Freedom & Design

Do we have free will and does it matter either way?

If we do not have free will, we obviously have something that looks enough like it to give us a feeling of agency. After all, good decision make us feel good. Bad decisions… If we have free will we have agency as well as the feeling that goes with it. Which is it to be?

Free will is defined as “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion”. Now that definition, taken from Oxford Languages on Google, appears uncontroversial but it does contain a problem.

Let’s unpack that problem. What are we to make of the relationship between the phrases “without the constraint of necessity or fate” and “at one’s own discretion”? Am I to understand that acting without the constraint of necessity or fate is what it means to act at one’s own discretion? What if it is precisely the fact that we do act under the constraint of necessity that allows us to mould fate, by giving us the ability to act at our own discretion? That will be my position. And without regurgitating the enormous and truly fascinating literature on freedom or contradicting those positions with in with which I can agree, that is what I shall argue here, in short.

The universe is determined. That is my assumption. In other words it behaves according to ineluctable and necessary patterns at all scales of its being-as-doing. A coin on its side falls this way or that way, not because of chance, but because of subtle workings in its own matter-form compound and external workings upon it. And what is true for the coin is true for Peter choosing between two kinds of chewing gum, or William shaping a memorable phrase in his play on the fate of the Danish Monarchy. In other words we cannot escape the necessity of the universe’s mechanics and that is a good thing as it gives us what we have.

The big danger at this stage of the argument is to then submit to fatalism. Fatalism is defined by the same dictionary just mentioned as “the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable”. Again an acceptably uncontroversial definition of the word. The problem appears in the combination of the two operational words in that definition. Why should ‘predetermined’ mean ‘inevitable’? Why can predetermined not include the ability to steer and so either hit or avoid? And how should we respond to the idea that events are predetermined? What does it mean for things to be predetermined? And what does it mean for something to be inevitable? The point is, is that the fatalists, submitting to their fatalism show agency: they say, “There’s no point in trying”, “It’s out of my hands”, “It’s futile”, “It’s just my luck”, “Oh well, if everything is predetermined and all events are inevitable then I might as well give up and stop making the effort, I can’t influence events anyway!”. As you can see, in using language like that, they do in fact act. They act by giving up one the one thing they can do which is to act in the attempt to accommodate themselves well. They do a double whammy, they act to stop acting, thereby giving up all responsibility and control! So, fatalism is no more or less of an answer to the predetermined nature of the universe than training strategically for the Olympics in the hope of winning a gold medal.

The point is that the universe’s mechanics necessitates our acting, even if it makes us act in not acting to actively submit to fatalist melancholy and the self-pity that goes with it.

Can we influence our acting such that we perform intentionally (that is with reason) according to the ineluctable mechanics of the universe? I think we can.

A first condition for this to be possible is that we must see things coming. The must be some form of spatiotemporal distance between a situation we have to respond to and our response. A stone cannot see things coming, it has no conscious world of thought. As such it responds to the laws of nature on the basis of its properties.

In fact, for all our ability to think, we do no more. The difference is only that that the properties of a stone are somewhat more limited by comparison to our bodies and their capacities to think and move. We are more exciting macro-molecular structures than stones, with a lot more stuff happening.

When we see, hear, feel, smell things coming we have time to prepare our response. If someone offers us a bag of liquorice all-sorts, we are given time to deliberate our choice. That time is only useful if we have learnt through play, or from intercourse with peers and observation what our options are and within those constraints to decide on what we want.

Let’s look at options: the notion of choice. We often think that freedom resides in freedom of choice. On examination that is a strange kind of freedom.

Say that we have a choice between Wrigleys chewing gum and Freedent. I have a box of each. The people I offer it to may choose between them. I offer both to a child with little knowledge of either kind of gum. Is the child free to choose? Well, perhaps, but it would not know how to choose as those with knowledge of chewing gum choose. As a result the child’s choice becomes a matter of some anxiety: what should it choose? It will choose on the basis of reasons that an older child may dismiss. The packet of the one is more attractive than the other. Or, he had heard from his friend that Wrigleys is cool. The choice is made on reasons approrpiate to one without direct knowledge of chewing gum. We might want to call those weak reasons.

I then offer the two boxes to a teenager with expert knowledge of chewing gum. The teenager will quickly reduce the problem to something like this: “Wrigley allows you to blow great bubbles, but Freedent has a fresher, mintier taste.” Depending on what the teenager wants, the choice is made. Was his choice free? Not in the sense that they were constrained by the two options, which were resolved into a chocie by the fact that they “knew what they wanted”. In that sense there was only the fortunate fact of the one the teenager preferred within the situation, also being available. The choice was free in that the teenager was able to harmonize what he wanted with what he got. The fit was made and it felt satisfying.

So freedom of choice is a bit of a misnomer. If you know what you want, you look for things that accord with what you want or settle for compromise. If you do not know what you want, choice dissolves into anxiety in that you do not know what to choose on what grounds. At such a point reasons that the experts might consider weak would start playing a decisive role. Better reasons to inform your choice are missing. Whatever your level of knowledge, once reasons appear, good ones or weak ones, the choice is made.

In other words, the agency we have, comes with learning, with the conceptualization of the world and with playing with those concepts and their attributed properties within the space of implications, finding out what it is you want. When you do not know what you want, choice is wasted on you, you will make it on grounds you would, with more sophisticated knowledge, dismiss. When you know what you want choice is no longer relevant, it is rather the availability of the best option that becomes important.

There you have it: freedom in design, freedom in all intentional action. More freedom we do not need. We need space and time to see things coming, to evaluate a situation so that we have time to deliberate our options and we need to know what it is we want. Both of these necessary conditions for freedom become sufficient for us to act with real agency. The challenge is to train yourself in seeing things coming or to evaluate situations well, so that you can use the space and time you are given to think carefully about what it is you want, and to learn to want good means to good ends.

© jacob voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.