Free Will and the Myth of
“Either You Have Power or You Don’t”
*last updated on February 20, 2026
Free will is the focus of one of the most enduring debates in philosophy. I’m not going to map that debate in full; philosophical encyclopedias do it better than I can in a single essay. My aim is more practical. I want to explain how my thinking about free will connects to my work on power and powerlessness, and why I think it’s hard to talk about power seriously without touching the free-will question.
One reason is simple: in everyday moral life, “free will” often functions as a proxy for a power claim. If we believe a person could have done otherwise, we tend to treat them as powerful enough to deserve credit or blame. If we believe they could not have done otherwise, we tend to treat them as powerless—more shaped than shaping, more pushed than choosing. The trouble is that when we slide into this either/or framing, we don’t just simplify an abstract philosophical problem. We simplify people. And that simplification has consequences: contempt instead of curiosity, blame instead of understanding, resignation instead of action, and attempts at social change that misread what actually moves human beings.
One reason is simple: in everyday moral life, “free will” often functions as a proxy for a power claim. If we believe a person could have done otherwise, we tend to treat them as powerful enough to deserve credit or blame. If we believe they could not have done otherwise, we tend to treat them as powerless—more shaped than shaping, more pushed than choosing. The trouble is that when we slide into this either/or framing, we don’t just simplify an abstract philosophical problem. We simplify people. And that simplification has consequences: contempt instead of curiosity, blame instead of understanding, resignation instead of action, and attempts at social change that misread what actually moves human beings.
Before going further, one guardrail matters. Agency is not distributed evenly. A person living with ordinary freedoms in a relatively democratic context and an enslaved person are not in comparable situations; even within the same society, people’s safety, legal protections, money, health, trauma histories, education, and social support vary dramatically. Any view of “choice” that pretends otherwise becomes ethically dangerous. Most of my writing is aimed at people who do have at least some meaningful scope of everyday choice, but even for that audience the point is not “everyone can do anything.” The point is that human action is constrained in ways that are often invisible, and freedom—where it exists—shows up within those constraints, not outside them.
If free will feels obvious, that is partly because the felt experience of choice is woven into daily life. You decide what to eat, what to buy, what to ignore, what to prioritize, whether to answer now or later. Even when you can name obligations—work, family, money, social expectations—many actions still feel voluntary. Most people feel they can tell the difference between “I had to” and “I chose to.” That intuition is real and psychologically important, and I don’t think it should be dismissed.
But the intuition becomes less straightforward the moment we ask how decisions actually form. In broad strokes, modern psychology and neuroscience complicate the idea that conscious deliberation is the sole or even primary driver of action. A lot happens before “I decided” arrives on the scene: perception filters shape what you notice; emotions bias what feels urgent or safe; habits run scripts without asking permission; social cues steer attention; desires arise, but their origins are not transparent. Even the statement “I want X” raises questions. Where did that wanting come from—biology, culture, history, attachment patterns, advertising, stress, shame, longing for belonging? Usually it’s a blend. If you care about the complexity of human behavior—and if you care about power—you can’t avoid noticing that choice is embedded in forces that do not feel like “choice” at all.
This is where I used to feel stuck when reading the classic Western debate. If you demand a final metaphysical verdict—either “this action was predetermined” or “this action was free in some ultimate sense”—you quickly hit a hard limit. To prove that an action was inevitable in the strongest sense, you would need to trace a complete causal chain back through an entire life, and beyond that through the entire history of the universe. That is not a real human possibility. And if you try to escape that by insisting that choice is fully independent of circumstances, you end up with an image of the person as an uncaused cause, a kind of island self floating above history, body, and culture. That image does not match lived experience either.
My interest in this question isn’t to win a metaphysical argument; it’s to reduce the damage that unexamined assumptions about human action cause in everyday moral life. One of the most common forms of damage is a pattern so ordinary we rarely name it: we often grant ourselves context and are quicker to read others’ actions as character.
When we explain our own behavior, we are quick to notice constraints—fatigue, fear, money, obligations, mental health, past experiences, systemic forces, social pressure. When we explain other people’s behavior, especially the behavior of those we dislike, we default to “they chose it.” We treat their action as a transparent expression of character.
This is one way “free will” becomes a moral weapon without anyone saying the term. We don’t announce a theory of agency; we simply behave as if other people possess full freedom exactly where we want them to be blameworthy. What makes this especially important to me is that even people who value nuance often apply nuance selectively. They are willing to complicate the story when discussing those they already perceive as deserving sympathy—say, in conversations about poverty or victim blaming. But they withdraw that complexity from those coded as the "bad other." In other words, we often allow ourselves a sophisticated view of constraint when it protects people we already want to protect, and a simplified view of choice when it justifies condemning people we already want to condemn. That selective complexity fuels polarization, contempt, and a refusal to investigate what actually drives human action.
The same underlying assumption can harm us when it turns inward. If I treat my agency as unlimited, change should be simple: “I decided, so I should be able to stop.” When I fail—when the habit repeats, when the impulse wins, when I do the thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do—I interpret it not as information about conditioning, stress, environment, or skill deficits, but as a moral defect. This produces a familiar loop: unrealistic expectations about willpower, predictable failure, shame, and then even less capacity to change. In that sense, a simplistic belief in free will can become a generator of self-criticism rather than a tool for growth.
Talking about needs helps make the constraint side of the picture more concrete. Humans need sleep, water, food, safety, and (for most people) some degree of social connection. A large portion of behavior is shaped by these pressures, whether we like it or not. Maslow’s hierarchy is useful here not because it is flawless, but because it highlights something easy to miss: even “higher” needs are not pure, self-generated freedom. The desire for self-actualization—the desire to become “the most one can be”—depends on an image of what that “most” looks like. And that image is partly cultural. Society supplies templates for worth, success, attractiveness, virtue, intelligence, belonging, even for what counts as being “true to yourself.” So even when we feel most personal—“this is my path; this is my dream”—we are often working with materials we did not invent.
Once you see this, you can fall into two traps that look like opposites but end up feeding similar forms of harm. One is fatalism: if everything is caused, why bother? This posture can slide into resignation, passivity, and a refusal to attempt change—personal or social. The other is moralism: if you did it, you chose it. This posture fuels blame, superiority, contempt, and the illusion that punishment and shame are the main engines of improvement. Neither helps us understand people accurately. Neither helps us reduce suffering. Neither supports wise action.
For practical purposes, my working view is that both absolute free will and absolute determinism are poor descriptions of human life. We are not absolutely free to make any possible decision; we are not even absolutely free to envision or desire any possible decision. At the same time, I don’t find it helpful to act as if no meaningful agency exists. What seems more realistic is a mixed picture: human action contains both powerlessness (constraint) and power (the capacity to influence what happens next). Not in separate compartments, but intertwined in the same moment.
This is where the language of “wiggle room” helps me. Agency is not a switch; it’s a range. In any given situation, there is a set of options you can realistically take. You do not choose that set from scratch. It is shaped by your body, your history, your environment, your relationships, your resources, your skills, and your immediate state. But within that range, there is often some wiggle room—sometimes small, sometimes larger—where a different next step is possible. And that next step matters because it reshapes the next moment’s range of options. The options available to you later are influenced by what you do now, even when what you can do now is limited.
This is also where I’ve found Buddhist thought useful—not as a religious claim I’m asking others to accept, but as a way of reframing the Western dilemma. When I felt stuck in the usual either/or framing, Buddhism offered a different emphasis: conditioning is real, and ethical practice is real. Thoughts, impulses, and emotions arise from causes; you can observe this directly. But that does not mean you are doomed to reenact every impulse. You can train attention, cultivate the capacity to pause, and strengthen the ability to choose a more skillful action within the limits of the moment. In many Buddhist traditions, it functions not only as philosophy and not only religion; it is also an investigation of human behavior coupled with a practical discipline of change. And what I find compelling is that parts of modern Western science resonate with this picture: much of our inner life is shaped by processes outside conscious control, yet practice and environment can alter patterns over time.
So where does this leave me? With a commitment that is simple to state and difficult to live: I want a view of human action that supports compassion and responsibility at the same time. Compassion and humility, because constraint is real and often invisible from the outside. Responsibility and effort, because wiggle room is real and often grows through practice. This is why I care about free will—not as a topic for empty philosophizing, but as a way to interrupt the unspoken assumptions that can shape our judgments, our self-image, and our approach to change.
That brings me to what I call alertness. Alertness isn’t a performance and it doesn’t require long philosophical reflection. It is a form of ordinary critical awareness that interrupts autopilot. It is the willingness, at least sometimes, to ask: What constraints might be operating here that I’m not seeing? What wiggle room is realistically available right now? Am I granting complexity to myself and simplicity to someone else? Am I using “choice” language as a disguise for contempt—or as a tool for courage? When there are no clean answers, alertness becomes a discipline: staying flexible in conclusions and careful in judgment, because power and powerlessness are not cleanly separable in human action.
In the end, this is the link I keep returning to. Just as there is no absolute power or absolute powerlessness, there is no absolute freedom or absolute determination. Relative amounts of power and powerlessness vary from person to person and from action to action, and it remains ethically essential to notice those differences. But the fact that agency is uneven does not make agency meaningless. Within the limits of a given life and a given moment, choices matter—sometimes not because they erase constraints, but because they shape what becomes possible next.
If this view does anything valuable, I hope it does two things at once. I hope it makes it harder to use blame as a shortcut—toward others or toward yourself. And I hope it makes it easier to take responsibility without cruelty: to look for the wiggle room that exists, to expand it where you can, and to treat both your own action and other people’s actions as more complex than a simple story of “they could” or “they couldn’t.”
If free will feels obvious, that is partly because the felt experience of choice is woven into daily life. You decide what to eat, what to buy, what to ignore, what to prioritize, whether to answer now or later. Even when you can name obligations—work, family, money, social expectations—many actions still feel voluntary. Most people feel they can tell the difference between “I had to” and “I chose to.” That intuition is real and psychologically important, and I don’t think it should be dismissed.
But the intuition becomes less straightforward the moment we ask how decisions actually form. In broad strokes, modern psychology and neuroscience complicate the idea that conscious deliberation is the sole or even primary driver of action. A lot happens before “I decided” arrives on the scene: perception filters shape what you notice; emotions bias what feels urgent or safe; habits run scripts without asking permission; social cues steer attention; desires arise, but their origins are not transparent. Even the statement “I want X” raises questions. Where did that wanting come from—biology, culture, history, attachment patterns, advertising, stress, shame, longing for belonging? Usually it’s a blend. If you care about the complexity of human behavior—and if you care about power—you can’t avoid noticing that choice is embedded in forces that do not feel like “choice” at all.
This is where I used to feel stuck when reading the classic Western debate. If you demand a final metaphysical verdict—either “this action was predetermined” or “this action was free in some ultimate sense”—you quickly hit a hard limit. To prove that an action was inevitable in the strongest sense, you would need to trace a complete causal chain back through an entire life, and beyond that through the entire history of the universe. That is not a real human possibility. And if you try to escape that by insisting that choice is fully independent of circumstances, you end up with an image of the person as an uncaused cause, a kind of island self floating above history, body, and culture. That image does not match lived experience either.
My interest in this question isn’t to win a metaphysical argument; it’s to reduce the damage that unexamined assumptions about human action cause in everyday moral life. One of the most common forms of damage is a pattern so ordinary we rarely name it: we often grant ourselves context and are quicker to read others’ actions as character.
When we explain our own behavior, we are quick to notice constraints—fatigue, fear, money, obligations, mental health, past experiences, systemic forces, social pressure. When we explain other people’s behavior, especially the behavior of those we dislike, we default to “they chose it.” We treat their action as a transparent expression of character.
This is one way “free will” becomes a moral weapon without anyone saying the term. We don’t announce a theory of agency; we simply behave as if other people possess full freedom exactly where we want them to be blameworthy. What makes this especially important to me is that even people who value nuance often apply nuance selectively. They are willing to complicate the story when discussing those they already perceive as deserving sympathy—say, in conversations about poverty or victim blaming. But they withdraw that complexity from those coded as the "bad other." In other words, we often allow ourselves a sophisticated view of constraint when it protects people we already want to protect, and a simplified view of choice when it justifies condemning people we already want to condemn. That selective complexity fuels polarization, contempt, and a refusal to investigate what actually drives human action.
The same underlying assumption can harm us when it turns inward. If I treat my agency as unlimited, change should be simple: “I decided, so I should be able to stop.” When I fail—when the habit repeats, when the impulse wins, when I do the thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do—I interpret it not as information about conditioning, stress, environment, or skill deficits, but as a moral defect. This produces a familiar loop: unrealistic expectations about willpower, predictable failure, shame, and then even less capacity to change. In that sense, a simplistic belief in free will can become a generator of self-criticism rather than a tool for growth.
Talking about needs helps make the constraint side of the picture more concrete. Humans need sleep, water, food, safety, and (for most people) some degree of social connection. A large portion of behavior is shaped by these pressures, whether we like it or not. Maslow’s hierarchy is useful here not because it is flawless, but because it highlights something easy to miss: even “higher” needs are not pure, self-generated freedom. The desire for self-actualization—the desire to become “the most one can be”—depends on an image of what that “most” looks like. And that image is partly cultural. Society supplies templates for worth, success, attractiveness, virtue, intelligence, belonging, even for what counts as being “true to yourself.” So even when we feel most personal—“this is my path; this is my dream”—we are often working with materials we did not invent.
Once you see this, you can fall into two traps that look like opposites but end up feeding similar forms of harm. One is fatalism: if everything is caused, why bother? This posture can slide into resignation, passivity, and a refusal to attempt change—personal or social. The other is moralism: if you did it, you chose it. This posture fuels blame, superiority, contempt, and the illusion that punishment and shame are the main engines of improvement. Neither helps us understand people accurately. Neither helps us reduce suffering. Neither supports wise action.
For practical purposes, my working view is that both absolute free will and absolute determinism are poor descriptions of human life. We are not absolutely free to make any possible decision; we are not even absolutely free to envision or desire any possible decision. At the same time, I don’t find it helpful to act as if no meaningful agency exists. What seems more realistic is a mixed picture: human action contains both powerlessness (constraint) and power (the capacity to influence what happens next). Not in separate compartments, but intertwined in the same moment.
This is where the language of “wiggle room” helps me. Agency is not a switch; it’s a range. In any given situation, there is a set of options you can realistically take. You do not choose that set from scratch. It is shaped by your body, your history, your environment, your relationships, your resources, your skills, and your immediate state. But within that range, there is often some wiggle room—sometimes small, sometimes larger—where a different next step is possible. And that next step matters because it reshapes the next moment’s range of options. The options available to you later are influenced by what you do now, even when what you can do now is limited.
This is also where I’ve found Buddhist thought useful—not as a religious claim I’m asking others to accept, but as a way of reframing the Western dilemma. When I felt stuck in the usual either/or framing, Buddhism offered a different emphasis: conditioning is real, and ethical practice is real. Thoughts, impulses, and emotions arise from causes; you can observe this directly. But that does not mean you are doomed to reenact every impulse. You can train attention, cultivate the capacity to pause, and strengthen the ability to choose a more skillful action within the limits of the moment. In many Buddhist traditions, it functions not only as philosophy and not only religion; it is also an investigation of human behavior coupled with a practical discipline of change. And what I find compelling is that parts of modern Western science resonate with this picture: much of our inner life is shaped by processes outside conscious control, yet practice and environment can alter patterns over time.
So where does this leave me? With a commitment that is simple to state and difficult to live: I want a view of human action that supports compassion and responsibility at the same time. Compassion and humility, because constraint is real and often invisible from the outside. Responsibility and effort, because wiggle room is real and often grows through practice. This is why I care about free will—not as a topic for empty philosophizing, but as a way to interrupt the unspoken assumptions that can shape our judgments, our self-image, and our approach to change.
That brings me to what I call alertness. Alertness isn’t a performance and it doesn’t require long philosophical reflection. It is a form of ordinary critical awareness that interrupts autopilot. It is the willingness, at least sometimes, to ask: What constraints might be operating here that I’m not seeing? What wiggle room is realistically available right now? Am I granting complexity to myself and simplicity to someone else? Am I using “choice” language as a disguise for contempt—or as a tool for courage? When there are no clean answers, alertness becomes a discipline: staying flexible in conclusions and careful in judgment, because power and powerlessness are not cleanly separable in human action.
In the end, this is the link I keep returning to. Just as there is no absolute power or absolute powerlessness, there is no absolute freedom or absolute determination. Relative amounts of power and powerlessness vary from person to person and from action to action, and it remains ethically essential to notice those differences. But the fact that agency is uneven does not make agency meaningless. Within the limits of a given life and a given moment, choices matter—sometimes not because they erase constraints, but because they shape what becomes possible next.
If this view does anything valuable, I hope it does two things at once. I hope it makes it harder to use blame as a shortcut—toward others or toward yourself. And I hope it makes it easier to take responsibility without cruelty: to look for the wiggle room that exists, to expand it where you can, and to treat both your own action and other people’s actions as more complex than a simple story of “they could” or “they couldn’t.”