What is Free Will?

Hello. My name is Thomas Pink.

I'm professor of philosophy at King's College London,

and I'm going to give you a short series of lectures

on free will.

I want to begin by saying what free will is,

and the most important thing about it

is that it's a kind of power,

a pile that human beings

seem to possess

over their actions.

So let me say a little about power in general

and then about free will. In particular,

power is a very important phenomenon,

and our idea of it is a very important philosophical idea.

The idea of a power

is a special kind of capacity.

It's not any old capacity.

It's a capacity to make things or prevent things from happening.

It's a capacity to produce,

even determine

outcomes.

One very important power in nature

isn't peculiar to human beings at all.

It's something we found all over the world,

and it's called causation.

Supposing I take a brick

and hurl it at a window.

That brick has a very clear capacity.

It has the capacity to produce a certain outcome. When it hits the window,

it makes the window break,

and so there's lots of other cases of causation as well.

Fire can heat and melt ice,

and so forth

free will

looks as though

it's in one respect, very like causation.

It's another capacity to make things happen.

You and I

can make our actions happen.

We can determine what we do.

But it's also highly peculiar kind of power.

Look again at that brick as it about it's about as it's about to hit the window.

There's only one thing the brick is going to do as it moves towards the window.

It's going to make the window break,

but that's not like the power we possess over our actions

with respect to our actions.

We, very importantly, have the power under any given set of circumstances

to do more than one thing.

And we report the power by using expressions

that involved just this very idea of being able to do more than one thing.

We might say.

It's up to me what I do. It's up to me whether I raise my hand or lower it. I'm in control,

and what we have here is the idea of a special kind of power.

It's a capacity to determine under given circumstances more than one outcome.

I have the capacity at one and the same time either to determine that my hand goes up

or that my hand stays, whether it is or maybe that my hand goes down.

I've got the capacity. Determine whether I cross the road or stay where I am.

Philosophers call this power a power over alternatives.

It's a capacity to determine alternatives by way of outcomes,

and the use of the term freedom is designed to pick up this idea of alternatives

were free to do more than one thing.

The alternatives are up to us.

That's very like ordinary.

Unlike ordinary causation,

ordinary causes can under given only given circumstances only do one thing.

There's another very important feature of this power.

It's not just

a power to determine whether I raise my hand or lower

it or cross the road or stay where I am.

These actions that I've just described to you

involve limb motions and you can actually see them happening.

You can see my hand going up or it's staying where it is.

You can see me crossing the road or staying where where I am

but something else that we can control. Besides these

what philosophers often called external or voluntary actions

voluntary because they're in effect

of a prior will to perform them.

Where this term will picks out something that goes on in our heads,

something that involves

taking a decision or forming an intention to do these things.

When I take a decision or form an intention,

I'm

forming a psychological state in my mind a state of intention

that motivates me or moves me

to raise my hand or lure it

to cross the road or stay where I am.

We talk of by having an intention to raise my hand.

That intention then causes my hand to go up and satisfies or fulfils the intention.

And the tensions are formed by decisions,

decisions to perform one voluntary action or another

decisions to raise my hand or lower them.

And this capacity to take decisions or form intentions

is what philosophers traditionally called the will.

Now the important thing about the will

is that we think that not only do we control whether our hand goes up or whether

it stays where it is or whether we cross the road or stay where we are,

we also control whether we decide to do these things,

so it's not just up to me whether I raise my hand or lower it.

I've got a capacity to decide which of these I do,

and it's up to me what decision I take and what I decide to do.

So prior to the action of raising my hand or luring it,

I can, it seems, perform a little mental action in my head

of deciding to raise my hand or deciding to lure it.

And I control which of these actions I perform, too.

That's why we call this problem of the power of freedom

the free will problem

because we have a natural understanding of freedom

as a power

that starts off as a power over the exercise of the will

over the exercise of our capacity to take decisions and form intentions.

So freedom is immediately exercised by us

as a freedom of the will,

and it looks as though if we didn't have the capacity

to take decisions and control what decisions we took,

we wouldn't have freedom at all.

Imagine

that the motivations

that lead you move you the psychological states that move you to

raise your hand and or lower it weren't decisions that you controlled.

We're just sort of passive feelings

that come over you.

So what determines you moves you to raise your hand is

a sort of urge that you have no control over.

That just pushes you into raising your hand or learning it

Well,

thinking of your motivations that way as urges

that just come over you outside your control,

it's very hard to think of what they determine

you to do are still within your control.

It would seem that you were gripped by passions outside your

control and not in control of your actions at all.

So it seems very important to our understanding of freedom

that it involves and depends on a capacity to take decisions in

our heads where these decisions are active motivations that we really control.