[Part of Advent of Writing 2025]
Does free will exist? My gut immediately says yes. Surely we, as humans, choose things like being good or bad and being disciplined or lazy. To say we don’t have free will feels like an attack on everything we’ve worked hard to achieve. But an argument I’ve recently heard is that because everything we are determines everything we will do, there is no free will.
To expand, you are born with many traits, which are determined by your genes. Your genes are given to you by your parents, so the lack of choice here is apparent.
But it’s not just your genes that you don’t have control over. As soon as you are born, you are placed in an environment that shapes who you are. Things like being raised rich or poor, belonging to a loving or cold family, and having parents who push you vs. let you find your own path are all included.
So the combination of your genes, environment, and experiences determines what you'll do next. You can’t escape these. And because you are beholden to what makes you, you, there is no free will. This is the basis of what I've come to learn as determinism.
Logically, I don't think I can argue against this. But to me, it's the same as saying everything comes from nature. Even things like plastics, which are far from what you can find in the wild, are from nature because nothing can exist unless its origins are from nature. But to say something is natural in today’s world means something more practical, that it can be found in nature or be created with minimal processing.
In the same vein, I think of free will in a more practical sense. Free will is the ability to do things that you want to do, even if those things are beholden to determinism. The lack of free will is when someone or something prevents you from doing that. In a functioning society, you have free will in some things and none in others. The ratio changes based on the society you are in. As a kid, a lot of your will isn’t free because you follow your parents' rules. So by this definition, humans do have free will depending on their situation.
But this practical definition is less fun, so let’s go back to determinism and examine how it shapes our view of human behavior. With determinism, when someone does something that you disagree with, logically, you cannot get mad because there is no free will. The person acted that way not because they wanted to, but because they had to. There was no other choice.
When people hear something like this, they immediately think about how this mindset will result in a world full of unchecked criminals. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Even if we absolve bad behavior as a lack of free will, we can still take steps to stop and discourage it. What changes is how we look at people who do things we, or society, disagrees with. You start to contextualize why they acted the way they did, which is a powerful way to humanize someone.
Another consequence of determinism is that people separate those with ambition or a strong work ethic from those who are lazy or have low motivation. According to determinism, these things are part of the person and thus cannot be changed with more will. But I firmly believe that the real difference between someone motivated and someone who isn’t boils down to whether they’ve found the right things to spark said motivation. And following that logic, that means we shouldn’t consider individuals doomed by fate if they aren’t the person they want to be. Both the self and others can promote change, which, to me, is a form of free will in a free will-less world.
I’ve only really started to explore this topic, so next I’m going to read Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky to see if it gives me any new insights.
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