free-will Here is a deep thought to chew on: The will is not a cause; it is an effect, whose cause is conation. “Acts of the will cannot come to pass of themselves,” writes Arthur Pink. “To say they can is to postulate an uncaused effect.” John Frame concurs, saying, “The very idea of a ‘will’ which exists in some independence from the person, the intellect, and the emotions, is deeply problematic.” [1]

Choice is a term describing a circumstance appropriate to volition or acts of will, which are determined (causally necessitated) by the mental activity of conation. The term conative (desire) describes one of the three aspects of the human mind, the other two being cognitive (intellect) and affective (emotion); [2] as such, the conative consists of the cognitive and affective and causally produces how one acts on them. Therefore, as Arthur Pink astutely noted: if volition or the will is the effect of these causal faculties, then it is subject to them; if it is subject to them, then it is not sovereign; if it is not sovereign, then we cannot predicate freedom of it.

But freedom should not be predicated of faculties at any rate, but rather of agency. As John Locke wrote, “Liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or abstaining to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” [3] I reference him not as an authority but as having raised a very good point. As the agent is free and not his will, so we should reject ‘free will’ in favour of ‘free agency’.

References:

  1. On Arthur Pink: see Chapter 7 of his The Sovereignty of God, under the heading “The nature of the human will.” On John Frame: see his answer to the question on “Agent Causation and Free Will,” as well as the article “Perspectivalism 101” by his friend Joseph Torres.
  2. See the article on “Conation” at Wikipedia.
  3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” which can be found in print in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources from Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, eds.

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