Until quite recently, philosophers distinguished clearly between two different things that could both be called free will. They gave them different names, so that it could always be made clear what was under discussion and what was being asserted. The liberty of spontaneity was the freedom to do what you wanted, rather than being compelled to do what you did not want. The liberty of indifference was the freedom to do equally both a given thing and its opposite, the liberty (you might say) of a tossed coin, which can come down heads or tails.
But in modern discourse, this distinction is seldom made. When free will is described as being incompatible with a deterministic universe, it is usually pretty clear that it is the liberty of indifference that these philosophers and scientists are talking about, whether they are aware of this or not. On the other hand, ordinary people are not greatly interested in the liberty of indifference. What passionately interests them is the liberty of spontaneity. Ask anyone who has just performed an action (especially one they care about) whether they could have done the opposite of what they decided to do, and the answer will usually be, “But I didn’t want to do the opposite! I wanted to do what I did.”
The liberty of spontaneity is what people cherish and what some people in the past were willing to die for. Political liberty is the liberty of spontaneity. No one except a philosopher really cares much about the liberty of indifference.
Because philosophers and theoretical scientists give so much weight to the liberty of indifference, they are often willing to invoke all manner of weird forces to preserve it. So, for instance, Roger Penrose has suggested that atomic-scale events in microtubules inside neurons can introduce quantum indeterminacy into neuronal function and therefore into our decision making. But in fact all cells contain these microtubules, which is difficult to explain if their main function is to help neurons in the brain to evade determinacy.
Of course the borderline is fuzzy. If you hold a gun to my head and order me to do something, it could be argued that I was still free because I could have said, “All right, go ahead and shoot me, but I’m not doing that!”. In practice, though, most people would classify my obedience as enforced.
There are judicial consequences to this kind of uncertainty. I can remember, during the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, a case where the IRA forced a member of the public to cooperate with them by threatening his wife. He was charged along with them on the grounds that he was not acting at gunpoint himself and therefore could have refused their demand. Instead he chose to place the safety of his wife above the safety of the public. Most people thought at the time that this was not much of a choice and that the judgement against him was unreasonable.
So, to sum up, when the causes of my action seem to lie (mainly) within myself, I perceive that as a free action. When they lie mainly or wholly outside myself, I perceive it as forced and not free. With inevitably a fuzzy area lying between.
But what happens if I cannot actually determine the causes of that action? In that case, I am inclined to say, “I don’t know what made me do that!”.
Notice the assumption which I automatically make in such cases: that something unknown must have forced me to do what I did, that it was not a free action and indeed could not have been. That is because a free action is perceived as being one with definite causes that lie wholly or mainly within yourself, and it requires internal confirmation that such causes do actually exist.
This would equally apply of course to actions triggered by subatomic quantum forces of the kind that Penrose posits. Since no amount of introspection would allow me to discern these, my action or decision would appear uncaused by my internal subjective state and therefore not free. The difference between that and someone putting a gun to my head is that in the latter state, I would at least know who was putting pressure on me. In the former, I would simply be the victim of random, uncontrollable and unobservable quantum events.
So it seems that the kind of free will which ordinary people truely value is not only fully compatible with determinacy but actually requires it in order to function. In a random and indeterminate world, no one could ever tell whether an action was caused by his own internal states or external forces beyond his control, or whether they happened in a purely random manner that was also beyond his control. Indeed it would probably be pointless to ask.
How does this analyis affect our ordinary considerations of moral accountability? Is “My brain made me do it.” a legitimate plea of defence in a criminal court, or should it be? Only if I, the one making the plea, am distinct from my brain. For much of the history of western thought, the existence of a separate and immaterial soul, distinct from the brain, was taken for granted. Most Christians regarded it as a central plank of their faith and still do. Yet it rests on astonishingly shaky foundations. The Biblical view seems to be that the self or soul is simply the animated body. Thus, when God breathes into Man’s body the breath of life, the man does not receive a living soul. He becomes one. Most Old Testament writers take it for granted that when the body dies, the person dies.
By New Testament times, one group of Jews, the Pharisees, had adopted the Persian belief in immortal souls that merely associate with the body for a few decades and then continue without it. It was probably a response to the period of severe religious persecution that took place under the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes, which saw many cruel martyrdoms. Judaism survived only because some people were willing to die for their faith and others to risk their lives fighting for the right to practice it. Why would they have bothered if death simply meant annihilation, with no possibility of any kind of heavenly reward or vindication? Educated Jews who thought there was something better than that could draw support from contemporary Greek philosophy. Many Greeks had absorbed the idea of an immortal soul from Plato, who seems to have derived it independently from Persian sources.
You might expect the New Testament to have much to say about the immortality of the soul and its independence of the mortal body, given the importance this has acquired in Church thought. Yet extraordinarily, it does not. Instead, all the wealth of New Testament promises centre around the resurrection of a glorified immortal body. The resurrection of Jesus is presented as the prototype of ours. Biblical Christianity doesn’t actually require any kind of “soul” to exist. The importance of the concept in historic Christianity is, Biblically speaking, a distraction from our true hope.