by G. Murphy Donovan (August 2025)
Of course I believe in free will. Do I have a choice? —Isaac Bashevis Singer
Agency, or the lack of it, has been trending at New English Review in recent months with at least three fine contributions on free will in the past two months from Armando Simon, Carl Nelson, and Andy Thomas respectively, each coming down on various sides of the argument.
So I thought I would get my oar in too.
Free will is a fundamental axiom of most religious traditions, ethical codes, or even legal systems in the West. For Catholics, the drill begins early with the ritual of “Confirmation,” a sacrament that holds the age of reason and responsibility for children begins at puberty, at which point a child is expected to know the difference between good and bad behavior in particular, good and evil in general.
It’s not really clear that kids think much about sin, the law, agency, or choice at that age; yet the idea is to give conscience and soul searching a head start. Surely it’s no accident that the Catholic age of reason coincides with sexual maturity where the consequences of bad choices, especially for girls, can be life altering.
Confirmation is followed by admonitions to examine conscience on a periodic basis and confess any failures to pastors in ritualized “confessions” where sins are acknowledged and forgiven. Again it’s not clear that tweens are really guilty of anything serious at that age either, but the ritual’s objective is to cultivate conscience, reflection, and a sense of personal/civic accountability.
As an erstwhile Catholic, whilst reflecting on these matters, it occurred to me that Artificial Intelligence might have an interesting take on free will, given AI’s capacity to review, analyze, and digest the history of philosophical speculations.
I asked GROK AI to give me a short summary of the arguments for and against free will.
Here’s what she wrote:
The concept of free will is heavily debated. From a deterministic perspective, everything in the universe—including human thoughts and actions—follows from prior causes, suggesting our choices are ultimately predetermined by physical processes.
However, compatibilists argue that free will exists within constraints; we can act according to our desires and reasoning, even if those are shaped by prior events. Quantum mechanics introduces randomness at a fundamental level, but it’s unclear if this randomness translates to meaningful free will or just adds unpredictability.
Arguments for Free Will:
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- Moral Responsibility: Free will is essential for holding people accountable for their actions. Without it, punishing or rewarding behavior loses justification, as individuals wouldn’t truly choose their actions.
- Subjective Experience: We feel like we make choices freely, from small decisions to life-changing ones. This intuitive sense of agency supports the idea that free will exists.
- Practical Necessity: Societies function on the assumption of free will. Legal systems, education, and personal growth rely on the belief that individuals can choose to act differently.
Arguments Against Free Will:
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- Causal Determinism: The universe operates under physical laws, where every event, including human decisions, is determined by prior causes. If our brains follow these laws, free will is an illusion.
- Neurological Evidence: Brain studies show decisions are often initiated before conscious awareness, suggesting our choices are driven by unconscious processes, not free will.
- Illusion of Agency: The feeling of free will might be a psychological construct. Evolutionary pressures could have favored a sense of control, even if our actions are predetermined.
GROK AI, of course, is the penultimate determinative agent. Prior and physical causes are the engines that drive her logic. Nevertheless, the AI answer is balanced if not ironic, coming down, it seems to me, on the pragmatic or utilitarian side of the free will argument.
I’m drawn to the “personal growth” part of the AI response, a necessary, but not quite sufficient phenomena. After all, whether we believe in free will or not, questions like agency and self control dog us daily no matter where we stand.
And to be sure, answers are never as important as the next question.
But belief, faith if you will, matters to us all, even heathens like my wife. Of the primary traditional Western virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity), it’s no accident that personal faith comes first.
All of which reminds me of the eulogy at my sister Pat’s funeral. Every Irish Catholic family has a priest somewhere in their woodpile and ours was Ed Reynolds, Catholic pastor to Wall Street at Saint Peters on Barkley Street in lower Manhattan.
My sister was handicapped from birth, her “prior condition.” Over time she still became a Nurse Practitioner and eventually director of the charity pediatric clinic at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, a devout Catholic girl who made a career at a Jewish teaching hospital.
At Patricia’s funeral, Father Ed, by then Monsignor Reynolds, compared my sister’s life to a game of cards, where she had no control over the deal, but “played her cards well.”
When I think about “will” of any sort, I think about my sister and her will to overcome events beyond her control and dedicate her life, in the Bronx, to helping indigent children.
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G. Murphy Donovan usually writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security. Follow him on X.
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12 Responses
Thanks for your insightful contribution G. Murphy. I hadn’t known the significance of the Catholic confirmation before this. But it makes good sense. I’d note that the belief that”The universe operates under physical laws, where every event, including human decisions, is determined by prior causes” is just that, a belief.
The concept pf Free Will is not a philosophical argument. It is simply, and only, the history of everyone’s life trajectory. In my case, consider the following. I would not be sitting in my idyllic California home had not Christ been crucified, had Mohammed not been born. Being an Armenian a direct beneficiary of his largess. Had not North Korea invaded the South, resulting in my serving in the US Army, and had I not been born with a cyst in my breast would not be marred for 67 years to the receptionist of the physician to whom I went for it. Read Mark Twain’s “The Turning Point of My Life.
Indeed, we are the sum of our experience.
Thanks, Carl. Believing human are the most intelligent or highest form of life is just a “belief too,” methinks. Sometimes a hedge is the best bet. Humility is faith’s first cousin.
G.:
I think humility is faith’s second cousin. I think pride is its’ first cousin. I am a lapsed Catholic who was confirmed but somehow lost it.
Indeed!
There is no free will. Period.
Those who doubt the absence of Free Will often resort to the position that Agency proves its existence. What they disregard (probably due to the absence of agency) is our choosing ability, since it is determined in known areas of the brain by juices, chemicals, and electrons is acquired by each of us in a unique combination from our ancestors of thousands of years and combinations ago. How else to explain the frequent profound difference in the lives of siblings? Armando, you are right, there is no free will. Myron
Do individuals have to make Godlike decisions? Yes, of course, for example when doting parents decide to bring-up their children with distinctive values of their choice. These values strictly reinforced by mother and father stamp a distinctive behaviour pattern onto that child. (Assuming that the parents are sufficiently loving to get an acceptance response.)
Now anyone who believes in freewill has a much higher view of the stature of the human lot… than a person who thinks otherwise.
The key question is “What kind of thing are we claiming to be free from?”. The answer is: “From palpable other-human threats”. We don’t want to be free from our own deepest values and standards. We are not “controlled by” our brains… because our brains are already built-into the meaning of the “We” in this sentence.
The famous French philosopher Marcel Foucault deliberately and bravely threw himself in front of an on-coming car in Paris to “prove” that he possessed freewill. He was badly hurt, but fortunately he survived. This demonstration was brushed aside, I’m sure, by fanatical fatalists. They probably retorted that he was “forced” to do this act by unseen events in his brain. But these fatalists were not sufficiently savvy about the meaning of words to realise that he couldn’t be “forced to do anything untoward by his brain” because his brain was already part of him.
Dr Johnson famously kicked a stone down a path to prove he had physical agency. Fanatical fatalists have never faced up to the full implications of this simple act —-because it shows that mental acts backed up by physiology can make things happen in the physical world.
Methinks CO has the last word. Agency seems to have the day. Although the Foucault argument is a little too close to curb level for me, having survived a collision with an with an automobile as a child.
PS Ooops! Many apologies, for a slip in writing the comment above: for Foucault read ‘Michel’.
Anything caused is unfree; thus ‘Free’ Will
created by a preference. The odor of the mindless rose exudes its fragrance choicelessly, freely, decisionlessly.