Freedom in Action

Abstract

Free will is the capacity to select and execute one really possible action alternative. In recent years this simple libertarian picture of our capacity to freely act has drawn much criticism. Many neuroscientists claim that we do not have a capacity to select alternative courses of action since our brain really makes all our decisions before we can. Philosophers generally do not deny that we have free will, but many argue that it is naive to think that we can really determine what we do. According to them we are free as long as we want to do what we do and are not forced to do it. This thesis argues that there are no good reasons to reject or adjust our simple libertarian picture of free will. It is argued that recent neuroscientific experiments that purportedly show that free will is an illusion are unsuccessful in that aim. For neuroscientists think that free will requires that free actions are consciously originated, where all that really matters for freedom is agential control. In the current philosophical debate about free will much conceptual confusion arises from the fact that philosophers are concerned with the task of identifying the factors that turn a mere action into a free action, without paying much attention to the nature of intentional action itself. This thesis argues that the questions about free will cannot be separated from issues in action theory. In fact, the widely accepted causal theory of action is biased against the simple picture of free will. Luckily for the advocate of the simple picture, however, the causal theory of action is also fundamentally flawed. Instead our ability to act should be understood in terms of practical knowledge and an Aristotelean metaphysics of powers. Once the capacity to act is properly analysed it turns out that it simply is the capacity to select and actualise one of the real possibilities we have.