But before such a question, and its ensuing discussion, can be posed, a number of significant preliminaries should be resolved. For example, what’s the difference between being free and having the experience of freedom?
Can one be free without knowing it? I.e., have freedom but not have the experience of freedom? Conversely, can one have the experience of freedom, without having freedom itself? In which case the experience would be misleading?
Some philosophers have moved the question about the free will up to a meta-level. If “willing” is wanting, does “having a free will” mean that I want to want what I want? Any will wants what it wants. Does a free will want to want what it wants?
There is an epistemological aspect: how do I know whether or not my will is free?
Freedom of the will might be relative to its object. This possibility uncovers the source of interest in the question about the will. Consider what we might call “mundane” decisions: I own several identical, or nearly identical, pairs of white socks. When I get dressed tomorrow morning, which pair will I choose?
Perhaps I will choose based on which pair is closest, which is at the top of the pile, which will take the least effort to grasp, or which will least disturb the orderliness of my wardrobe. Our discussion will then proceed along the usual lines: asking how I formed those preferences, how I analyze and calculate the situation, whether the choice is conscious or deliberate or not, etc.
But the choice about the socks is, in itself, uninteresting. The question about the free will becomes interesting when we discuss the will of, e.g., a murderer.
Many thinkers care about the question of the will because of its moral examples. But arguably many choices made by humans are ethically neutral.
Some scholars have estimated that each individual human being can make as many as several thousand decisions in one day: I reach into my drawer to grab a pencil; there is more than one pencil there; I choose one; in another drawer, there are several slips of paper; I choose one; I start writing my grocery shopping list; I choose whether to buy a quart or a pint of cream; I choose whether to buy red grapes or black grapes; I choose whether to buy grape jelly or strawberry jelly.
Marketing executives and advertising agencies will be interested in those decisions in the grocery store. Generally, philosophers will not.
The human will, then, makes some choices which appear to have no ethical significance, and other choices which do have ethical significance. It seems likely that moral decisions are responsible for much of the interest in the question of the will’s freedom.
Philosophers haven’t spent the last two millennia pondering the free will because they were wondering about choices between tea and coffee.
In addition to the ethically significant and the ethically insignificant, there may be a third category of decisions: a third set of objects for the will.
In theology, there are hints of a category of choices which we might call “spiritual.”
These are found, e.g., in the debate about whether one can ‘accept’ God’s grace, or whether one instead ‘receives’ it. Could this be a debate about the will?
A variety of theological views insist that the human will cannot ‘cooperate’ with, or ‘choose,’ God. They are implying that the human will is not free in those matters. But some views will simultaneously insist that humans are free in certain moral choices.
The result is the possibility that the human will could be, at the same time, free in some matters and bound in others.
Bluntly put, the businessman is interested in the will’s operation in selecting products in a grocery store; the ethicist is interested in the will’s operation in moral decisions; the theologian is interested in the will’s operation in relation to God.
Are these truly distinct categories? To be sure, there are some overlaps. A purchase decision can certainly be, simultaneously, an ethical decision.
Can we find examples of choice which are purely in one category or another?
Further: is it possible that the human will could be free in one category of decisions, and unfree in another category?
Discussions about the freedom of the will were already complex. If we establish a taxonomy of three difference types of choice (about mundane decisions, about ethical decisions, about spiritual decisions), then it’s even more complex.
