FREEWILL
Free will is generally understood as the capacity or ability of people to (a) choose between different possible courses of action, (b) exercise control over their actions in a way that is necessary for moral responsibility, or (c) be the ultimate source or originator of their actions. There are different theories as to its nature, and these aspects are often emphasized differently depending on philosophical tradition, with debates focusing on whether and how such freedom can coexist with physical determinism, divine foreknowledge, and other constraints.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility and moral desert, praise, culpability, and other judgements that can logically apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists and the implications of whether it exists or not constitute some of the longest-running debates of philosophy.
Some philosophers and thinkers conceive of free will as the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. However, determinism suggests that the natural world is governed by cause-and-effect relationships, and only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will. Ancient Greek philosophy identified this issue, which remains a major focus of philosophical debate to this day. The view that posits free will as incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism (the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible) and hard determinism or hard incompatibilism (the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible). Another incompatibilist position is illusionism or hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also indeterminism (randomness) to be incompatible with free will and thus free will to be impossible regardless of the metaphysical truth of determinism.
In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilist philosophers (i.e., hard compatibilists) even hold that determinism is actually necessary for the existence of free will and agency, on the grounds that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what "free will" means and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatibilists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will if, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Many contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one's behavior in a way that is responsive to reason or potentially sanctionable. There are still further different conceptions of free will, each with its own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of physical determinism a threat to the possibility of free will.
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