Free will – our freedom to choose for ourselves – is at the heart of our sense of being human. How we think about free will effects everything from responsibility and criminal justice to laziness and poverty to seemingly ordinary choices like what I’ll have for dinner.

Free will is of course the power to select from options, for ourselves, unencumbered, unrestrained, uncaused – to be the author of our own thoughts and actions.

Today, let’s interrogate this. What does this really mean?

In front of me, I have some options – playing a video game, eating cake, filling in this job application, reading this book. What does my freedom to choose between them consist in? I could write or think through a pros and cons list for each option, and pick that way.

I could choose to eat the cake and play video games for the following reasons: I’m hungry. I’m tired, I’ve already worked hard today. I have a genetic weakness for sugar. But I’ve eaten healthily all week. Oh, and it’s my birthday.

We can say that these reasons topped the reasons for working, and so I chose freely that option.

But is this free will? Have I really chosen myself? These are all facts, information, feelings, mental states, and observations that have pushed me towards eating the cake – but they are all causes that have affected me, they’ve all appeared in my conscious reflection. None of them are, in that moment, choices within my control. So where is the freedom?

In fact, all my choices are the effect of causes that have come before. The entire universe, and us within it, is determined by the laws of cause and effect. If the entire universe is determined by cause and effect, then all of my choices have causes that precede me.

Everything we do is moved by previous states of the universe. We are like snooker balls, knocked around by our genetic inheritance, by our environment, education, the social and political conditions we are born into, by the conversations we happened to have and the Youtube videos we happened to watch. Where is the free will?

Every effect has a cause. Even if a choice is random – even if the choice between eggs and beans has no cause I can find, one is as good as the other – I still just roll the dice. Where is the free will?

Cause and effect is a fundamental law of the universe, and, as the psychologist B.F. Skinner says, ‘A small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us. There is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies within this boundary’.

To discover where that freedom is, we must find a place in our psychological make up that escapes this law. We have to find a free place that is uncaused by anything. That is truly free. We have to become prime movers, unmoved, the masters of our own choices, personal gods.

Now, you may be thinking, but I still have desires, appetites, likes, and dislikes – they are mine, they are the source of what I freely choose.

Yes, responds the philosopher Paul Edwards, but, ‘We must go on to ask where they come from; and if determinism is true there can be no doubt about the answer to this question. Ultimately our desires and our whole character are derived from our inherited equipment and the environmental influences to which we are subject at the beginning of our lives. It is clear that we had no hand in shaping these’.

Now, you might say that the freedom was here. At this moment. When I chose to eat the cake and play the video game. I lied, it’s not my birthday at all. I should have been filling out the job application. I had the free will to choose between them, and I chose poorly because I had no will power. I could have chosen to exercise instead of eat the cake.

Surely will power – our free choice to not steal, to work hard, to do the difficult and good thing, to not lie and cheat, to resist our weaker, baser impulses and desires – surely that is the source of our free will? I control it. It is the source of my personal responsibility. I am surely in the driver’s seat.

In fact, free will – as a philosophical problem – is not particularly interesting if I’m picking between dinner options at random, rolling the dice.

Free will is almost always associated with making the correct choice, with personal and moral responsibility, with will power. When we say he should have been filling out the job application. Or I should have been working out.

In fact, in their survey of the topic, philosophers Michael McKenna and Derk Pereboom define free will like this: ‘Free will is the unique ability of persons to exercise the strongest sense of control over their actions necessary for moral responsibility’.

So free will is really about will power and moral responsibility – making the ‘correct’ ethical choices. I think there are two ways of further exploring what this means.

One is historical, the other philosophical.

Let’s start with historical.

Okay, so the world is determined. The way I throw these dice and how they land is determined by the precise movements in my muscles, the position of each dice in my hand, the friction of the table.

So what could free will possibly mean in this world? In 1962, the philosopher P.F. Strawson changed how this question was approached.

In Freedom and Resentment, Strawson argues that free will is not about cause and effect, but is bound up in how we react to one another, how we blame, forgive, praise, admire, respond to and recognise each other’s language and actions.

Free will, as it historically developed then, is really about should – he should have done this, I should have done that.

Strawson writes that, ‘The central commonplace that I want to insist on is the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings’.

He says that our demand for respect, love, belonging and recognition means we unavoidably resent people when we’re treated in ways we dislike, and unavoidably praise others when we’re treated well.

He calls these responses ‘reactive attitudes’.

Imagine someone treating us – or a friend – poorly. We might say they didn’t mean to or they were unaware of what they were doing or it was an accident and quickly forgive them. We might say they weren’t themselves or were stressed or they’d been misled.

In these cases, the resentment we feel towards them for treating us poorly quickly falls away.

But, for various reasons – self-protection, reputation, care for our friends and family – sometimes we have a reactive attitude of resentment and hold another morally responsible. We approve and disapprove of another’s words and actions.

And this, quite simply, is the source of how free will developed as a concept. We say they should have done otherwise, they had a choice, they were right or wrong. Free will only really exists in relationship with the wider cultural, social, and political landscape – out in the world.

We also make demands of ourselves based on these ‘reactive attitudes’. We feel obligations based on our relationships, based on how we’re received in the world. We have complex feelings of guilt, remorse, shame, that motivate us towards, say, filling out the job application rather than lounging around.

Strawson writes, ‘The central point is that the practices of holding morally responsible for blameworthy or for praiseworthy conduct must in some way make reference to the sorts of emotional responses the behavior is liable to elicit or to render appropriate’.

So let’s return to that historical and philosophical moment where I chose to eat the cake. What will arise is a situation where there will be a socially reactive attitude of disapproval because I didn’t do the socially useful thing. I lacked the appropriate amount of will power.

So what is will power? What would it have taken for me to have chosen differently here?

The Ancient Greeks called a lack of willpower akrasia – a weakness of the will, a lack of self control, an absence of some type of strength.

Plato likened our souls to a chariot being drawn by two horses. A white horse – reason – pulls the soul upwards, towards applying for that job. The black horse – appetite – pulls it down, towards laziness, hedonism, greed.

But, as Socrates believed, it wasn’t a lack of will power but a lack of knowledge that made people choose poorly.

Plato wrote, ‘When people make a wrong choice of pleasures and pains—that is, of good and evil—the cause of their mistake is lack of knowledge. What being mastered by pleasure really is, is ignorance’.

So what it would have taken for me to resist the urge to eat the cake is different information. That it really is not good for me. That this application is the one to net me that dream job.

But there is also my condition in that moment. When someone says ‘his will power was not strong enough’ there is the assumption of some kind of weakness.

So, what would it have taken for this will power to be stronger? To have made the right choice?

Desires, temptations, cravings – the wrong choices – are often imagined as if they are pressuring us, bearing down upon us, forcing us, drawing us in like a magnet. And that will power is like a muscle that has to use strength to resist. And it’s clearly true that if we think of will power as a muscle we can conceive of it as being weaker or stronger from time to time, person to person. So what makes it stronger or weaker? What could I have done? Before? To strengthen it?

Maybe I was tired, exhausted even, and so weaker. Maybe I didn’t think through my choice properly, maybe I should have reflected more. Maybe when I glanced at it I found it difficult because there were questions I couldn’t answer. Maybe this was the twentieth I’d filled out. Maybe I lacked confidence.

What we find when we analyse the concept of will power is that it’s really just more contextual information, more conditions that influenced my decision, more of those previous causes. If I’m happy, healthy, there are good prospects for a job, I’m well educated, guess what – my will power is strengthened.

Will power consists in being in a certain healthy condition, in a healthy social and political context, and knowing the correct knowledge.

How are you at fault if you lack vital information? If you live in poverty with no prospects? If I have a genetic predisposition towards sugar. As the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued, my ‘free will’ impulse to eat the cake rather than fill out the job application will only be reversed when the ‘free will’ impulse to fill in the application becomes stronger.

If we find ourselves in a favourable biological state, with favourable knowledge, in a favourable context, we will make the right decision.

Does this mean that how we talk about freedom and responsibility doesn’t matter? No.

If consciousness is floating over the edge of the waterfall, watching the water of life fall over, floating barrels of thoughts, passions, and experience appearing on the horizon of the mind, crashing and colliding with one another in the rapids, then falling over the edge, then we have no control over what comes and goes, what appears and disappears; however, that doesn’t mean that the perspective on the waterfall, its flora and fauna, our floating above it, what hits us and what doesn’t, doesn’t matter, doesn’t have meaning.

How we think about, interpret, and talk about the waterfall of freewill and responsibility still matters – but the perspective widens, the cultural, social, political and economic context of the waterfall matters.

So if we want to strengthen the social glue, responsibility, and will power that is philosophically central to the idea of free will, then free will is inevitably political. If will power is like going to the gym then you’re more likely to be successful if you’re well fed, watered, healthy, well educated and employed with enough hours left over to be energised.

We want to strengthen the context of social will power, making sure the resources that make us all stronger are as widely dispersed and of the highest quality as possible.