2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: A question for Objectivists
Free will is not the absence of motivation, it is the ability to choose your motivations. Your environment, past experiences, and biology influence you, but they do not determine your choices. If they did, thought itself would be impossible,
The essential choice in free will is to think or not to think, to engage in rational focus or surrender to passive drift. Animals and cavemen act on instinct and immediate perception, but humans have the power to conceptualize, introspect, and redirect their thinking. That is why rational action is volitional, even when it aligns with self-interest.
Free will does not require rejecting self-interest; it requires choosing one’s values and acting by reason rather than blind impulse or external compulsion. A starving man may have limited options, but he still chooses how to respond, whether to steal, to beg, or to work. Likewise, a wealthy man must still choose whether to pursue purpose or waste his life in stagnation.
Material security may expand the range of choices, but it does not create free will, thinking does. The ability to act for purposes beyond immediate survival, such as creating art or helping others, is not a departure from free will but an exercise of it. Free will is not about acting against one’s interests but about determining what one values and why, and directing one’s actions accordingly.
And the greatest proof of free will? The very fact that we are having this discussion. If your thoughts were purely determined by past experiences, biology, or environment, you would not be questioning them. You would simply be following a pre-set course, incapable of even considering an alternative. But you are questioning, challenging, and analyzing, which means you are choosing to think.
A deterministic entity a machine, an animal, or a human with no free will, could not ask, Do I have free will? It would simply react. The fact that you can step outside of your immediate impulses, reflect on the nature of choice, and engage in abstract debate means you are exercising the very faculty that makes free will possible: rational thought.
Free will is not the ability to act without cause, nor is it the rejection of self-interest. It is the ability to choose to focus, to direct your thinking, and to evaluate what is true and what matters. Without this ability, discussion, philosophy, and even the concept of morality would be meaningless—because reason itself would be an illusion. But reason is not an illusion. You are using it right now.
Comment by Unhappy-Land-3534 at 08/03/2025 at 14:54 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You say that:
you are exercising the very faculty that makes free will possible: rational thought.
And also:
The essential choice in free will is to think or not to think, to engage in rational focus or surrender to passive drift.
So do you believe that rational thought creates free will, or that free will is choosing to think?
And if rational thought creates free will, do you not contend that rationality is exterior to the self. That it is independent of who we are? That we can see others and determine from a distance what would be a rational choice for them to make.
One could contend that they used free will to make that choice, and they could have failed to do so. But the rationality of their choice is exterior to their self. As math or logic is exterior to any one individuals perspective or beliefs. It is a common destination that independent agents will arrive at regardless of who they are.
Which begs the question: Where is the free will in rationality?