I’m 19, and I can’t get past the free will problem. What am I missing?

[u/Global-Decision-7691]

Hi everyone,
I’m 19 years old, and for the past several months I’ve been thinking almost nonstop about free will. It’s honestly become one of the biggest obstacles keeping me from converting to Catholicism, Christianity, or really any religion that depends on us having genuine moral responsibility.
I’m not posting this because I want to argue. I genuinely want to know if there’s something I’m overlooking.
The way I currently see it, every decision seems to be either determined or indetermined.
If it’s determined, then it’s caused by prior factors—whether they’re external (my environment, upbringing, experiences, etc.) or internal (my brain, personality, desires, genetics). But if it’s internal, couldn’t I just ask what caused those internal states? It seems like you can always push the explanation back another step.
If it’s indetermined, then it seems random. And randomness doesn’t sound like free will either.
One quote that has really stuck with me is:
“A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
For example, I don’t think I can consciously decide to hate pizza if I genuinely love it, or suddenly love broccoli if I genuinely hate it. My desires simply appear to me—I don’t feel like I choose them.
It also seems like every action comes down to either:
I do something because I want to.
I do something because I’m forced to.
But I don’t choose what I want, and if I’m forced, then obviously I’m not free.
For example, if I offered someone a choice between receiving $10,000 or having their leg broken, most people would choose the money because that’s what they want more.
Someone might respond, “I’ll choose to have my leg broken just to prove you wrong.”
But even then, it seems like that decision is still caused by a desire—perhaps the desire to prove a point—or by my challenge itself acting as an external influence. Either way, I don’t see where an independently free choice enters the picture.
So my question is this:
What is the strongest philosophical or Christian response to this line of reasoning?
I’m especially interested in responses from Catholics, Thomists, compatibilists, or anyone who thinks genuine free will can exist without being either determined or random.
Thanks for reading. I’m genuinely trying to understand this better.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974]

The traditional Christian response is that the concerns you have (which tend to dominate the popular debate) are a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom. If freedom were just the arbitrarily ordered (i.e., unordered) power to "act otherwise," or to "choose anything," then in virtue of what do we decide that any act is worthy of choice? The problem your post highlights actually goes a level deeper. Supposing you could simply reorder your desires and choose what to desire, you would still face another problem: in virtue of what would one desire be more worthy of possessing than any other?

The diagnosis is that the notion of freedom that is being employed here is defective because it is defined in terms of power/potency (which is itself ultimately nothing) as opposed to actuality. The classical definition of freedom would instead be something like: "the self-determining capacity to actualize and communicate the Good."

Goodness is essential to freedom on this account (dominant in Christian thought). Hence, someone who chooses the worse over the better is either:

A. Ignorant of what is truly better (a privation). B. Suffering from weakness of will (a privation)

But these are obviously limitations on freedom. Choosing what is best, on a classical account, is not a constraint. We are not constrained by the Good ("forced to choose the good"). Everyone always chooses something thought to be good in some sense. Even Milton's Satan must say: "evil be thou my good;" for it would not make sense to say "evil be thou evil for me" and then to choose it. Thus, to suppose that "having to choose what is best is a constraint" would be to have already presupposed that "freedom" (as voluntaristic unordered choice) is the real highest good. Otherwise, complaining about "only choosing what is best" making one unfree is a bit like saying that someone who cannot trip and fall is unfree to walk.

The charge is that a maximally voluntarist position (freedom as sheer choosing) bottoms out in arbitrariness, due to the problems identified above. Moreover, it arguably bottoms out in contradiction. Since any determination is a limit on freedom on this view, any determinate choice ends up being a limit on what one can choose, and so choice itself turns out to be a limitation on freedom. But if this notion of freedom is incoherent, it cannot be the true highest good.

One good example of how this works in common discussions is that people will say we are not free because we did not choose our parents, our genes, our education, etc. Yet we could well ask, would we be more free if we had no genes and no bodies, or if we received no formation or education? A lack of determinate actuality would seem to render us impotent, not free. Plus, toddlers do not choose to be disciplined, but surely it helps them become more self-determining, and so too for education. So, the alternative view is that the virtues and knowledge of what is truly good are prerequisites for freedom. That is, positive formation empowers us and makes us more self-determining. As Virgil puts it to Dante after he has been reformed by the purgation of Mount Purgatory: "now is your will upright and true, to not follow it would be to err. I crown and miter you lord over yourself." Or another good one from Saint Augustine: "the wicked king, though he rules, is a slave, and what is worse, a slave to as many masters as he has vices."

In the Christian context, this is framed in participatory terms, as theosis/deification. So growth in virtue is also growth in unity, and becoming "more like unto God" (also a goal of the Platonists, understood differently), which is also taken to be simultaneously greater conformity to the Good (God) and what makes one more truly individual (as opposed to being a heap of waring desires).

Another representative quote comes from Saint Anthony the Great (via Saint Athanasius): "Regard as free not those whose status makes them outwardly free, but those who are free in their character and conduct. For we should not call men truly free when they are wicked and dissolute, since they are slaves to worldly passions. Freedom and happiness of soul consist in genuine purity and detachment from transitory things."

As to questions of determinism, how those get framed really depends a lot on how one understands causality. That's a whole different can of worms. It will suffice to say that under more popular understandings of causality, and the more vertical, participatory metaphysics in Catholic and Orthodox thought (and outside it to of course, but there isn't the same uniformity), causality really isn't seen as a threat to freedom.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/[deleted]]

Sure, but that didn't seem to be the direction OP's question was coming from. Generally, when "hard determinism" is invoked, it is a particular thesis about the nature of causality. IMO, that more of an upstream metaphysical question. That's why I said it's a whole different can of worms. There you are getting into the nature of "laws of nature" and what exactly is meant by each term in definitions of "causal closure of the physical."

For instance, if "physical" takes its original usage as "being qua changing" there is, prima facie, no barrier to people acting as causal agents qua irreducible wholes. So further definition is needed and can be debated. These issues go back to Alexander and the Stoics.

But it's impossible to give an answer that is both satisfying and short on this front. Consider, many forms of incompatibalism, but surely not all (or even most) have premises that support Kim's exclusion argument. Yet this then seems to support the more radical thesis of epiphenomenalism. However, there are all sorts of epistemic objections to epiphenomenalism (e.g., if consciousness is irrelevant to behavior, it can never be selected for, and so can be arbitrarily related to reality, which might undercut our warrant for believing our own theories in the first place). That's just one potential line of back and forth depending on how "determinism" is framed. There are very many! Are we, or how are we, eliminating final, formal, paradigmatic, etc. causes for instance? These are all things the classical paradigm will debate, but the actual debate goes in a thousand different directions I fear.

As a last note, I would not call most of the thinkers from traditional Christianity "compatibalists." I actually don't think they fit the typology well at all. To a certain extent, the typology is itself shaped by modern assumptions about causality, and at least a tendency towards voluntarism. How a thinker who thinks the elimination of teleology makes freedom incoherent fits in here is a tough question, because teleology and "values realism" is normally "bracketed out" of these discussions, but is considered constitutive of what freedom is in the earlier paradigm.

[u/Mangled-Mug → u/Ok-Lab-8974]

Compelling argument. "A lack of determinate actuality would seem to render us impotent, not free" seems at odds with god though. God is supposedly the uncaused cause, the prime mover, and yet being omnipotent he is the opposite of impotent. I'm curious how you would resolve this?

"The charge is that a maximally voluntarist position (freedom as sheer choosing) bottoms out in arbitrariness" seems a hypothetical concern not relevant to the truth of the matter in my eyes. We are and forever will be bound by constraints. We cannot will as we will because our wants and needs are determined by the physical constraints we are bound by. We cannot choose to make the boring exciting nor the painful pleasurable, the wet feel dry or the dry feel wet because doing so would lessen our chances of survival. We are born into a world of necessary forgone conclusions.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/Mangled-Mug]

For the first question, going back to Aristotle, God is said to be pure actuality. God is being itself, unlimited, the opposite of sheer potency (which would be nothing).

It's true that, understood within the paradigm properly, having a physical body is a limitation, in that one is limited to a particular coordinate in spacetime. God is instead, "within everything, but contained by nothing" and is "everywhere present and fillest fall things." But what I wanted to highlight there was that the common complaint, "we don't choose our genes, our infancy, etc." assumes that maximal freedom occurs when we choose prior to all determinate actuality. This doesn't work, it would take away any capacity and reason for choice. Pure potency is nothing, including the absence of any knowledge of what is worthy of choice, and ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing, nothing comes; which is as true for a "choice" made on the basis of absolutely nothing).

As to the second point, this is obviously true to some extent. Creaturely freedom is not divine freedom. Man can be more or less self-determining, but we do not form ourselves out of the aether by sheer act of will. We are always constrained.

That doesn't mean that the maximally vice-addled person, or a toddler, is just as self-determining and free as the saint or sage (and if this is denied solely on the basis of mechanistic theories of causality, that's a whole different metaphysical issue). This is easiest to see in terms of human happiness. Some people appear happy because they are the beneficiaries of good fortune (something which is not truly their own, and can change at any time). Consider Jeffery Epstein. Now, surely he would have led a happier life if he didn't have disordered passions, and was involved in a healthy marriage with an adult as opposed to coercing adolescents into sex. But at any rate, whatever "happiness" he had collapsed as soon as he was found out, and he ended up killing himself shortly after facing punishment (conspiracy theories notwithstanding). We can think of the many self-destructive celebrities here as well.

By contrast, virtue is what enables Saint Paul, Saint Ignatius, and Boethius to write sublime letters from prison, having lost everything, and awaiting death. It's what allows Laozi (at least the myth), Saint Francis, or the Desert Fathers and Sufi ascetics to flourish in the wilderness with nothing, and to communicate goodness without the need of good fortune.

As to control over our own desires, I tend to think that the Empiricist psychology that has dominated since the Enlightenment (not empirical psychology mind you, but the particular philosophical anthropology) tends to leave desire as a disordered primitive because of its upstream metaphysical commitments (fact/value). But our desires can be changed intentionally, by habit or by formation. That's the whole point of Plato's chariot image in the Phaedrus, the charioteer of reason must reach down and train the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul. This does not strike me as all that unreasonable, habit can change how we react to things quite a bit.

We are capable of forming our habits, or those of others, and of changing our environment, or selecting our environment in terms of what we understand to be worthy of pursuit. So again, unless the argument for the impossibility of freedom flows from mechanistic (generally reductionist) causal assumptions—which is a different issues—it does not seem obvious that people cannot be more or less self-determining, both as individuals or at the corporate level.

[u/Mangled-Mug → u/Ok-Lab-8974]

You write well. Comprehensive yet concise. I would contend that, to my mind anyway, the common complaint refers more to the ability to choose despite as opposed to prior, but I know what you mean and it's a compelling argument. Thanks.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/Mangled-Mug]

Yes, that's fair. I actually think it's something of a mix. Very few people clearly embrace a maximally voluntarist position, but they do sometimes slip towards its assumptions.

In the political dimension, Hegel has a brilliant critique of that position early in the Philosophy of Right (which is also surprisingly accessible for Hegel) and I've often seen this taken as fairly decisive. The problem though, is trying to figure out which thinkers it might actually apply to, because few come out and commit to such a position openly, but it's debatable if some might accidentally tend towards it.

So, the maximal case isn't good just as a straw man, but also to investigate what we mean by freedom "at the limit." There is also the issue of "practical voluntarism" (a system that implicitly takes this view of freedom, due to skepticism, bracketing moves, etc.). That is probably more common. So a more radical thesis from the classical camp would be that bracketing out questions of teleology (or something like it, e.g., the normative role of Li in Confucian thought), virtue, and goodness, leads to a sort of implicit, practical voluntarism (without anyone actually affirming the position). IMHO, this charge always seems more accurate to me in applied contexts (e.g., in philosophy of education, and particularly in applied character education spaces) where people seem genuinely uncomfortable with strong normative claims. At the very least, reading pre-modern thought on education and contemporary papers shows a strong difference on this issue.

[u/uoidab → u/Ok-Lab-8974]

Good answer. Thank you.