Free will and agency

Do we choose our actions, or do earlier causes settle them in advance? The free will debate turns on that question and on a prior one: what would we need in order to be free in any meaningful sense?

Hard determinists hold that if every event has prior causes, free will is an illusion. Libertarians about free will accept that determinism rules it out and conclude that, since we are free, the world cannot be fully determined. Compatibilists argue that freedom is a matter of acting on our own reasons and values, and that this sits comfortably beside determinism. Hard incompatibilists add that even indeterminism would not give us the control we want, and they draw consequences for moral responsibility and punishment.

Experiments in neuroscience, most famously the studies associated with Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, are often cited in the debate, and how to interpret them is itself disputed. More recent work looks at biology rather than the clock: how living organisms act as agents, and how agency might have evolved.

The guests here include philosophers, neuroscientists and a linguist, and their disagreements are the point. The subject touches medicine more than it first seems to, because ideas about responsibility shape how we think about addiction, mental illness and behaviour change, and how clinicians talk with people about what is and is not within their control.

Episodes are listed newest first. This is general discussion of ideas, not medical advice.