information:classification
Free will

In his search for truth and assorted principles of psychology, William James developed his two-stage model of free will. In his model, he tries to explain how it is people come to the making of a decision and what factors are involved in it. He firstly defines our basic ability to choose as free will. Then he specifies our two factors as chance and choice. "James's two-stage model effectively separates chance (the in-deterministic free element) from choice (an arguably determinate decision that follows causally from one's character, values, and especially feelings and desires at the moment of decision)."

James argues that the question of free will revolves around "chance." The idea of chance is that some events are possibilities, things that could happen but are not guaranteed. Chance is a neutral term (it is, in this case, neither inherently positive nor "intrinsically irrational and preposterous," connotations it usually has); the only information it gives about the events to which it applies is that they are disconnected from other things – they are "not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things" before they happen. Chance is made possible regarding our actions because our amount of effort is subject to change. If the amount of effort we put into something is predetermined, our actions are predetermined.

Free will in relation to effort also balances " ideals and propensities —the things you see as best versus the things that are easiest to do". Without effort, "the propensity is stronger than the ideal." To act according to your ideals, you must resist the things that are easiest, and this can only be done with effort. James states that the free will question is therefore simple: "it relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth."

Chance is the 'free element,' that part of the model we have no control over. James says that in the sequence of the model, chance comes before choice. In the moment of decision we are given the chance to make a decision and then the choice is what we do (or do not do) regarding the decision.

When it comes to choice, James says we make a choice based on different experiences. It comes from our own past experiences, the observations of others, or:

A supply of ideas of the various movements that are … left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life.

What James describes is that once you've made a decision in the past, the experience is stockpiled into your memory where it can be referenced the next time a decision must be made and will be drawn from as a positive solution. However, in his development of the design, James also struggled with being able to prove that free will is actually free or predetermined.

People can make judgements of regret, moral approval and moral disapproval, and if those are absent, then that means our will is predetermined. An example of this is "James says the problem is a very 'personal' one and that he cannot personally conceive of the universe as a place where murder must happen." Essentially, if there were no regrets or judgments then all the bad stuff would not be considered bad, only as predetermined because there are no options of 'good' and 'bad'. "The free will option is pragmatically truer because it better accommodates the judgments of regret and morality." Overall, James uses this line of reasoning to prove that our will is indeed free: because of our morality codes, and the conceivable alternate universes where a decision has been regarded different from what we chose.

In "The Will to Believe", James simply asserted that his will was free. As his first act of freedom, he said, he chose to believe his will was free. He was encouraged to do this by reading Charles Renouvier, whose work convinced James to convert from monism to pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, 1870, James wrote:

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

In 1884, James set the terms for all future discussions of determinism and compatibilism in the free will debates with his lecture to Harvard Divinity School students published as "The Dilemma of Determinism". In this talk he defined the common terms hard determinism and soft determinism (now more commonly called compatibilism).

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

James called compatibilism a "quagmire of evasion," just as the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume —that free will was simply freedom from external coercion—were called a "wretched subterfuge" by Immanuel Kant.

Indeterminism is "the belief in freedom holds that there is some degree of possibility that is not necessitated by the rest of reality." The word "some" in this definition is crucial in James's argument because it leaves room for a higher power, as it does not require that all events be random. Specifically, indeterminism does not say that no events are guaranteed or connected to previous events; instead, it says that some events are not guaranteed – some events are up to chance. In James's model of free will, choice is deterministic, determined by the person making it, and it "follows casually from one's character, values, and especially feelings and desires at the moment of decision." Chance, on the other hand, is indeterministic, and pertains to possibilities that could happen but are not guaranteed. James described chance as neither hard nor soft determinism, but " indeterminism ":

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance... This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

James asked the students to consider his choice for walking home from Lowell Lecture Hall after his talk:

What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?... It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.

With this simple example, James laid out a two-stage decision process with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice of one possibility that transforms an ambiguous future into a simple unalterable past. James's two-stage model separates chance (undetermined alternative possibilities) from choice (the free action of the individual, on which randomness has no effect). Subsequent thinkers using this model include Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Karl Popper.