Free Will is Incoherent

In this video, I'll explain why libertarian free will is, at best, meaningless and, at worst, incoherent. By the way, if your worldview depends on its existence, your boat is leaking badly.

According to a naturalistic worldview, here's a rough sketch of how we make decisions. We have competing desires, and we haven't chosen those desires. Our desires include our moral feelings. We always take the course of action that we think will satisfy the strongest of our desires, even though we might imagine that we've really chosen which of our desires to act on. With a little thought, we can see that this isn't really the case.

I might imagine that I freely choose not to act on my desire to take two pieces of cake instead of one. But really, my desire not to be seen as greedy or inconsiderate is stronger than my desire to eat two pieces of cake. I'm just acting on my strongest desire.

Advocates of libertarian free will imagine that there's something else going on in human decision-making. They imagine that there's a kind of inner judge who looks at our desires, takes them into consideration, but can veto the course of action that our unmediated desires would lead us to. This mysterious thing is called free will.

I want to show that positing this extra inner person causes a more serious problem than it solves. Proponents of free will think that your actions, while often influenced by your desires, are not dictated by them. They imagine that free will can overturn the course of action that our desires would lead us to.

For the moment, let's grant that such a thing exists. Regular will is determined by our beliefs, desires, and our characters, and maybe a bit of quantum randomness. How does free will make its decisions? On what basis does it decide whether or not to veto the course of action dictated by our desires or to go along with it?

Free will certainly doesn't use our desires to make a decision of whether or not to follow the course of action dictated by our desires; that would be absurd. We'd end up always following our desires, and free will would be redundant. So, what other bases can be the decisions made by free will?

Does free will make its decisions about what to do with our desires and beliefs on a completely random basis? If it does, this kind of will certainly doesn't deserve to be called free. It's not better than the roll of a dice. Or if free will does not act at random, on what other basis could it act and still deserve to be called free?

Now, there may be ways that people have tried to explain free will that I haven't mentioned in this video, but the problem that any attempts to account for how free will reaches its decisions will face is that whatever explanation is proposed, it's going to fall into one of three categories.

There's going to be a deterministic explanation of how free will reaches its choices, and if it's deterministic, then it's certainly not free in the traditional sense. Or it's going to be an appeal to randomness, and that's also not free; it doesn't match our intuitions about what freedom is.

Or it's going to be a combination. It's going to be something deterministic mixed with some randomness, and that suffers from exactly the same problems as I've just described. So all attempts to explain how free will is really free are going to fail. We have to conclude that this kind of free will is an incoherent concept that undermines all worldviews that assume its existence.