The Routledge Companion to Free Will is a thorough and engaging review of classic and contemporary positions on free will featuring 60 new essays from leading philosophers written for an academic audience.  Each essay includes a fair bibliography, a short list of suggested readings, and a list of related topics within the collection.   In the brief one-page introduction to this collection, the editors contend that this book serves both as an “advanced introduction” to free will, as well as a guide for experts; in many respects, they have succeeded in this enterprise.

          The collection is divided into six sections.  Each section is comprised of six to twelve essays, and begins with a short introduction to the topics discussed in the section. 

          Section I is a survey of widely held positions in the free will debate.  Most essays in this section discuss different versions of compatibilism – the theory that free will (and/or moral responsibility) exists and is compatible with universal causal determinism – the theory that there is only one possible future, one completely necessitated by events determined long ago – and libertarianism – the theory that free will (and/or moral responsibility) exists and is incompatible with universal casual determinism.  This section also includes essays on revisionism – the theory that we ought to abandon our concept of free will for one consistent with our best scientific theories – and skepticism about free will.

          Section II is comprised of six essays that look at major arguments in the free will debate – including essays on influential incompatibilist arguments – the consequence and manipulation arguments – and compatibilist arguments – the luck argument and Frankfurt-style cases.  Section III looks at classic, historical philosophical positions on free will, from the ancient Greeks to modern philosophers.

          Section IV focuses on questions surrounding recent scientific work and how it relates to free will.  Many of these chapters deal with apparent “threats” to human freedom that have arose from recent scientific investigation into human behavior.  For example, some experiments purport to show that our decisions are far from rational; that our decisions are often influenced by apparently irrelevant states of affairs.  Another “threat” is that some scientists have interpreted experimental data as showing that we make decisions and act before we are conscious or aware of our actions, suggesting that our conscious choices are not the causes of our actions, but merely reflections what came before.  This also includes an interesting chapter on the relationship of addiction to free will.

The final two essays in Section IV deal with experimental philosophy. Adam Feltz’s Folk Intuitions is a survey of experimental philosophers attempting to investigate our metaethical intuitions about free will and responsibility, while Adam Bear and Paul Bloom’s Born Free?  Children’s Intuitions About Choice describes several experiments designed to test children’s intuitions about free will, responsibility, and the ability to do otherwise.

Section V features essays on free will and theology, including an analysis of the intersections between free will and the problem of evil, fatalism, theological determinism, and dualism.  The section ends with a rather engaging essay by T. J. Mawson that asks whether God has free will.

The last section is an eclectic collection of essays, ranging from necessary inclusions – analysis of mental causation and determinism and explorations of weakness of will and the relevance of free will to criminal law – to essays might be seem frivolous, but are engaging and worthy inclusions.  Neal A. Tognazzini’s Free Will and Time Travel, the final essay in the collection, is of the latter kind.  Time travel would represent a unique set of problems for free will theorists, and here Tognazzini looks at several possible accounts of time travel and explores whether it makes sense to say the time travel is free.

The essays in this collection are thorough, rigorous, and engaging, but are far from the last word on the topics in question.  This collection is a valuable resource for scholars.  However, there are two aspects of this collection that prevent it from being a comprehensive and accessible introduction to free will – (1) omissions and (2) organizational issues.

A good example of these issues is how the book collection treats the topics of determinism and indeterminism.  Charlotte Werndl’s Determinism is a well written and engaging look at various theories and concepts associated with determinism.  It is also the second to last essay of the collection – a collection that begins with essays about whether free will is compatible with determinism.  There is no corresponding essay focusing on indeterminism.  Perhaps the collection would have been more accessible if it began with a series of essays discussing the apparent threats to free will; both determinism and indeterminism can, and are, addressed as such throughout the collection, as are questions of divine foreknowledge, many of the topics discussed in Section IV.

Although the collection devotes two essays at the end of Section IV to discussing experimental philosophy, these essays are quite light on the methodology and data.  In many respects, experimental philosophy is still an emerging area of study, but already there are two robust lines of inquiry in the literature with experiments by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols yielding apparently incompatibilist intuitions and experiments by Eddy Nahmias yielding apparently compatibilist intuitions.  A more complete treatment of this research would include more detailed accounts of the surveys discussed, as well as Nahmias’s account of bypassing.  Nahmias contends that “incompatibilist” intuitions are better understood as intuitions about the incompatibility of freedom and bypassing, where bypassing would occur if an agent’s normal deliberation method is circumvented by an external influence, such as a device implanted in one’s brain that would cause one to act as the mad scientist that implanted the device wishes.

Moral enhancement is another, related topic that sees no serious discussion here.  Some philosophers – notably Ignmar Persson and Julian Savulescu – argue that we ought to take steps to morally enhance individuals, while others – notably John Harris – argues that moral agency requires the freedom to fail, morally.  Many of the interventions proposed by Persson and Savulescu – such as a God Machine that would consistently edit a person’s thoughts and desires to prevent that person from choosing to do wrong – would constitute bypassing, and thus are apparently incompatible with free will even if free will is otherwise compatible with universal casual determinism.

The oddest editorial choice is the decision to begin the collection with an essay by John Martin Fischer on semicompatibilism – the theory that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.  Many philosophers believe there is a substantive relationship between moral responsibility and free will; usually the latter requires the former.  However, Fischer’s semicompatibilism is so named because the theory is concerned exclusively with whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, and is agnostic as to whether free will is similarly compatible.  A noteworthy variation of compatibilism, it is a worthy inclusion; but if we understand this collection as either a tool for scholars or an introduction to free will, it certainly should not precede essays on traditional compatibilism – theories that determinism is compatible with free will (and moral responsibility).

Despite these shortcomings, I want to be clear: this text can serve as an indispensable tool to scholars interested in free will and moral responsibility.  Highly recommended.

© 2017 William Simkulet

William Simkulet, Ph.D., University of Wisonsin, Marshfield/Wood County