online course I teach every month on the subject, facing countless questions from numerous students and challengers from all walks of life (and if you have your own million questions on the subject, I encourage you to take that course and ask them there, where you’ll get my full and detailed attention). But after more than a decade of this, never has anyone been able to present any instance in the real world of free will being used in the “contra-causal” sense—as in, not merely talked about, but applied.

That means, for example, in any instance when you ever had to decide whether someone did or didn’t act freely—if they acted with informed consent or not, if they were forced or not, if their autonomy was respected or not—you never “check” if they violated any laws of causation. Nope. You always key on completely different facts to tell whether someone’s autonomy had been violated or not, or even there or not. And ask ten different people and they will give the same answer—given enough real-world information, you will all consistently know when someone acted freely and when they didn’t. And yet at no point did any of you “check” to see if they violated any laws of physics. So that clearly isn’t what you all mean by free will in the real world. You mean something else—the thing you are all looking for, and actually seeing, when telling whether someone is acting freely or not. Which is the same thing all courts of law look for when having to make exactly the same decision. Which is in turn the same thing ethics review boards look for when having to determine if someone’s autonomy was respected or violated or even present. It’s also what we look for when deciding whether we have lived the life we wanted, or the life someone else wanted us to live—whether that pressure and interference came from particular people, or society as a whole. How much of who we are was intentionally and informedly built by us, rather than merely installed or absorbed or “left to happen.”

The Control Condition

“Since all events are causally determined, and we don’t control our past, then we don’t control our future, and if we don’t control our future we have no free will.” Of course we do control our past—as in, we were there, controlling it. So to get this argument to work, we now have to abandon an obvious and ordinary meaning of “control” to mean something else altogether, or forget that we were making decisions in our own past. The premise thus presumes its own conclusion; a circular argument (rather like “abortion is murder because killing is murder”). But rather than untangle that mess, we should instead be asking, “In what sense is it true that if we do control our future, we do have free will?” In other words, start taking seriously the possibility the conclusion is false. What would the word control then have to mean? And does that just happen to be what it usually means in the real world?

My thermostat controls my heater. This is a factually true statement. Yet no laws of physics are being violated. It would be nonsensical of you to insist my thermostat doesn’t control my heater on the mere trivial fact that I, in turn, control my thermostat—and my body’s evolved heat tolerances control my control of my thermostat, and random accidents of celestial history control my body’s evolved heat tolerances, and the Big Bang controlled all the random accidents of celestial history, therefore “the Big Bang controls my heater.” This is a ridiculous semantic game that simply ignores how language works in the real world; and not just how it works, but why. Because we built it that way for a reason.

The Big Bang is completely irrelevant to whether my thermostat is controlling my heater or not—as becomes obvious when, for example, we are trying to find out why my heater turns on at one time and not another. “The Big Bang caused that” is factually true (in a hyper-literal, causally determinist sense), but completely useless information, if what you want to know is why my heater is behaving as it is; even more so if you want my heater to behave differently. Because either way, you’d better figure out that it’s my thermostat that is controlling it, and where my thermostat is, and how to reset it. That’s how the real world works. The ivory tower can go freeze to death for its complete failure to grasp how thermostats work, while it incessantly rambles on about the Big Bang controlling my heater. That’s simply not what “control” means.

Control in ordinary everyday discourse means: if we removed the thing that controls outcome x, it will observably cease to control the outcome x. If you remove my thermostat, my heater won’t turn on, much less at a certain temperature. If you remove the President who controls in odd ways how discretionary budgets get spent, those discretionary budgets will likely get spent differently. If you remove the magistrate who is subversively controlling the police, his subversive control over the police will observably end. If you force a woman to marry someone, you have removed her control over whom she marries. If you removed me from all decision-making about my future, I then no longer have any control over my future. But if it takes removing me from all decision making to do that, then it follows inserting me back in restores my control over my future. I therefore, in every sense that matters, control my future. Obviously not entirely (my will is not free of every constraint—I am not an omnipotent deity), but significantly enough to make a difference—a difference worth realizing and protecting.

Yes, many other contributing causes are “involved.” If I lock my thermostat so no one else can reset it, then I fully control my thermostat, but if I leave it open for anyone to set, then I only provisionally control my thermostat; others then can control it. Then the only common theme to how my heater operates is that my thermostat controls it. Everything else is just external contingencies. In like manner, biological history determined my heat tolerances and thus has a causal effect on how I decide to set my thermostat. But it won’t set that thermostat without me. I have to be a part of the causal chain. And my involvement has to be conscious and deliberate, not something I don’t even know I’m doing and thus am not even as myself deciding to do; nor can I be fooled into thinking I’m doing something else, as then my will is certainly not free, because it is not my will that is actually then being done.

This is obvious when we look at when we all agree our free will is being taken away. If someone threatens to harm me unless I set my thermostat where they want me to and not where I want it, I am no longer freely choosing where to set my thermostat. “But your evolved heat tolerances have that same effect on you” is false, because the person coercing me is not changing my heat tolerances, they are not causing my will to be what it is—they are preventing my will from enacting what it wants. My evolved tolerances determine what I want; they do not subvert what I want. That I was caused to have the heat tolerances I do, and cannot change them, does not mean I am not free to set my thermostat where I want to set it.

“Where I want to set it” is my will. And my will is free not when it is uncaused. Wholly regardless of even physics, every decision must logically necessarily “have causes.” Even decisions that are “random” must be caused to be so by some underlying fact or prior decision or reason, and being wholly random cannot in any sense be said to be caused “by us” (and as such, the idea of “contra-causal free will” is actually a logical impossibility). So “free of being caused” is not what anyone in any real world application means by freedom of the will. Rather, my will is free when nothing and no one interferes with it—when what I will is allowed to happen—and that means, no one tries to replace my will with theirs (like someone coercing me to act against my own will), and nothing thwarts my will (like a defective thermostat that constantly resets to some value I did not set it to).

This is also the case when I want to go against my heat tolerances. I might choose to set my thermostat low, and endure some discomfort, because I have decided I would rather save money. Even that choice will “have causes” (all the things that caused me to value frugality over comfort, for example, which can be a whole chaos of external contingencies ranging from biological proclivities to parental upbringing, even a whole history of political regimes determining my access to resources). But what makes it my will is that it is the will generated by me—who I am—without any interference. That means no mad scientist sticking electrodes in my brain, no one pointing a gun at me. And what makes that will free is that nothing is preventing that will from being realized: I actually can set my thermostat to an uncomfortable temperature whenever I want to. I don’t have to control whether I want to in order to still be free to do what I want.

That is what it means to say I control my thermostat: no one else controls it (either directly, such as by sneaking in and setting it to some other value—or indirectly, such as by coercing me); and but for my causally controlling it, it would do nothing at all. Take me—and my intentions (more on which in a moment)—out of the causal chain and it doesn’t happen. And this is what it means to say “I” (and not merely some random part of my body) controlled the decisions of my past, and thus control my future. It does not mean I controlled all the decisions (much less events) of my past. And it does not mean any (much less all) of my decisions had no causes. To say otherwise is as absurd as saying the Big Bang controls my heater. It does not. Not in any relevant or useful sense. My thermostat controls my heater. And so do I, by controlling my thermostat. And as long as I am free to do that, I am acting with free will. No one is stopping me. Nothing is thwarting me. This is what free will means in ordinary reality.

The Intent Condition

What then is the difference between me and my thermostat? Does the thermostat have free will? Of course not. Because it does not have a will. It is not a conscious being that even has desire-states. It has no intent to do anything, and has no ability to assent to anything. It lacks any knowledge or concern over what it does, or what is done to it. That which has no will obviously cannot have a free one. I am not “coercing” my thermostat when I set it. It has no will for me to subvert, in that way or any other.

Free will thus requires intent; more particularly, conscious assent. A will that is free is a desire we consciously want to satisfy, and which is not prevented from being satisfied, and which we informedly assent to satisfying. It is not a desire “that is uncaused.” All desires are caused. That has nothing to do with the matter.

Free will means acting with autonomy, a Greek loan word that means, literally, “self-controlling.” That which is autonomous is that which operates on its own. That doesn’t mean free of all external causation; it means free of interference in enacting what it wants, and in assenting to what it wants. An autonomous state means a state that no other government can override the decisions of. It is “self-governing” not in the sense that it can ignore the laws of physics or the demands of trade agreements or external threats and internal difficulties. And it ceases to really be “autonomous” if its internal decisions are being manipulated by external powers, rather than left to its own transparent devices; if its people are being tricked into thinking the decisions being made are their own, it is no longer really their decisions governing the outcome. Likewise a person who is “self-governing,” who acts with “self-control,” who “decides for themselves.” These never mean “free of all causes.” They mean only free of particular kinds of causes—those that would actually subvert their will; not those that would merely determine their will.

Yes, in some cases, that does mean having free will requires being free of interference in choosing what we want, free to determine our own will. If we are being denied the opportunity to evaluate and assent to our own desires as we will to do, our free will is again being subverted. We have no free will over biologically inherited desires, like the desire to eat or be loved or get along with others; and we know that, and thus we know we can only act within the space of freedom we are allowed. We might even be able to vet the desires we were inalienably given and assent to them—on objective analysis it makes sense that we should desire to eat and be loved or get along with others; if we were soundly informed and had the power to change these desires, we wouldn’t. Because we would know, being suitably informed, that we would be less satisfied with our lives without these desires: we would be more inclined to become malnourished, and nourishing ourselves would become pleasureless; we would be more inclined to become unlovable, and would deprive ourselves of the pleasure of being loved for who we really are, and further increase our self-defeating conflicts and disconnects with others; and so on.

Yes, we could perhaps see the utility of eliminating hunger if we acquired bodies that no longer needed to eat, but (A) we haven’t yet acquired such bodies and (B) we still would prefer a world where we can experience culinary pleasures, to one where we couldn’t, had we a choice. And yes, we could perhaps see the utility of eliminating social desires if other people didn’t exist and we weren’t physically dependent on them and didn’t benefit from them, but (A) other people do exist, and we are physically dependent on social systems and benefit from them, and (B) we still would prefer a world where we can experience social pleasures, and even the physical benefits and advantages of a social system, to a world where we couldn’t, had we a choice.

So it is not merely that fate “saddled” us with a bunch of random desires we can do nothing about. In actual fact most of our desires we can change, through decision, habituation, and reorientation of belief; and of the few we can’t change, most have objective utilities, such that we would have given them to ourselves (or something their equivalent) even had evolution not. Only those very few desires that remain that (A) we can’t change and (B) even on adequate knowledge we objectively would get rid of, if we could, are desires that subvert our freedom of will. And we always acknowledge this. That some things, sometimes thwart our will does not mean we have no free will ever (as if only omnipotent deities could “have” free will). That isn’t what we ever mean by “free will” in the real world; “free will” is never a synonym of “omnipotence.”

The Autonomized Android

These distinctions are made evident in the science fiction film Being John Malkovich, where the protagonist finds out how to “inhabit” someone else’s body and control it, while they remain entirely conscious but impotent spectators of everything that then happens with their body. The consciousness shunted aside and no longer “in control” of their body is the consciousness that has lost free will; the consciousness that has moved in and taken over their body, by contrast, is acting freely. The hard determinist would have us believe “there is no difference” between those two people. That is patent hogwash. And thus so is hard determinism.

And this is actually why free will matters. We don’t want to be passengers in a life someone else is controlling. And if you want to be in control of your own life, you have to first acknowledge what the difference is between being in control of it, and not in control of it—the difference between being a passive slave to others’ opinions and the happenstance trends of the external world or random walks of your internal whims, and being a person who actively examines and vets who they are and what they want and the decisions they are making, and begins selecting only those they informedly assent to on a basis of evidence and reason, and thus ends being a wholly passive victim of social forces.

That difference matters. And that is why free will matters. If you start training yourself to see no free will in anything, you are training yourself to see no difference between being the manipulable slave of society or an independent thinker who actually chooses who they become, what they want and believe, based on evidence and reason, rather than influence and easiness. You will be training yourself to see no difference between being the puppet and being the puppeteer; which ensures the puppet you will be.

To grasp all of this imagine a different science fiction scenario:

A sentient android has been manufactured to believe it is Indiana Jones and that the first woman it sees after waking each day is his fictional love interest Marion Ravenwood, all in service to a sex club catering to women who want to live out their sexual fantasies. To prevent him from discovering this impelled delusion, the android has been programmed to “not perceive” any information that would expose the truth to them. For example, if any woman, posing as a client, tries telling him the truth, he will simply never consciously hear or remember her words to that effect, or he will disbelieve her with a pre-programmed “insurmountable confidence,” such that persuading him of the truth will be impossible even should he recognize what is being told him.

I think it would be obvious to anyone that this android is being denied a great deal of their free will. They are being manipulated by lies, and with meddling in the very structure of their brain, to believe false things; and with the specific result that someone else’s will (that of the clients he’s being made to satisfy, and of the company serving them with this “product”) is being substituted for his own. Because of their intentional interference he cannot assent to the beliefs and desires he has been assigned, and thus they are not really his desires in the sense required for him to be really an autonomous person. This is manipulation; and in result, slavery.

Now imagine some valorous women blast their way into the company and rescue this android from his invisible prison, and escaping to safety, realize they have to change his programming to make it possible for him to learn the truth about himself. They then face the conundrum of how they respect his autonomy at that point. How can they “free” him? If they “reprogram” him, aren’t they violating his autonomy as much as his manufacturer did? Is there really no difference between what the company did to him, and what they’d be doing to him?

To be consistent, the hard determinist would have to insist there isn’t. They’d have to maintain there is no difference between the company lying to him and preventing him from discovering the truth and the women removing those program-locks and telling him the truth—a truth he could then be persuaded of by a presentation of evidence and sound reasoning, and not by “simply being programmed to believe it.” Fact is, far from there being no difference, there is a universe of difference between his being programmed to believe something, and his being programmed to believe only claims he can personally vet with actual evidence and reason. And that difference is precisely the difference between having a will that is free or a will that is unfree. He could then apply the same “clean” tool (of evidence-based reasoning) to vet all his programming and decide how much of what he was assigned (how much of “Indiana Jones”) he wants to remain to be, and whether even the desires guiding that choice are warrantable independently of his having been programmed to have them. He would then become more of his own person than he began.

“But he would never know for sure he wasn’t still being tricked” is technically true, but that requires maintaining an elaborate Cartesian Demon in control of his every thought and movement. In his freed state he could scour through his own programming code and verify there were no “belief locks” still there manipulating him; and any effort to manipulate that process (such as recursively programming him to be blind to that very same code, or otherwise tricking him) becomes increasingly difficult (and quite frankly, expensive) to maintain. It becomes increasingly improbable the more tests he mounts, continually requiring a more elaborate and resourceful manipulation of reality. As in The Truman Show, the trickery will fail eventually. Reality will give away the game.

But even then the issue is epistemic, not ontological. It would not be “no one has free will, because everyone could be the victim of a Cartesian Demon,” as that’s a possibiliter fallacy (“maybe there is a Cartesian Demon, therefore probably there is a Cartestian Demon”). Ontologically, there remains a very real and relevant difference between that android’s code lacking any belief-locks such as the company had installed—and instead being full of evidence-based reasoning procedures—and being the other way around, tricked and manipulated, recoded to conveniently fail at evidence-based reasoning whenever needed. Which ontological state he was in would merely be an epistemological question. Whereas free will is the ontological question. The android free of those locks and possessed of the ability to self-examine and self-correct in response to evidence and reason is free in precisely the way the android belabored with those locks and devoid of the converse ability is not. The hard determinist’s insistence that there is no ontological difference between those two androids is simply boiled hogwash they should be embarrassed even to be attempting to convince us of—much less themselves.

Conclusion

The reprogrammed android in that scenario is manifestly, indeed physically more free than its factory-default analog. And we exist somewhere in between—we are not “perfectly rational”, but neither are we complete robots “programmed at the factory.” We have some capacity for evidence-based reasoning and can thus vet our programming and change it. We can change what we desire, what our objectives are, what to believe, whom to help or obey, or defy and oppose. We can change those things irrationally, reactively—and thus with less free will, being more controlled than in control. But we can also change them rationally, actively—and thus take more control over our lives, and thus be more free than we’d otherwise be, more a product of our own reasoning and conscious assent. And the difference between those states is not only real, and not only increasingly achievable, it is extraordinarily important to work toward and obtain. And you won’t likely do that if you are led to believe you can’t, that there is “no difference” between being in one state or the other.

Already, that one can have different amounts of free will proves free will exists—because obviously you can’t have “more” or “less” of something that doesn’t even exist. But more importantly, only by understanding what free will really is, and how to increase your degree of it, will you increase your degree of it. Hard determinism will not help you do that. More likely, it will hinder you in any such advancement. And this is why compatibilism is not merely correct belief, it is essential to bettering yourself as a human being. All the supposed “benefits” of hard determinism—like acquiring a more objective grasp and thus (ironically) more control over your own emotions, or a more sanguine perspective on the unchangeables of life, or more sympathy for the passive victims that society or circumstance has molded into fools or monsters—are all achievable, indeed more honestly and informedly achieved, without hard determinism. Compatibilism produces all these same benefits in full measure, without the harmful effect of believing—and trying to convince others to believe—that no one can be more free than they are, or that no one is ever free at all.

You cannot increasingly free yourself from manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy, if you don’t believe “freedom” or “autonomy” even exist. Hard determinism thus condemns you to being the victim of manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy, by denying there is any difference between their presence or absence; it then even virally recruits you into trying to make others into victims of these themselves. A proper grasp of what free will really is, and why it matters, and how to increase (and not diminish) everyone’s proportion of it is a requirement for anyone who wants to make the world a better place, and their lives better in it.

After all, if you are not asking “What does it take to be free?” you will never discover what the answer is, much less take steps to implement it.

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For a deeper dive into this subject see my next article Why Syllogisms Usually Suck: Free Will Edition.

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