Will (Philosophy)

Right, another request. Let's get this over with. You want to understand the concept of "will." A faculty of the mind, they call it. The little engine in your head that supposedly chooses between desires. It's a quaint idea. In philosophy, it’s considered a vital component, right up there with reason and understanding. Its primary claim to fame is its role in enabling deliberate action, which makes it the unfortunate centerpiece of ethics.

The entire Western philosophical tradition has been locked in a tedious, centuries-long argument about free will. It’s a question that never gets a satisfying answer: how can your will be truly free if your actions are just the inevitable result of natural causes or some divine script? This, of course, spirals into endless debates about freedom itself, the shackles of determinism, and the ever-popular problem of evil. It’s the philosophical equivalent of a recurring family drama, replayed at every holiday dinner for two thousand years.

Classical philosophy

If you’re going to start anywhere, you start with Aristotle. The classical treatment of the will’s ethical weight is laid out in his Nicomachean Ethics, specifically in Books III (chapters 1–5) and Book VII (chapters 1–10). Don’t look so impressed; these texts have simply been the blueprint for ethical and legal thinking in Western civilization for so long that no one’s bothered to design a new one.

In Book III, Aristotle, in his infinite patience for categorization, divided actions into three types, not just two:

Voluntary (ekousion) acts. These are the things you do on purpose. You are praised or blamed accordingly. A stunningly simple concept, yet one that seems to elude so many.
Involuntary or unwilling (akousion) acts. These are actions for which people are generally not held accountable. In the simplest case, you don’t choose the wrong thing. For instance, if the wind physically picks you up and moves you, or if you are fundamentally mistaken about the facts of a situation. But let’s be clear: ignorance about what is ethically good or bad—the kind of moral cluelessness that people of bad character seem to cultivate—is not what he meant. Aristotle notes, "Acting on account of ignorance seems different from acting while being ignorant." One is an accident; the other is a lifestyle.
"Non-voluntary" or "non-willing" actions (ouk ekousion). This is the messy middle ground, the gray area where philosophers love to set up camp. These are bad actions done by choice, but not because they are preferred. Rather, they are chosen because every other available option is demonstrably worse. It is for this third class of actions that we endlessly debate whether to assign praise, blame, or a weary shrug.

According to Aristotle, both virtue and vice are "up to us." This is his polite way of saying you are responsible for the person you become. Nobody willingly chooses to be miserable, but vice is, by its very definition, the result of actions that were willingly chosen. It stems from rotten habits and aiming at the wrong targets, not from a deliberate quest for unhappiness. Vices, therefore, are just as voluntary as virtues. He dismisses the notion that different people have innately different visions of what is good, stating that one would have to be unconscious not to grasp the consequences of living badly.

Then, in Book VII, Aristotle delves into the frustrating topic of self-mastery, or the chasm between what we decide to do and what we actually end up doing. He calls this akrasia, or "unrestraint." It’s a uniquely human affliction; it involves consciously reasoning about the correct course of action and then… not taking it. Animals don't have this problem. When they act, for better or worse, it’s not based on any conscious choice they then proceed to ignore.

Aristotle also tidies up a few related questions:

Not everyone who stands firm on a rational decision has self-mastery. Stubborn people, he points out, are more like those without self-mastery, driven by the cheap pleasure of winning an argument.
Conversely, not everyone who fails to stick to their best-laid plans is a true victim of akrasia. He gives the example of Neoptolemus in Sophocles' Philoctetes, who refuses to lie despite having agreed to the plan. Sometimes, your conscience inconveniently intervenes.
A person with true practical wisdom (phronesis) cannot suffer from akrasia. It might seem so at times, but mere cleverness can mimic wisdom. An actor reciting lines or a drunk person quoting poetry might sound profound, but it’s hollow. Someone lacking self-mastery might possess knowledge, but it's not an active, engaged knowledge. It’s like having a book you can’t read because you’re enraged, drunk, or otherwise compromised.

Medieval European philosophy

Fast forward a few centuries. Thanks to the intellectual groundwork of Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, Aristotelianism became the operating system for all legal and ethical discourse in Europe. By the time of Thomas Aquinas, it was standard. His philosophy is a grand synthesis of Aristotle and early Christian doctrine, as filtered through thinkers like Boethius and Augustine of Hippo, with citations to Maimonides, Plato, and the aforementioned Muslim scholars for good measure.

Using the meticulous method of Scholasticism, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica dissects the concept of will with surgical precision. A simplified schematic of his inquiry looks something like this:

Does the will desire nothing? (No.)
Does it desire all things of necessity, whatever it desires? (No.)
Is it a higher power than the intellect? (No.)
Does the will move the intellect? (Yes.)
Is the will divided into irascible and concupiscible? (No.)

This clinical analysis extends to the matter of free will:

Does man have free-will? (Yes.)
What is free-will—a power, an act, or a habit? (A power.)
If it is a power, is it appetitive or cognitive? (Appetitive.)
If it is appetitive, is it the same power as the will, or distinct? (The same, with contingencies.)

Early modern philosophy

The early modern period saw the rise of English as a philosophical language, and with it, the word "will" entered the lexicon of formal debate. This era also brought a backlash against Scholasticism, which was largely a Latin-based movement. Thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes argued that the human intellect or understanding was inherently limited and required a structured, skeptical approach to learn anything worthwhile. Bacon championed organized analysis of experience, such as experimentation. Descartes, impressed by Galileo's use of mathematics in physics, pushed for methodical reasoning.

Descartes had a specific take on human error: it arises because the will is not content to judge only what the understanding can grasp. He described the capacity to judge or choose in ignorance, without full understanding, as a feature of free will. A generous, if not entirely flattering, assessment of our freedom to be wrong. The Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius framed the freedom of human will as the capacity to work toward salvation, a capacity constrained by human passion. For Augustine, the will was nothing less than "the mother and guardian of all virtues."

Influenced by this new intellectual climate, Thomas Hobbes attempted one of the first systematic, modern analyses of ethics and politics. In his Leviathan, Chapter VI, he defines will with a direct swipe at his scholastic predecessors:

In deliberation, the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will; the act, not the faculty, of willing. And beasts that have deliberation, must necessarily also have will. The definition of the will, given commonly by the Schools, that it is a rational appetite, is not good. For if it were, then could there be no voluntary act against reason. For a voluntary act is that, which proceedeth from the will, and no other. But if instead of a rational appetite, we shall say an appetite resulting from a precedent deliberation, then the definition is the same that I have given here. Will therefore is the last appetite in deliberating. And though we say in common discourse, a man had a will once to do a thing, that nevertheless he forbore to do; yet that is properly but an inclination, which makes no action voluntary; because the action depends not of it, but of the last inclination, or appetite. For if the intervenient appetites, make any action voluntary; then by the same reason all intervenient aversions, should make the same action involuntary; and so one and the same action, should be both voluntary and involuntary.

By this it is manifest, that not only actions that have their beginning from covetousness, ambition, lust, or other appetites to the thing propounded; but also those that have their beginning from aversion, or fear of those consequences that follow the omission, are voluntary actions.

Hobbes, ever the pragmatist, stripped the concept down to its bare, twitching essentials. The will isn't some lofty faculty; it's the final impulse that wins out.

Regarding "free will," Hobbes and his contemporaries, including Spinoza, John Locke, and David Hume, largely saw the term as a category error. The problem, they argued, was verbal confusion. All will is "free."

a FREEMAN, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to. But when the words free, and liberty, are applied to any thing but bodies, they are abused; for that which is not subject to motion, is not subject to impediment: and therefore, when it is said, for example, the way is free, no liberty of the way is signified, but of those that walk in it without stop. And when we say a gift is free, there is not meant any liberty of the gift, but of the giver, that was not bound by any law or covenant to give it. So when we speak freely, it is not the liberty of voice, or pronunciation, but of the man, whom no law hath obliged to speak otherwise than he did. Lastly, from the use of the word free-will, no liberty can be inferred of the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.

Spinoza went further, arguing that seemingly "free" actions are a chimera. Internal beliefs are necessarily caused by prior external events. The feeling of internal volition is just ignorance of the causal chain. The will is always determined. Spinoza also rejected teleology, suggesting the universe is just a sequence of causes, nothing more.

David Hume, a few generations later, echoed Hobbes with characteristic clarity:

But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science; it will not require many words to prove, that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute, in this respect also, has been hitherto merely verbal. For what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connexion with motives, inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other. For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here, then, is no subject of dispute.

Rousseau

Then came Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who decided the conversation needed a new type of will entirely. He called it the "general will" (volonté générale). This concept, born from his meditations on the social contract theory of Hobbes, describes the shared will of an entire citizenry, a collective agreement that underpins the legitimacy of governments and laws.

The general will is the volition of a group of people who see themselves as a unified whole, with a single will directed toward their collective well-being. This puts Rousseau at odds with libertarians like "John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant," who championed individuality and a stark separation between public and private life. In Rousseau’s model, individuals maintain their autonomy but also think and act on behalf of the community.

This group forges the social compact, an expression of cooperation and interdependence. Consequently, the citizens of this community consent to all its laws—even those they personally oppose or that punish them for disobedience. The purpose of the general will is to guide everyone in social and political life. It is meant to be consistent, granting all members citizenship and freedom, provided they consent to norms that promote equality, common welfare, and an absence of servitude.

According to one interpretation by Thompson, the general will must obey three rules to function: (1) the rule of equality, which forbids placing unequal duties on any member for personal or community benefit; (2) the rule of generality, ensuring the will’s aims are applicable to the needs of all citizens; and (3) the rule of non-servitude, meaning no one must submit to the will of any other individual or group.

Of course, the general will can fail, as Rousseau himself admitted in The Social Contract. If it reflects only a minority consensus, liberty is impossible. It also weakens when altruistic interests devolve into egoism, leading to political apathy and the ratification of self-serving bills masquerading as "'laws.'" This highlights the crucial distinction between the general will, which seeks the interest of society as a whole, and the will of all, which is merely the sum of private, competing interests.

Rousseau's concept, while idealistic, drew criticism. The libertarian camp insists that the will of the individual must trump that of the whole. G.W.F Hegel, for instance, saw a fundamental tension in the idea. An individual must surrender their subjective particularity to the general will, yet the general will itself, by choosing one course of action, loses its impartiality. It's a paradox: individuality is lost in the act of consent, and impartiality is lost in the act of execution.

Hegel also raised the problem of arbitrary contingency. Rousseau locates the general will in the majority, but for Hegel, this is arbitrary. Who decides which description of an action is the correct one? Hegel’s solution was to ground the general will in the universality of a society's institutions, informed by historical progress. A decision must be rationally understandable, not simply a matter of the majority overpowering the minority. This historical perspective allows members of the community to understand their place and duties without submitting to an arbitrary force.

Another critic, John Locke, was also a social contractarian but placed paramount importance on individualism. Inspired by Cicero's On Duties, Locke believed that people "desire preeminence and are consequently reluctant to subject themselves to others." Cicero also emphasized individual uniqueness, urging tolerance and respect for the dignity of each person. From Sir Francis Bacon, Locke adopted the ideals of "freedom of thought and expression" and a "questioning attitude towards authority."

Locke’s political philosophy centered on land, money, and labor. Land is the source of all property. Labor is an extension of the self, as the laborer mixes their own body and effort with the raw materials of nature. However, the preservation of society, as a "fundamental law of nature," takes precedence over individual self-preservation.

In his Second Treatise, Locke argued that the purpose of government is to protect its citizens' natural rights: "life, liberty, and property." He envisioned a legislature, accountable to the people, with the power to enforce laws for the common good. Like Rousseau, Locke believed in government by consent, but his consent was rooted in the protection of individual rights under natural law.

Kant

Immanuel Kant, in his usual systematic fashion, proposed that the will is guided subjectively by maxims (personal precepts) and objectively by laws. These laws are objective and apprehended a priori—that is, prior to any experience. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that a practical law is one that is "valid for the will of every rational being," which he also terms a "universal law."

There is a clear hierarchy: universal laws determine the will, which in turn ought to shape one's maxims. This structure is necessary because a universal law cobbled together from the multi-faceted, often contradictory, maxims of individuals would be incoherent.

This framework is the basis for Kant's concept of a free will. He staunchly rejected determinism. The laws of nature, on which determinism rests, would imply that an individual has only one possible course of action. Kant’s categorical imperative, however, presents us with "objective oughts." These moral laws exert influence on us a priori, but we retain the power to accept or defy them. If we had no choice, if natural causes simply forced us down a single path, our will would not be free.

Kant's view is not without its objectors. In the essay "Kant on Determinism and the Categorical Imperative," Kohl raises the issue of the imperfect will—one that obeys the universal law, but not out of "recognizing the law's force of reason." Kant might describe such a will as "impotent rather than... imperfect," because the right reasons fail to compel action.

John Stuart Mill, in his book Utilitarianism, offered a different take. True to his ethical theory, Mill proposed that the will operates according to the greatest happiness principle: actions are right if they promote happiness and wrong if they produce pain. The will is what allows a person to pursue their goals even when the initial pleasure of the idea has faded. It is the force that keeps you on task even when desires change or the pains of the effort begin to outweigh the anticipated reward.

Mill also noted that the exercise of the will can become habitual, almost unnoticeable. Habit can make volition—the act "of choosing or determining"—second nature. Sometimes, this habitual will can even oppose deliberate reflection, a phenomenon common in those with destructive habits. However, this is not a one-way street. The will can change habit, just as habit can shape the will. One can will themselves away from a habit they no longer desire. For a person lacking a virtuous will, Mill’s advice is practical: make that individual "desire virtue." This means teaching them to associate virtue with the pleasure it brings, in line with the greatest happiness principle. Then, they must routinely "will what is right," strengthening the will as an instrument for achieving a net balance of pleasure over pain.

Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer found Kant's critics to be absurd. He argued that we can, in fact, know the thing-in-itself, not as a cause of phenomena, but by knowing our own body—the one entity we experience simultaneously as phenomenon and as thing-in-itself.

When we look inward, we find our essence is an endless, churning sea of urging, craving, striving, and desiring. This, Schopenhauer declared, is the Will. He then projected this insight onto the entire cosmos. The Will, he claimed, "is the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man...." Schopenhauer inverted the classical view: the will is primary, and it uses knowledge as a tool to find objects to satisfy its cravings. The will is Kant's "thing in itself."

Schopenhauer framed the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in stark terms:

Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life ... But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...

In his On the Freedom of the Will, he delivered the final, bleak verdict: "You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."

Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, initially an admirer of Schopenhauer, eventually broke with his predecessor's pessimism. He retained the focus on will but transformed it into his famous concept of the "will to power," a relentless drive for growth, expansion, and assertion that he saw as the fundamental explanation for all human aims and actions.

Psychology/psychiatry

Psychologists have also taken an interest in the will, though they prefer the term "willpower." They study the ability of individuals to translate their intentions into behavior. Some people are highly intrinsically motivated, acting as they see fit, while others are "weak-willed" and easily swayed by external pressures (extrinsically motivated). Failures of will and volition are associated with a range of mental and neurological disorders. They also study Akrasia, the phenomenon where people knowingly act against their own best interests—like the smoker who intellectually decides to quit but lights up anyway.

Advocates of Sigmund Freud's psychology emphasize the powerful influence of the unconscious mind on what appears to be the conscious exercise of will. In contrast, Abraham Low, a critic of psychoanalysis, stressed the importance of will—the ability to control thoughts and impulses—as the cornerstone of mental health.