Tahmizian and Carrier will be recording a discussion on Free Will vs Determinism soon and here are some of my thoughts:

What is the free will vs determinism debate? For example, if we ask with Keith Augustine why aggressive behavior in society is overwhelmingly a male issue it seems to point to testosterone as the culprit, not free will.

Instead of framing the discussion as an either or, is it better to think of determinism and free will as two poles of a spectrum?

One argument against free will is the problem of sin. Tahmizian notes since God could have programmed us with a revulsion to sin like we have with feces God seems to have programmed us with an inclination to sin, we are susceptible to temptation, and so is the cause of evil.

One place where we experience radical freedom is our being toward death. The stoics and the apostle Paul taught the imminence of death every day. The epicureans deemed it irrelevant to everyday life, though this was still a meditation on death. The Nietzsche of Human all too Human volume 2 saying 399 concluded life is too short for the rare and uncommon. Tim McGraw sang about living like you were dying. The freedom in our being-toward-death is that it’s the great unknown as to whether it is annihilation or torture or bliss or whatever. There is a broad spectrum between annihilation and bliss that people choose or place themselves on as their philosophy of life without being determined to because despite personal and societal inclinations, it is a leap over the abyss of undecidability.

Free will vs. determinism is the long-standing philosophical dispute over whether human actions and choices are genuinely open (agents could have done otherwise in a robust sense) or whether they are fixed by prior causes—physical, biological, psychological, social, or divine.

Core positions

• Hard determinism: Every event, including decisions, is necessitated by antecedent conditions plus the laws of nature (or God’s decrees). Free will is an illusion. Modern variants often cite neuroscience (e.g., readiness potentials preceding conscious awareness of choice) or genetics/environment.
• Libertarian free will: Some choices are not fully determined; the agent originates them in a way that is not the inevitable product of prior states. This usually requires an “uncaused cause” or agent-causation that sits outside the ordinary causal chain.
• Compatibilism (soft determinism): Free will is compatible with determinism. An action is free if it flows from the agent’s own desires, reasons, and character without external coercion, even if those desires were themselves determined. “Could have done otherwise” is reinterpreted as “would have done otherwise if the agent had wanted to.”
• Hard incompatibilism (e.g., some free-will skeptics): Whether determinism is true or not, free will in the strong sense does not exist.

Empirical influences do not automatically settle the metaphysical question. Higher average testosterone and related neurobiological factors help explain why physical aggression and certain risk-taking behaviors are statistically far more common in males across cultures. That is strong evidence of causal contribution from biology. It does not by itself prove that no individual male ever exercises meaningful choice about whether or how to act on those impulses, nor that social norms, reflection, or self-control never modulate the outcome. Biology supplies strong inclinations and probabilistic tendencies; the debate is whether those tendencies leave residual room for undetermined or self-determined agency.

Spectrum rather than strict either/or

Thinking in terms of degrees or poles is often more useful than a binary.

• At one end: actions heavily constrained by reflex, overwhelming addiction, severe mental illness, or extreme coercion.
• Toward the middle: ordinary deliberation under ordinary biological and social pressures.
• At the other end: rare moments of radical self-reconstitution or “leaps” where the agent experiences (or claims) a break with prior character.

Compatibilists and many experimental philosophers already treat freedom as scalar—more or less reasons-responsive, more or less coherent with the agent’s higher-order desires. Even libertarians sometimes allow that freedom comes in degrees of “ultimate” sourcehood. The spectrum framing avoids both the caricature of absolute uncaused freedom and the caricature of total puppetry.

The theological “problem of sin” argument

The claim that God could have given humans an innate, feces-like revulsion to sin, and that the actual inclination toward sin therefore makes God the author of evil, is a classic form of the problem of evil directed at free-will theism. Standard free-will defenses reply that a world containing creatures capable of genuine moral choice (and therefore of sin) is more valuable than a world of impeccable automata, and that the “revulsion” option would eliminate the very freedom that makes moral goodness possible. Critics counter that an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have created free beings whose nature already strongly disposed them toward the good without eliminating freedom, or that the actual distribution of propensities looks more like a design flaw or indifferent natural process than optimal programming. The argument therefore presses hard against certain classical theisms; it is less decisive against views that deny libertarian free will altogether or that treat “sin” as a non-literal category.

Being-toward-death and radical freedom

Existentialist and certain classical treatments locate a distinctive openness precisely in the confrontation with mortality.

• Stoics practiced daily memento mori to strip away what is not “up to us” and to act from rational agency while time remains.
• The apostle Paul who was from the birthplace of the stoic enlightenment in Tarsus went to the extreme claiming that the entire way we live our lives (denying the flesh, amplifying the spiritual) is completely dependent on our being-toward-death and so Paul said if the dead are not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die.
• Epicureans argued that death is “nothing to us” (when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not), yet the meditation still shapes how one lives the finite interval.
• Nietzsche’s remark in Human, All Too Human (II §399) that life is too short for the rare and uncommon underscores the pressure of finitude on value and choice.
• Popular expressions such as “live like you were dying” dramatize the same urgency.

Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death) is the most systematic modern articulation: authentic existence appropriates the possibility of one’s ownmost non-relational death, thereby disclosing freedom as the capacity to take over one’s thrown existence rather than flee into everyday anonymity. Because the content of what follows death—if anything—is radically undecidable from the standpoint of the living, the stance one adopts toward that abyss is not fully dictated by prior empirical character. It can function as a site of “leap,” even while biology, culture, and personal history continue to exert strong pressure. That does not prove libertarian free will in every domain; it illustrates one phenomenological locus where the sense of undetermined self-positioning is especially vivid.

In short, the debate remains open because empirical science maps causes and correlations without yet closing the metaphysical question of whether those causes exhaust the agent’s contribution. Framing freedom and determination as poles of a continuum, and attending to limit situations such as mortality, keeps the discussion more precise than an all-or-nothing dichotomy.

Tahmizian and Carrier’s discussion will be soon and I’ll post a link when it’s up!