ABSTRACT
Are human actions performed through the exercise of a faculty of will, and does the freedom of our action depend on a freedom specifically of the will? Many Hellenistic Greek philosophers and the medieval scholastics supposed that actions were performed through the exercise of a free will, and we find the same general theory in Kant. But from Thomas Hobbes onward, there has been an opposing view, that the will is not required to explain either the nature of agency or its freedom. The idea of a free will is a myth. It exaggerates the metaphysical character of human agency to distance it from the rest of nature and, in particular, from animal agency. This debate about the will is a conflict between two competing models of the goal-direction or purposiveness that is essential to agency, and of the relation between agency and content-bearing psychological attitudes. Are our actions distinct from the attitudes that motivate them, obtaining their purpose or goal-direction from the contents of these distinct attitudes, or does agency occur as itself a distinctively practical kind of attitude with its immediate goal-direction deriving from something internal to the agency itself, its own content? These two competing models, in turn, reflect profound disagreements about what kinds of power are involved in the performance of human actions, and especially about those involved in our capacities for self-determination and for reason. Is the only power productive of human agency a causal power operating through prior attitudes? Or is human agency also the product of a distinctive power of self-determination exercised by agents themselves, and of a force of reason or justification operative through content internal to the action?
