Introduction and Overview

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of some of the history of debates regarding free will, and concurs with several authors who claim that the philosophical discussions have reached a stalemate due to their focus on a metaphysical doctrine of universal determinism. The way ahead, therefore, requires two developments. One is to focus not on determinism but on reductionism; the other is to attend to specific scientific findings that appear to call free will into question. The chapter provides an introduction to the topics of reductionism, emergence, and downward causation, and then surveys the works of Daniel Wegner and Benjamin Libet, which have been taken to show the irrelevance of conscious will in human action. It summarizes the chapters comprising the rest of the volume, and then offers a reflection on the achievement of the work as a whole – in brief, a critique of free-will skeptics based on human capacities such as meta-cognition and long-term planning, which allow agents to exert downward control on neural processes and behavior. It ends by highlighting, in light of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on moral responsibility, an important additional factor involved in creating the possibility for freedom of choice, namely the possession of abstract symbolic language.