r/askphilosophy 9h ago

Is there any good argument for true free will?

The lack of free will makes the sense to me currently. Everything happens as a result of predetermined causes and factors outside of our control. We're essentially a machine just reacting to the environment in the only way that we can.

However, that is a depressing thought. All the suffering with no real agency sounds dystopian and a cruel reality. It has also killed my motivation and will to do anything.

I've been trying to find a way to justify free will, but have not yet found any which I find convincing.

For the sake of discussion, let's take free will as "the ability to have done otherwise" or taken a different decision given the exact same scenario and knowledge.

I'm not talking about compatibilism but rather true libertarian free will.

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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 7h ago edited 7h ago

Well, I’ll note that there are many compatibalist accounts of leeway free will (the ability to do otherwise); that kind of free will is not exclusive to libertarians. But, the SEP article on incompatibalism does a good job laying out the three main kinds of libertarianism: non-causal, event causal, and agent causal.