Questions to Ask About Free Will
For a teacher, a student leading a seminar, a discussion or Bible study group, or two friends who got onto the subject and want to do it properly. The 53 questions follow the path the argument usually takes: what each person means by free will, whether a choice that had causes can still be free, who deserves blame, punishment or praise, what brain experiments and an unchosen upbringing do to the picture, how God's foreknowledge fits, and what would change on an ordinary Monday if it all turned out to be an illusion. Any section stands alone, so a philosophy class can stop before God and a study group can begin there.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Starting out
Do you believe people have free will: yes, no or not sure?
Why ask it
Take it as a show of hands and write the three totals down before anyone explains. Nobody has to defend a vote yet. The count is there so that you can take it again at the end and find out from the people who moved what moved them.
What do you mean when you say a person has free will?
Why ask it
Put this straight after the vote and write the answers where everyone can see them. One person will mean 'nobody forced me' and another 'I could have done something different with the very same past', and most of the later disagreement turns out to be those two definitions talking past each other.
Think of something small you chose today, such as what to eat. What made you pick it?
Why ask it
Have people trace it back a step at a time: hungry, it was in the kitchen, it is what they always have. Then ask at which link the choosing happened. A breakfast works better than a life decision here because nobody feels the need to defend it.
Does it feel to you as though you have free will, and how much should that feeling count as evidence?
Why ask it
Nearly everyone answers yes to the first half, so the second half is where the discussion is. Offer another strong impression that misleads, such as the sun appearing to cross the sky, and ask what makes this one more trustworthy.
Which decision in your life felt the most free, and which the least?
Why ask it
Some people name a calm, unpressured choice as their freest. Others name the one where they felt they could do nothing else, a vocation or a refusal. List the features of each kind on the board and you have the group's working picture of freedom to test later.
Is there anything in your life that you believe was meant to happen?
Why ask it
People who voted a firm yes for free will often say the same of meeting a partner or walking away from an accident. Do not point out the clash yet. Find out what 'meant' means to them: planned by someone, bound to happen whatever they did, or only good in hindsight.
Did you choose what you like: your tastes, your sense of humor, the people you are drawn to?
Why ask it
Most say no without hesitating, then go on calling the choices that grow out of those likes free. Put the gap into words and leave it open: if the wants were handed to you, which part of a choice made from them is yours?
Why does it matter to you whether free will is real?
Why ask it
Listen for what each person is afraid of losing: credit for their effort, the right to be angry at someone, an open future, their faith's account of sin. A room worried about anger and credit wants the blame questions, and a room worried about sin wants the ones on God.
Choice
If someone knew every fact about the universe a moment ago and every law of nature, could they say what you will do next?
Why ask it
This is Laplace's thought experiment of a perfect predictor, put plainly. Sort the objections into practical ones (nobody could hold that much information) and ones of principle, because only an objection of principle bears on freedom.
If yesterday were rewound and played again with nothing changed, would you make all the same choices?
Why ask it
A yes is determinism in everyday words, and people are often surprised to hear themselves say it. A no needs the follow-up: with nothing different, what would produce the different choice?
Would pure chance somewhere in your brain make you any freer than strict cause and effect?
Why ask it
Keep this ready for when quantum physics comes up, as it will. A decision that hangs on a random event belongs to you about as much as a coin toss does. Ask what third thing the group is hoping for that is neither settled in advance nor random.
Can a choice be free if it was always going to happen, so long as it came from what you wanted and nobody made you?
Why ask it
The position is called compatibilism, and it is better to give the name after people have reacted to the idea. Put a case to those who say yes: a want planted by hypnosis. Those who say no owe the table a description of the missing ingredient, and of where it could come from.
You can do what you want. Can you decide what you want?
Why ask it
Adapted from a line of Schopenhauer's. Try it live: ask everyone to sincerely want a food they dislike for the next minute. Then bring in the dieter who wishes the craving would go, since wanting to want something different may be the nearest thing to steering that people have.
Everything you do has causes behind it. What separates that from being forced?
Why ask it
Handing over a wallet at knifepoint and writing a check to a charity both have causes, yet only one is called unfree. If the group can say where the line falls, it has described a kind of freedom that does not depend on causes being absent.
Is believing in fate the same as believing that everything has a cause?
Why ask it
The two get run together, and five minutes here saves confusion later. Fate says the ending arrives whatever you do, as in the story of Oedipus. Determinism says it arrives through what you do. Ask which of the two would make effort pointless.
When you weigh a hard decision, is the weighing doing any work?
Why ask it
This meets the 'why bother thinking, then' objection before it derails the session. On a determined view the outcome is reached through the deliberating, the way the answer to a long division is reached by working it out. See whether that satisfies the person who raised it, and if not, what is still missing for them.
Blame and praise
Before you blame someone for what they did, what do you need to know about how it came about?
Why ask it
Collect the conditions people offer: they knew what they were doing, nobody threatened them, they were in their right mind, they could have held back. Keep the list on the board. The cruel upbringing, the sleepwalker and the two drivers each put one item on it under strain.
A child raised with cruelty grows up to be cruel. How much of the blame is theirs?
Why ask it
Ask at what age the blame starts and what happened on that birthday. Someone will mention a sibling from the same home who turned out gentle. Does that show there was a choice, or only that the two were dealt different temperaments?
We do not blame a small child, a sleepwalker or someone acting under threat. Is the reason the same each time?
Why ask it
Sorting the three shows what the room thinks responsibility requires: understanding, control, freedom from pressure. The harder follow-up is whether determinism, if true, is one of these excuses stretched over the whole human race or a different sort of thing altogether.
Two drivers glance at their phones. One hits a pedestrian and the other gets home safely. Do they deserve the same blame?
Why ask it
The choice was identical and only the luck differed, yet most people feel very differently about the two. Whether or not the room can defend that, it shows how much blame already follows things outside a person's control, before anyone has mentioned determinism.
If nobody could ever have acted differently, would punishment still make sense?
Why ask it
Separate the purposes first. Deterring, protecting the public and reforming all look forward and survive the loss of free will. Paying someone back looks backward and is the one in doubt. So the live question is less whether to keep prisons than what would change inside them.
Is holding someone responsible the same as believing they deserve to suffer?
Why ask it
A parent who makes a child apologize and mend what was broken is holding them responsible with no wish to see them hurt. Could a school or a court work on that model, and what, if anything, would the person who was wronged feel was missing?
We praise effort more than talent. Is effort any more a person's own doing?
Why ask it
Students defend effort hard, since it is what school tells them is theirs. The awkward follow-up is where the ability to stay with a dull task came from. If the room gives ground, move to whether grades and prizes should change, or whether praise does a job even when nobody earned it all the way down.
Can you be grateful to someone who says they had no choice but to help you?
Why ask it
Picture a friend who shrugs off thanks with 'I couldn't have done anything else.' Many people find that makes the help warmer, not colder. If so, what we thank people for may be who they are, and the open alternative matters less than the theory says.
Does forgiving someone get easier if you believe they could not have acted otherwise?
Why ask it
For some it does. Others object that it stops being forgiveness and becomes the kind of allowance you make for bad weather. In a personal group, let people keep the example in their head and speak only about which way it moved.
Brain and upbringing
Some experiments report brain activity building before people say they decided to move. If that is right, who or what decided?
Why ask it
The reference is to a line of experiments begun by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s on simple hand movements, and what they show is still disputed. Ask whether the timing of a flick of the wrist tells anyone much about choosing a career or keeping a promise.
Is 'my brain made me do it' an excuse, or another way of saying 'I did it'?
Why ask it
The excuse needs two parties, a brain and a separate me for it to push around. People who say they are their brain have less to fear from the lab results. People who say they are something more owe the group an account of how that something gets a neuron to fire.
A tumor changes a person's behavior, and removing it changes them back. If the tumor excuses them, why not every other physical cause?
Why ask it
Someone will say that a tumor is foreign to the person while a healthy brain is the person. Push on it: nobody selected their genes or their childhood either. The class is hunting for a principled line between a cause that hijacks you and a cause that makes you who you are.
How much of who you are was settled by things you had no say in: your parents, your first language, your country, the year you were born?
Why ask it
Have each person write down three things they are proud of and trace one of them backward. The point is not to deflate anyone. The useful part is what still feels self-made at the end, and whether self-made ever had to mean made from nothing.
If you had been born with another person's genes and lived their exact life, would you have done anything differently from them?
Why ask it
Many say yes and then cannot say what the 'you' is that would have been carried across. It is the thought behind 'there but for the grace of God', and it is worth asking just before the group judges anyone, real or invented.
Do habit and addiction suggest that free will comes in degrees?
Why ask it
Treating freedom as more-or-less often dissolves a stalemate between yes and no. Ask what widens a person's room to choose: sleep, distance from the temptation, other people. Keep it hypothetical, because someone at the table may be living it.
Advertisers and app designers work at steering what people pick. When they succeed, was the choice still yours?
Why ask it
With teenagers, use the next video that starts playing by itself. The line to find is where persuading ends and manipulating begins. Groups tend to settle on a test worth writing down: would you still go along with the influence if you could see exactly how it worked?
If science showed that every decision is a physical event with physical causes, would that settle the question?
Why ask it
It divides those who treat free will as a matter for the laboratory from those who think it hangs on what the words mean. Ask each camp what finding would change their mind. If the answer is none, it was never a scientific question for them.
Does a dog have free will? Does a two-year-old? If not, when does it arrive?
Why ask it
Anyone who says a dog chooses its path across the park has to say what more a person does. Anyone who says free will arrives with reasoning or self-control has made it a capacity that grows, and a capacity that grows can also be stunted or damaged, which bears on every blame case the group has argued over.
Could a computer program ever have free will, and if not, what do people have that it lacks?
Why ask it
Whatever gets named (consciousness, real desires, unpredictability, a soul) is that person's actual criterion for freedom. Turn it around and check that every human plainly has it, including a newborn or someone asleep.
God
If God already knows what you will choose tomorrow, are you free to choose something else?
Why ask it
The reply heard most often is that knowing is not causing: watching a friend order lunch does not make them order it. Does that still hold when the knowledge was there before the friend was born and cannot turn out wrong?
If God has a plan for your life, can you make a choice that falls outside it?
Why ask it
In a study group the puzzle tends to arrive in this form, as worry over a job, a marriage or a move. Find out whether 'plan' means one route a person could miss or a purpose that holds whichever road they take. Then have each person name the passage their picture rests on.
Is there a difference between God knowing what will happen and God deciding what will happen?
Why ask it
This separates foreknowledge from predestination, and traditions answer it very differently. In a mixed group, have people describe what their own tradition teaches before they say what they think themselves. It stops the session from becoming a contest between churches.
If God is outside time and sees all of history at once, does 'knowing beforehand' even apply?
Why ask it
An old answer, usually credited to Boethius: God does not foresee your choice but sees it, the way you see a person walking past right now. The group can judge whether that helps or only relocates the puzzle, since what is seen eternally sounds just as fixed.
Why would a God who wants goodness give people the freedom to do harm?
Why ask it
The usual defense is that love or obedience that could not be withheld would not be worth having. Let the group weigh it, then raise the case it does not reach: suffering that no human choice brought about, such as an earthquake.
Exodus says both that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and that God hardened it. How do you read the two together?
Why ask it
Have the group find both wordings in the plague chapters before anyone offers a theory. Some readers take God to be confirming a course Pharaoh had already set, and others take God to act first. Romans 9 picks up the same story if the group wants to go further.
When you pray for someone to change, what are you asking God to do to their will?
Why ask it
Praying that a friend will come to faith or leave a destructive path asks for something to happen inside another person. Does the group think of that as overriding the friend's freedom or as releasing it? The answer shows the working theology under the stated one.
If salvation is a gift of grace, what part does a person's own choice play in it?
Why ask it
Christians have divided here for centuries: Augustine against Pelagius, later Calvinists against Arminians. Do not try to settle it in an evening. A better use of the time is for each person to say what the other view puts at risk: God's sovereignty on one side, human answerability on the other.
Do ideas such as karma, destiny or 'it was written' leave room for choice?
Why ask it
It opens the subject beyond one religion. If someone present holds one of these ideas, ask them to explain it in their own words before anyone else characterizes it, and listen for whether they separate circumstances that are given from a response that is theirs.
Could a person in heaven choose to do wrong, and if not, are they free?
Why ask it
Best with a group already at ease with one another. If freedom there does not need the possibility of sin, someone will ask why it needed it here. One line of answer is that a character formed by earlier choices can become settled without being forced.
Daily life
If you were convinced tomorrow that free will is an illusion, what is the first thing you would do differently?
Why ask it
After a pause, a common answer is nothing at all: they would still pick a breakfast. That leaves the group two readings to choose between. Either the belief makes no difference to living, or it is one that nobody can hold for longer than a seminar.
Would losing the belief in free will make you kinder or more careless?
Why ask it
There are two guesses, more compassion as blame softens and more excuses as 'I couldn't help it' becomes available. Have each person answer for themselves first and then for people in general. The two answers often differ, and the gap is worth pointing out.
When is 'I couldn't help it' a good excuse, and how can you tell?
Why ask it
This brings the subject down to the classroom and the kitchen. Collect one case where they would accept it from a friend and one where they would not. The difference usually comes down to whether the person tried, which puts the whole debate back on the table in miniature.
If nobody has free will, does it still make sense to feel proud of what you achieved or guilty about what you got wrong?
Why ask it
One possibility is that pride turns into something closer to gratitude and guilt into sorrow without the self-punishment. Would those be losses or gains? Someone will want to keep guilt on the grounds that it is what makes them do better, and that deserves a hearing.
Would love mean less if the person who loves you could not have done otherwise?
Why ask it
Few people want to be loved by a coin toss that might have landed the other way. They want it to come from who the other person is. Where people do want a choice in love, it tends to be in staying more than in falling.
How should courts, schools and parents act if most people stopped believing in free will?
Why ask it
Split into small groups and give each one institution to redesign. Watch for proposals that keep consequences and drop contempt. Then test them: does a consequence handed out with no blame attached still teach anything?
If free will is an illusion, is it better for people to know?
Why ask it
The question is whether a useful belief should be protected from the truth, and who would get to decide that. A group that votes for not knowing has just spent an hour doing the opposite, which is fair to mention with a smile.
Has anything said today changed what you mean by free will?
Why ask it
Go back to the definitions written up at the start and take the yes, no, not sure vote a second time. Have each person finish the sentence 'I am free when' in a single line. Minds rarely change in one session; the gain is that people can now say which kind of freedom they care about.
Leading a free will discussion that gets somewhere
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Setting up the hour
Fix the meaning first
Spend the opening ten minutes on Starting out even if the group is impatient to argue. A discussion in which one person means freedom from coercion and another means freedom from all prior causes can run for an hour without the two ever disagreeing about the same thing.
Choose two sections, not all of them
A class period or an evening covers Starting out and two more sections at a comfortable pace. A philosophy class usually wants Choice with Blame and praise. A Bible study can go from Starting out directly to God and finish with Daily life. Save the remaining sections for a second meeting.
Hold the labels back
Determinism, compatibilism and libertarian free will (the philosophical term, which has nothing to do with politics) are handy once people have already taken a position. Given too early they turn the session into sorting people into teams, and students start defending a label instead of thinking.
Count hands twice
The list opens with a vote for a reason. Free will tends to split a group, which is an advantage: use the count to pair people so that each one has somebody of the opposite view within reach, and take it again at the end. The second count gives the closing question something to work with.
With younger teenagers
Lead with the cases and leave the theory for later: the breakfast choice, the two drivers on their phones, the video that starts playing by itself, the dog and the two-year-old. Hold the timing experiments and the question about God outside time for older groups, who have more patience for an argument with several steps.
Moves that keep it going
Ask what would change their mind
When someone is dug in, ask what discovery or argument would move them. A person who can name one is treating the matter as open. A person who cannot has learned that their view rests on a definition, and the conversation can shift to whether that definition is the right one.
Keep one case on the table
Abstract talk about causes drifts. Pick a single case, the two drivers or the tumor, and send every new claim back to it: what does your view say about her? People who agree in the abstract often part ways over the case, and that is where the real positions show.
Argue the other side for five minutes
Halfway through, ask everyone to make the best case for the view they reject. It lowers the temperature, and it is the quickest check on whether a person has understood the opposing position or only a weak version of it.
Slow down at 'could have'
Most stalemates hide in those two words. One speaker means 'would have, had I wanted to' and the other means 'might have, with everything exactly the same'. When the room is going in circles, stop and ask each side which one they mean.
In a Bible study or faith group
Read the passage before the doctrine
Start with a text in front of everyone: the Pharaoh chapters, Joseph telling his brothers that what they meant for harm God meant for good, or Peter's denial being foretold. People who would argue past each other about predestination in the abstract will read closely together when the words are on the page.
Let each tradition describe itself
In a group that mixes backgrounds, ask people to say how their church or family taught the matter before anyone evaluates it. Nobody should have to hear their tradition summarized by someone who left it or never belonged to it.
Leave room for 'both'
Many believers hold that God is sovereign and that people answer for their choices, without a theory of how the two fit. That is a position and not a dodge. Ask what each half protects, and resist forcing a resolution the group's own tradition has declined to force.
Where it goes wrong
The physics detour
Someone will bring up quantum mechanics or chaos theory, and ten minutes can vanish into material nobody present can check. Use the chance question in the Choice section to bring it home: randomness is not obviously freedom, so the physics settles less than it seems to.
The slide into 'so nothing matters'
A student who decides there is no free will sometimes announces that effort is pointless. Separate fate from determinism at once. If choices are part of how outcomes come about, then trying still changes what happens, whatever one concludes about the deeper question.
When the example is someone's life
Blame, addiction and upbringing are not abstract for everyone in the room. A person with a relative in prison or a hard childhood may hear the discussion as a verdict. Use invented cases, let people pass, and do not ask anyone to offer their own history as evidence.
Needing a winner
The question has been open for well over two thousand years and will not close on a Thursday evening. End by asking each person to state what they now think and the strongest point against it. A group that can do that has had a good session, whoever was ahead.