Free Will: Who Has It

Are we human beings in charge of the decisions we make—or not?

If someone builds a business, cures a disease, or writes a symphony, did he choose to exert the effort that caused the achievement? Could he have done otherwise? Or was he moved by forces beyond his control?

Similarly, if someone robs a bank, rapes a woman, or commits murder, did he choose to do so? Could he have done otherwise? Or was he a victim of forces beyond his control?

Are we human beings in charge of the decisions we make—or not?

This is the alternative of free will or determinism.

Free will is the idea that people initiate and control certain mental and physical actions, such that they could have done otherwise. These actions are freely chosen.

Determinism is the idea that all our actions—mental and physical—are caused and necessitated by forces beyond our control. No action is freely chosen.

To the extent that you accept one of these ideas (or some mixture), it underlies and directly affects the way you think about every concern in your life—from personal achievement to moral responsibility, self-confidence, self-development, friendship, romance, recreational activities, and political freedom. Most fundamentally, your acceptance of free will or determinism affects your psychological orientation toward the world, yourself, and others—and thus your general relationship to each.

If you freely choose your actions, then your relationship to the world, yourself, and others is active. You can—and, if you want to thrive, you should—use your mind to understand the world and yourself; choose and pursue a fulfilling career, friendships, and romantic relationships that support and enhance your life; deliberately plan and strive for success; and cooperate with like-minded people to create and maintain a social system in which everyone is politically free to choose his own goals, act on his own judgment, and keep the product of his effort.

If you don’t freely choose your actions, then your relationship to the world is passive. Whatever illusions you might have about “free will,” you are not actively in charge of your life; rather, you merely experience events happening to you. You might have a job and go to work, or not—but whether you do or don’t is not up to you. You might have friends or a lover, or not; either way, you didn’t make it so. And whatever social system happens to exist wherever you happen to be is what you’re stuck with—at least until another one happens to come along or you happen to be moved to another place where a different system happens to exist.

If determinism is true, there is no “should” or even “could” about what you do. Your strings are pulled one way or another, and you move as you must, like a marionette. As Sam Harris, a leading proponent of this idea, puts it, “you are being played by the universe”—you are “a biochemical puppet” who “will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.”^¹

So, which is it? Are you an active agent or a passive puppet?

Let’s consider arguments and evidence for each, beginning with determinism.

The Case for Determinism

Determinism is the idea that all our actions—mental and physical—are caused and necessitated by forces beyond our control. Free will, in this view, is an illusion; you might think you make choices, you might feel as though you have some degree of control, but you don’t.

According to determinism, all events—including events we may think we control, such as choosing to apply for a job, ask someone on a date, or crash a truck into a parade of people—are caused by prior events, which, in turn, are caused by prior events, and so on, back to before we were born and, indeed, before Earth was formed. In this view, people no more control their actions than rocks control their locations or rivers control their flows.

The core argument for determinism involves three related claims:

1. You don’t choose the thoughts that arise in your mind; to choose them, you would have to “think them before you think them,” which is impossible.²

2. You can act only as you want to act (or are forced to act), and you can’t control your wants, so you can’t choose your actions.³

3. The law of cause and effect holds that all events are caused and necessitated by prior events; thus, free will—a choice not necessitated by a prior event—would violate the law of causality.⁴

Let’s examine each claim with examples, then turn to the case for free will.

1. You Don’t Choose Your Thoughts

“Two plus two equals . . .” Observe that the word “four” arose in your mind and that you had no control over it. You didn’t choose it. It simply appeared.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a . . .” Again, you had no control over whether “wall” surfaced in your mind. You had no choice in the matter.

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite . . .” Just the reaction I expected! Once again, you didn’t choose that thought; it just popped into your head.

From such observations, determinists argue that you have no control over your thoughts—and thus none over your mind. As Harris puts it,

If you pay attention to how thoughts arise, you’ll see that they simply appear quite literally out of nowhere—and you’re not free to choose them before they appear. That would require that you think them before you think them. So, here’s the question: If you can’t control your next thought, if you can’t decide what it will be before it arises, and if you can’t prevent it from arising, where is your freedom of will?⁵

Harris offers an extended example to emphasize this point. “Think of a city anywhere in the world. You can choose any city you want,” he begins:

Now, the first thing to notice about this is that this is as free a decision as you are ever going to make in your life. You have all the cities in the world to choose from, and I’m just asking you to pick one. Now, several cities have probably occurred to you. Just focus on one. . . . Do this again just so you can see what the process is like. Pick another city—it can’t be the first—and notice what that experience is like. Did you see any evidence for free will? We better be able to find it here. If it’s not here, it’s not anywhere. So let’s look for it.

First, let’s set aside all those cities whose names you don’t know and therefore could not have picked—because you couldn’t have picked one of those if your life depended on it. There’s no freedom in that, obviously. There are many other cities whose names are quite well known to you but which simply didn’t occur to you to pick. For instance, perhaps Cairo didn’t occur to you. You absolutely know that Cairo is a city but, for whatever reason, your Cairo circuits were not engaged; as a matter of neurophysiology, Cairo was not in the cards.

Think about this: Were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose? Based on the state of your brain a few moments ago, Cairo was not coming. Where is the freedom in that? . . .

Now, you probably thought of several cities. Let’s say you thought of Paris, New York, and Tokyo. And, then you thought, “I love Paris, I’m going to go with Paris”—and at the last minute you thought, “No, no, Tokyo. I’ll go with Tokyo.”

This is the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will: You’ve got two or more choices, you’re picking between them, and it’s just you and your thoughts. There’s no coercion from the external world—you are doing it, apparently. But, when you look closely, I think you’ll find that you are in no position to know why you picked what you picked—in this case, why you chose Tokyo over Paris. You might have some additional story to tell about it. You might think, “Well, I had Japanese food last night, and so I remembered it, and I picked Tokyo.” . . .

Even if you are right in this instance—even if your choice of Tokyo over Paris is based on your memory of having Japanese food last night, you still can’t explain why you remembered having Japanese food last night, or why the memory had the effect that it did. Why didn’t it have the opposite effect? Why didn’t you think, “Well, I just had Japanese food last night, so let’s go with something new, let’s go with Paris”?

The thing to notice about this is that you as the conscious witness of your inner life are not making these decisions—you can only witness these decisions. You no more picked the city you settled on than you would have if I picked it for you.⁶

The conclusion that Harris and other determinists draw from such examples is that every idea that arises in your mind is caused and necessitated by forces beyond your control. “You think you’re the thinker of the thoughts,” says Harris, but “you’re not. Thoughts just arise.”⁷ Indeed, he ventures to say, “If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have—‘What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!’—is just another thought, arising in consciousness.”⁸

In this view, you are not a thinker but a reactor. You are a puppet being played by the universe.

We’ll revisit these claims about thoughts and thinkers later. For now, let’s consider another argument determinists make.

2. You Act Only as You Want to Act or Are Forced to Act

Alex O’Connor, another popular proponent of determinism, argues against free will primarily by zeroing in on the fact that our actions are motivated by our desires: “You only ever do anything—ever—because you want to, or because you’re forced to. That’s it. There’s no counterexample to this. . . . If you’re forced to [act], you’re not in control. If you do it because you want to, then given that you can’t control your wants, you’re not in control of that [action], either.”

O’Connor illustrates this point by querying a woman who thought she had chosen to walk her dog:

“Why did you walk your dog?” he asks.

“Because if I didn’t, he wouldn’t have gotten walked.”

“So what?”

“I suppose I want to care for him.”

“You want to care for the dog because you have a desire for your dog to be in good health.”

“Yes.”

“Had the desire to stay at home been stronger, that’s what you would have done. Wants have governed your decision.”⁹

Harris uses this same line of argument:

You are “free” to do an almost infinite number of things today—free in the sense that no one will try to stop you from doing these things or put you in prison if you do them. But you’re not free to want what you don’t in fact want, or to want what you want more than you want it. . . . Where is the freedom in doing what one wants when one’s very desires are the products of prior events that one had absolutely no hand in creating?¹⁰

This is the second prong of the core argument against free will: You can act only as you want to act (or are forced to act), and your desires are products of prior events over which you had no control, so there is no room for freedom of choice.

We’ll return to these claims later, as well. But now, let’s consider what many regard as the strongest argument against free will: an argument pertaining to natural law—specifically, the law of causality.

3. Free Will Would Violate the Law of Causality

The basic argument of this third prong is that because every event is caused by prior events, because every action is a reaction to preceding actions, free will is impossible. If you take an action, mental or physical, that seems to be freely chosen—say, you think about your plans for the weekend, or go for a run, or attend a marketing seminar—what actually happened is that prior events inexorably made you do it. In this view, an event not necessitated by prior events would be causeless or random. If it’s causeless, you didn’t cause it; and if it’s random, it happened by chance. Either way, you didn’t cause it, so you are not in control.

As Harris puts it,

Everywhere we look, we see patterns of events, and all these events have prior causes, which is to say they depend materially and functionally and logically on other events that preceded them in time. And, most relevantly for our purposes, all of our conscious experiences—our thoughts, intentions, desires—and the actions and choices that result from them are caused by events of which we are not conscious and which we did not bring into being.¹¹

Most determinists acknowledge, as Harris does, that so-called “choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior.” But, they say, these influences “are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.”¹² Thus, all control is illusory. As Harris sums it up, “The next thing you think and do can only emerge from this totality of prior causes, and it can only emerge in one of two ways: lawfully—that is, deterministically, like one domino just getting knocked over by another—or randomly.”¹³

To indicate the significance of this point regarding moral responsibility, Harris provides this example:

Consider a generic serial killer. His choice to commit his last murder was determined by neurophysiological events in his brain, which were, in turn, determined by prior causes—bad genes, the developmental effects of an unhappy childhood, a night of lost sleep because a car alarm was going off down the street. These events precede any conscious decision to act.

So, what does it mean to say that this murderer committed his crime of his own free will? If this statement means anything, it must mean that he could have behaved differently. He could have resisted the impulse to commit the murder, or he could have declined to feel the impulse altogether—and not on the basis of some random influences over which he had no conscious control, but because he was actually the conscious author of his thoughts and actions.

The problem is that no one has been able to describe a way in which mental and physical events could arise that would make sense of this claim of freedom. When we assume that violent criminals have such freedom, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But when we look at this wider net of causality, the basis for placing blame seems to evaporate. The moment we catch sight of a stream of causes that reach back into childhood and beyond, the sense of his culpability begins to disappear.

To say that he would have done otherwise or could have done otherwise, had he chosen to, is simply to say he would have lived in a different universe had he been in a different universe. As sickening as I might find such a person’s behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with him, atom for atom, I would be him. There’s no extra part of me that could resist the impulse to victimize innocent people.¹⁴

This is the meaning of determinism regarding morality and personal responsibility: We all are inexorably driven to act as we do by prior conditions and events beyond our control, so no one is genuinely responsible for anything—not for good behavior, bad behavior, or the most evil behavior imaginable.

Leveraging this conception of causality, Harris seemingly drives the final nail into the coffin of free will:

You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose the society into which you were born. There’s not a cell in your body or brain that you the conscious subject created, nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. . . .

There’s no way to describe causality such that the idea of free will could make sense. Neither determinism nor randomness nor any combination of the two cashes out this idea of free agency. Under determinism you lose the free part, and under randomness you lose the agency.¹⁵

In sum, as Harris puts it,

1. “You are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.”¹⁶

2. “The ‘you’ that you take yourself to be isn’t in control of anything.”¹⁷

3. “The future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior.”¹⁸

To many people, the foregoing arguments seem decisive. It appears that free will is simply impossible. To reconcile free will with our thoughts, desires, and causality, we would have to integrate it with each—without contradiction.

We will.

But before we do, let’s note some general implications of determinism.

Implications of Determinism

If we have no free will—if we are not in control of our actions—then we are in a strange and dark place. Among other things:

• As indicated above, moral responsibility is out. No one can be morally responsible for something over which he has no control. If you didn’t will yourself to study for the exam, then you can’t legitimately claim credit for the A. If you didn’t freely choose the actions that built your company and created your wealth, then you can’t legitimately claim ownership of either. And if jihadists didn’t will themselves to burn families alive; rape, torture, and mangle women and children; murder people in myriad unspeakable ways; and celebrate all this in the streets, then we can’t legitimately hold them responsible or even hold them in contempt for having done so; they couldn’t help it.

• Romantic love is out. “Honey, I didn’t choose you; I was pushed by forces beyond my control to ask you out. Then I was forced to kiss you. Then to have sex with you. Then to marry you. And now, unless the forces change, I have to stay with you. Perhaps tomorrow they’ll push me toward our neighbor, Mary. Who knows? But remember, I’m just a puppet being played by the universe. So, whatever happens, the universe made me do it.”

• Friendship is out—for the same reason as romance. You didn’t choose your friends. They didn’t choose you. You don’t choose to get together when you do. And when you enjoy each other’s company, there is no “you” or “self” involved on anyone’s part. You’re just meat puppets running your mouths and slapping your knees.

• Purpose is out. You might feel like you choose your career, hobbies, and various projects. But you don’t. It’s all accidental. You are merely pushed this way or that by forces beyond your control; there’s no intention or striving to any of it. You’re merely a passive reactor. Tell yourself what you will—lie if you must. But you have no purposes or aims in life.

• Self-esteem is out—for the same reason as purpose. You might feel as though you’ve achieved worthy goals—say, creating an app or climbing El Capitan. But you haven’t achieved anything. All your alleged achievements were caused and necessitated by forces beyond your control. To take pride in them is to pretend that they were achievements. Again, lie if you must. But you don’t deserve to feel good about yourself.

• Political freedom is out. The whole point of political freedom—the reason human beings need it—is that we have free will and need to act in accordance with our own choices, purposes, and aims. If Frederick Douglass had no free will, why would it matter that Thomas Auld forced him to serve against his “will”? If people have no free will, they have no need for political freedom. Forcing someone to work in a field or factory is no more “wrong” or “immoral” than forcing a horse to pull a plow or training a dog to lead the blind. What’s more, people—including statist politicians and dictators—who act to enslave others have no choice in the matter. They merely do as they must—and they can’t be blamed. If free will doesn’t exist, then there is no moral difference between Abraham Lincoln and the United States on the one hand and Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union on the other.

Those are just some of the implications of determinism.

Now let’s consider a different approach to free will.

What Free Will Is and Isn’t

Free will is not the ability to fully control which thoughts or memories arise from your subconscious. Nor is it the ability to act in ways you don’t want to act—or to act on a weaker rather than a stronger desire. Nor is free will a violation of the law of causality, properly understood.

What, then, is free will? It is the choice to think or not to think—to exert mental effort or not to do so.¹⁹

That you can and do make this choice is introspectively self-evident. When you introspect—when you look inward at the functions of your consciousness—you can watch yourself choosing to focus your mind fully or less than fully. You can observe that you are able to choose to increase or decrease mental effort.

The word “introspection” derives from the Latin specere, meaning “to look” or “to observe.” And “evidence” derives from the Latin videre, meaning “to see.” When you look inward and observe yourself choosing to activate your mind, you are observing evidence of the fact that you can choose to activate your mind.

The process of looking inward and observing yourself choosing to think is as valid as the process of looking outward and observing a traffic light turning green. It is direct evidence. (If someone claims that your introspective evidence of your choice to think is invalid, the burden is on him to provide evidence that what you observe yourself doing is not what you observe yourself doing.)

To fully grasp the nature of free will, we must understand the relationship between free will and reason.

Reason is the faculty that operates by means of perceptual observation, conceptual integration, and logic (non-contradictory identification). Using reason, we can perceive the outside world with our senses (extrospection) and the functions of our mind through introspection; we can integrate our perceptions into concepts, propositions, generalizations, and principles; and we can check our ideas for contradictions and correct them along the way. In short, reason is the faculty that enables us to think.

Whereas reason is our capacity to think, free will (or volition) is our ability to activate that capacity. Seen this way, reason and volition are two sides of the same faculty; whereas reason enables us to think, free will is the choice to think.

As the philosopher Ayn Rand observed, “man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not.”²⁰ At any waking moment, a person “can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment.”²¹ A person can even actively turn his mind against its proper function; he can deliberately try to push out of his awareness relevant facts that he does not want to face. In a word, he can evade.²²

Consider these alternatives regarding one of the most important matters in life: the need for productiveness. To live, we human beings must produce the values necessary to sustain and further our lives (or survive parasitically on the productive efforts of others). The things we need don’t spring into existence from a wish or a prayer. We must produce them—or produce something we can trade to get them from others who have produced them. This sphere of life entails a vast range of options—from construction work to chemical engineering, from teaching to gardening, from medical work to method acting, from writing novels to programming computers—the list is practically endless. Within this massive range, each of us must choose some way to produce values in order to survive and thrive (or suffer the consequences of not doing so). This is a basic fact of reality: Human beings must produce in order to live.

Given the alternatives that free will affords, we can approach the need of productiveness in one of three ways: fully in focus, less than fully in focus, or evasively:

1. We can set our minds to full, conscious awareness of our need for productiveness; consider our alternatives in the full context of our lives, needs, values, and desires—all the things that matter to us; and choose to pursue a productive path fully rationally. (People who love and excel in their careers do so because they approach the subject this way.)

2. We can approach the issue less than fully focused, thinking about it some but not a lot, and drift in a semiconscious daze regarding this important area of life. (Many people do this.)

3. We can actively set our minds against recognizing and accepting the fact that our life requires productiveness, try to push it out of our minds, and seek instead to “get by” without having to produce values. (Thieves, con artists, and many politicians and bureaucrats choose this approach.)

That these alternatives exist is a matter of observation. You can see them both introspectively and extrospectively (i.e., through your observations of and experiences with others). And what makes them possible is free will.

Consider another example: moral justice. If, when judging someone’s character, you take into account your full context of knowledge about him—all that you know he has said and done, including good, bad, or questionable things—and judge him accordingly, you have judged him in full focus. If, instead, you don’t consider the available and relevant facts but you hear others say positive or negative things about the person (which you don’t know to be true) and judge him on the basis of such hearsay, then you have judged him in less than full focus, in a semiconscious daze (not to mention secondhandedly). And if you know that the person has been honest and just in all your dealings with him—or, alternatively, that he has been dishonest or unjust at times—but you try to push this knowledge out of your mind so that you can judge him, say, in a way that aligns with the views of people from whom you seek approval, then you have judged him evasively (and secondhandedly).

Again, these alternatives are possible because you have free will. They couldn’t exist without it.

We make many choices in life, but to focus our mind (or not) is our fundamental and primary choice. It is the choice that governs all our other choices. The choice to think, as Rand observed, is the locus of free will; it’s where free will fundamentally resides.²³

Our other choices are real but secondary in that they follow from and are governed by our choice to think or not to think. Secondary choices include everything from choosing a career to choosing friends, a lover, where you’ll live, which entrée to order, or which movie to watch. In all such cases, you can activate your mind fully to the task at hand, less than fully, or evasively. The primary choice is always present. And the secondary choices are always real.

The foregoing indicates the basic nature of free will. Now, let’s see how this idea stands in relation to thoughts and memories arising from our subconscious, wants or desires that motivate our actions, and the law of causality, properly understood.

Free Will and Thoughts

Although as Harris and other determinists note, you can’t fully control the thoughts and memories that arise from your subconscious, you can choose to deal with them rationally—or not. When thoughts arise, you can activate your mind fully or less than fully to assess or work with them.

If I say, “Two plus two equals . . .” and “four” pops into your mind, that is not evidence against free will. It’s simply a consequence of the fact that you have a subconscious full of knowledge and memories, some of which were activated by the prompt. If you are paying attention when I issue the prompt, you likely can’t stop “four” from arising, but your free will does not lie in your ability to stop the automatic functions of your subconscious from happening. Rather, your free will lies in your ability to activate your consciousness fully or not, to be rational or not.

Likewise, if Harris asks you to think of a city, and Paris comes to mind, that is not evidence against free will. When your conscious mind queries your subconscious, it cannot predict precisely what will come up. It cannot think thoughts before they arise. But this is not evidence for determinism.

Your mind has a nature, and it can act only in accordance with its nature. It is capable of thinking, exerting mental effort, and trying to make sense of the material it receives—whether from your subconscious or from the outside world. Likewise, your subconscious has a nature, and it acts in accordance with its nature. Your subconscious is the storage facility for your knowledge, ideas, memories, skills. It does not actively think; rather, it passively stores data caused by your thinking or non-thinking and the experiences you’ve mentally processed one way or the other. So, although as Harris notes, your mind can’t know exactly what data will come up before it comes up, this has no bearing on whether you can choose to think or not to think. The content of your thoughts and the choice to think are not the same thing.

The content of your thoughts is the ideas you are forming, assessing, or working with at any given time. The choice to think is the choice to apply reason while forming, assessing, or working with ideas. If you apply reason to the question of whether you can control or predict every thought that arises from your subconscious, you will see that you can’t. If you apply reason to the question of whether you can activate your mind by choice, you will see that you can. The fact that thoughts sometimes pop into your mind unbidden is not evidence against free will. Rather, it is evidence of the existence and nature of your subconscious—which interacts with but is distinct from your conscious mind.

This distinction will become clearer as we consider the relationship between free will and desires.

Free Will and Wants

As O’Connor observes, apart from coercion, you always act on your desires; and, when faced with competing desires, you always act on your strongest desire. All of this is trivially true. The important question is: Do you think about your desires before acting on them? Do you rationally assess them with respect to the full context of your relevant knowledge and then act—or do you act on your desires without thinking about them at all? Free will is your power to do either. The choice is yours.

Which comes first: the will or the want? In a certain respect, they come together, as both free will and desires are omnipresent in our minds. However, in an important respect, free will comes first. To know what we want—especially to know what we want most and to know whether the things we want are good for our lives—we must think. We must activate our minds to identify our desires, analyze them, name them, compare them, determine whether they integrate with or contradict our long-range plans and purposes, project the course of our lives if we act this way rather than that way, and so on. Desires, to be understood, must be examined. Our means of examining them is reason—which operates by choice.

Moreover, our desires are not causeless starting points. Rather, they are caused by the ideas and values we’ve accepted—which, in turn, are consequences of the thinking or non-thinking we’ve done. Of course, our thinking or non-thinking is done within the context of our social environment and our biological and psychological nature. Someone born and raised in Boston who is six feet tall and has an IQ of 90 will have substantially different experiences and opportunities than someone born and raised in Nairobi who is five feet tall and has an IQ of 130. But none of this changes the fact that we can and do choose to think or not to think. Contrary to the widely accepted false alternative, “nature and nurture” are not the only things that affect your life. Your choices affect it, too—and this part is entirely up to you.

Whether and to what extent you choose to think about your wants before acting on them makes a massive difference. Acting on your desires without full-context thinking is not the same as acting on your desires with full-context thinking, and the difference is decisive. If you think and act rationally as a matter of principle, you will live a profoundly different life than if you don’t. This is why rational parents and teachers encourage children to think before they act, to use their heads, to consider the consequences of their actions, and so on.

To fully grasp the relationship between free will and wants, we need to understand exactly what emotions are and how they relate to reason. Our emotions are automatic consequences of our value judgments; they arise from our evaluations of the things, people, and events in our lives. And they are vitally important. They are our psychological means of experiencing our values.

For instance, if you apply for a job that you consider ideal for your career path and get it, you experience positive, joyful emotions. If you don’t get the job, you experience frustration or disappointment. Similarly, if you haven’t seen your friend for a long time and you see him at a concert, you will be thrilled. If, however, he informs you that he’s been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer, your emotion will change to sorrow. Likewise, if your favorite team wins a major game, you’ll be happy about it. If they lose, you’ll be sad—especially if you bet a lot of money on the game.

Your emotions reflect what is important to you; they are, as Rand put it, “lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values.”²⁴ As such, they are crucial to your life. If you didn’t experience desire, you wouldn’t be motivated to take any actions at all, and you’d soon die. If you never experienced joy, you’d have no reason to remain alive; a life devoid of joy is not worth living.

We need emotions. But emotions are not our means of knowledge. They can’t tell us which berries are edible, how to build a hut, how to write a constitution, who is honest, or what will make us happy. Only reason can tell us such things—and only if we choose to use it.

If we choose to use reason as a matter of course in life, we develop healthy, life-serving values and, correspondingly, life-serving emotions. We feel emotions of joy when we achieve our life-enhancing goals or see other good people achieve theirs. And we feel emotions of frustration, sorrow, or anger when we fail or experience or witness tragedies or atrocities.

So, although we don’t control our emotions directly, we do control them indirectly: by means of our thinking or non-thinking.

This means that, over time, we can change how we feel about something or someone. For instance, if a woman wants to remain in a relationship with a man who is abusive, because she’s attracted to his “bad boy” demeanor, but she also wants to stop wanting to remain in the relationship, she can make this change. She can choose to exert the effort necessary to engage in full-context thinking about the situation. She can question the value of the “bad boy” to her life, physical well-being, psychological needs, and long-term happiness. She can compare him and his ilk to the kind of men who treat people rationally and justly as a matter of principle. She can project what her life would be like if she were to leave the “bad boy” and begin engaging with men of (genuine) self-esteem. She can do this kind of thinking—if she chooses to. And if she does, she can also choose to act accordingly. She can choose to act in her rational self-interest. And if she thinks and acts this way as a matter of course, then, in time, she will lose her desire for a “bad boy” and instead desire a good man.

Given the respective natures and relationship of reason and emotion, the lag time between our thinking and corresponding emotional changes can be substantial. But, if we choose to think, we can understand this fact, project the future value of acting in accordance with our rational judgment today, and thus develop a strong desire to do so. Free will makes this possible. To make it actual, we must choose to think.

With this in mind, let’s revisit O’Connor’s and Harris’s claims that we have no control over our wants or desires.

O’Connor says, “You only ever do anything—ever—because you want to, or because you’re forced to. That’s it. There’s no counterexample to this.” OK. That comports with experience. But what about this: “If you [take an action] because you want to, then given that you can’t control your wants, you’re not in control of that [action].” Is this true? As we’ve seen, it is not.

Likewise, Harris says, “You are ‘free’ to do an almost infinite number of things today—free in the sense that no one will try to stop you from doing these things . . . [but] Where is the freedom in doing what one wants when one’s very desires are the products of prior events that one had absolutely no hand in creating?” Is it true that you have no hand in creating your desires? Again, on examination, it is not.

We do control our desires—in two ways: First, we choose to think (or not) while forming our values—which, in turn, give rise to our emotions and desires; and, second, when we experience a given desire or set of desires, we choose to assess them rationally (or not) before acting on them. So, our choice to think (or not) governs both sides of the equation: our formation of the values that cause our emotions and desires—and our decisions about whether to act on a given desire.

It is worth noting the abundance of literature, audio, and video on the subject of changing the way you think in order to change the way you feel. All of it presupposes and depends on the idea that you can choose to think. For instance, both rational emotive behavior therapy, developed by Albert Ellis in the 1950s, and cognitive behavioral therapy, developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s, emphasize the causal relationship between the ideas you accept and how you feel. Likewise, Nathaniel Branden’s work on the psychology of self-esteem, developed with Ayn Rand in the 1950s and 60s and elaborated by him in subsequent decades, focuses explicitly on the relationship between rational thinking and personal happiness. Similarly, positive psychology, developed by Martin Seligman in the 1990s, is about choosing to focus on the positive aspects of your life, including life-enhancing opportunities and courses of action—and challenging and reframing negative thoughts in light of positive alternatives. And of course, the entire self-help and self-development industry is premised on your ability to take charge of your life by activating your mind. Examples include the work of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, who observes, “Ultimately, the only way to truly be in control of your life is to be in control of your thoughts”; and the work of Carol S. Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which is based explicitly on the premise that “You’re in charge of your mind. You can help it grow by using it in the right way.”²⁵

The foregoing is an indication of the relationship of reason and emotion and how they can and should work in harmony. Your fundamental means of making them work in harmony is free will: your choice to think.

In light of these facts, we can see that no dichotomy exists between acting on your desires and acting on your rational judgment. You can do both at the same time. But you can do so only if you place reason in charge of the process. This is because reason can account for and assess your emotions—including your wants and desires—which are important facts that can and should be included in your thought processes; but your emotions cannot account for your reason, because they are not a means of thinking. Nor can your wants or desires make you think or not think. They are incentives; they can and do provide motivation for you to act (or not) in certain ways. But they cannot force you to act one way or another. Incentives are not coercions—which is why we have different concepts for the two different things. Incentives are incentives.

Your wants and desires are real, and they are involved in your thinking and choosing—even in your choice to think or not to think. You don’t make that choice in a vacuum; you make it in the context of your values, desires, and aims—all of which provide incentive for you to think. Indeed, the desire for a life of happiness provides a massive incentive to think. If you want to flourish, you must think rationally and act accordingly. Every adult with a normal, healthy brain knows this to some extent, whether explicitly or implicitly; and if he ignores or evades this knowledge, he suffers the consequences. But not even this powerful incentive can force anyone to think.

The only thing that can make a choice happen—the only thing that can cause a choice—is the person who chooses. This will become clearer as we think through our next subject: the law of causality.

Free Will and Causality

The final and most fundamental problem in the determinist’s approach to the question of free will is a false conception of causality: the notion that events are caused by events.

This idea seems to make sense in the realm of mechanistic or physical causation—planetary motion, river flows, chemical reactions, and the like. But this conception of causality is fundamentally flawed, which is why it cannot account for our observations of free will.

The correct formulation of the law of causality is not that “events are caused by events” (aka “event causality”) but, rather, that actions are actions of entities—and entities act (and interact) in accordance with their identities (“entity causality”). As Rand put it, “The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.”²⁶

This conception of causality is observably true. We can see that things are what they are—and that they act in accordance with their natures. For example, we can see that a rose is a rose and a woman is a woman. We can see that a rose can bloom but cannot speak, that a woman can become an engineer but cannot become a pillar of salt.

The event-causality model is observably false. Events are self-evidently not primaries; they cannot happen apart from entities. Blooming can’t happen in the absence of a thing that blooms (e.g., a rose), and speaking can’t happen in the absence of a thing that speaks (e.g., a woman). Entities—including people (agents)—are the causes of events.

Recall Harris’s claim that thinking just happens—that there is no thinker of thoughts: “You think you’re the thinker of the thoughts,” but “you’re not. Thoughts just arise.” “If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have—‘What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!’—is just another thought, arising in consciousness.”

The notion that an action or event (such as thinking) can happen without an entity that takes the action or causes the event is absurd. Just as “dancing” can’t happen without a dancer, and “skiing” can’t happen without a skier, so, too, “thinking” can’t happen without a thinker.

Events are not primary aspects of existence. Entities are. And entities are what cause actions and interactions (e.g., “colliding” can’t happen without entities that collide). If you (an entity/agent) throw a rock (an entity) at a window (an entity), what happens—and why? The window breaks—and it breaks because of the natures, the identities, of the entities involved. Likewise, if you throw a cotton ball at the same window, what happens? Exactly. And why? What difference makes the difference? The difference that makes the difference is the nature of the cotton ball in relation to the nature of the window—and how they interact given their respective natures.

The valid conception of the law of causality is that actions are actions of entities, and that entities act in accordance with their identities. With this conception in mind, we can see that free will is not an exception to the law of causality but an instance of it. Human beings have a nature, the essence of which is that we possess the faculty of reason—which operates by choice. Your choice to think (or not) is caused—caused by you: the agent (entity) making the choice.

That you must choose one way or the other—to focus your mind fully or not to do so—also is caused: It is caused by your nature as a being who possesses the faculty of reason. But your choice to think or not to think in any given moment is not necessitated by any prior event or any other entity. You are the cause of the choice. You are the primary cause.

Recall Harris’s claim that “There’s no way to describe causality such that the idea of free will could make sense.” This seems to be true—if you describe causality as events causing events. But in light of the observably correct law of causality—the fact that actions are actions of entities and that entities act in accordance with their identities—we can see that the determinists are wrong on this count, too. Free will is an instance of causality.

Free will makes us remarkably different from other things, including other animals. This is because they don’t possess the faculty of reason. We do. And with reason comes the ability to activate it: free will.

Just as we don’t look at inanimate objects such as rocks or gears and say, “These objects are the model of causation for all entities, regardless of kind”—and just as we don’t look at plants and say, “No way! These things can’t possibly engage in self-generated action, because inanimate objects can’t take such action”—and just as we don’t look at animals and say, “Impossible! These things can’t conceivably engage in self-generated locomotion, because plants can’t engage in such action”—so, too, we shouldn’t look at human beings and say, “Absolutely not! These things can’t possibly engage in self-generated mental action, because non-human animals can’t take such action.”

Different things have different identities. Different things have different natures. And each thing acts in accordance with its nature.

Free will is a complex subject. There is a lot here to get our heads around—especially given how much has been written and said in support of determinism and against free will in recent decades. So, take your time with these ideas. Be patient with yourself and with others. The goal in thinking about and discussing this subject (as with all philosophic subjects) is to see which ideas derive from and integrate non-contradictorily with direct evidence, both introspective and extrospective—and thus which ideas ultimately make sense.

Toward that end, let’s consider a few common fallacies that can and often do cause confusion about free will.

Fallacies Against Free Will

The following is not an exhaustive list of fallacies that cause confusion about free will, but these prevalent few are worth understanding and bearing in mind. I encourage you to think through them and be on the lookout for them in your own thinking and in the arguments and claims of others.

Loaded Question

A loaded question is one that contains an unwarranted assumption or implication.

Whereas the question “What caused my choice to think?” is not a loaded question (something must have caused it, and that something is me), the question “What caused me to choose?” is loaded. It implies that something other than me (i.e., other than the choosing agent) ultimately caused the choice. This is an unwarranted assumption. What’s more, it flies in the face of direct introspective evidence that I initiate my choice to think.

Circular Reasoning or Begging the Question

Circular reasoning (aka question begging) consists in assuming that which you are trying to prove.

If someone argues that “something must have caused you to choose one way or the other—because every event is caused by a prior event,” he is begging the question. In an argument about whether free will exists, the question of whether something other than the agent caused his choice is precisely the issue at hand. For someone to argue that “something must have made you choose . . .” is to assume what he is trying (and has the burden) to prove—namely, that your choice to think (or not) is caused not by you but by something else.

Frozen Abstraction

The fallacy of the frozen abstraction consists in falsely equating ideas by substituting a particular conceptual concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs.²⁷

To treat the law of causality (a broad abstraction—indeed, a universal law) as the equivalent of one of its constituent kinds of causality, say, mechanistic causality, is to exclude from the universal law things that are in the universe yet operate via a different kind of causality—such as vegetative causality (specific to plants), instinctive causality (specific to certain animals), and volitional causality (specific to humans).

Just as we don’t equate math with algebra and thus omit arithmetic, geometry, and calculus from the broader abstraction of “math,” so, too, we shouldn’t equate the law of causality with one specific kind of causality and thereby omit the others. To do so is to conceive a universal law in non-universal terms.

Post Hoc

“Post hoc” is short for “post hoc ergo propter hoc,” which means “after this, therefore because of this.” The fallacy consists in assuming that because one event precedes another, the first event caused the second. It’s an instance of assuming that correlation implies causation but specifically regarding temporal sequence.

One way this fallacy manifests regarding free will is in claims to the effect that because certain experiments show that a certain kind of brain activity precedes people’s alleged choices, the brain activity caused the choices. Harris cites such experiments in his book, Free Will. As you read this passage, see if you can spot the fallacy:

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it. . . .

One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.²⁸

Did you catch it?

That final paragraph is an instance of the post hoc fallacy. The fact that activity in the subjects’ brains preceded their decisions to act doesn’t mean the brain activity caused their decisions to act. The brain activity may be a necessary condition for a choice to be made, but that doesn’t make it a sufficient condition. Engine activity is a necessary condition for a car to move; that doesn’t make it a sufficient condition. For the car to move, the driver must put the car in gear and press the accelerator.

As various scientists and thinkers (including Libet himself) have noted, the brain activity could be and likely is part of a pre-choice process leading up to the agent’s choice to act one way or another. Assuming causation based merely on temporal sequence is not scientific.

Libet himself saw his experiments not as disproving free will but as affirming it in some form or another. In his article “Do We Have Free Will?,” he wrote,

I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. . . .

Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues. Conscious-will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. Conscious-will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs. The existence of a veto possibility is not in doubt.²⁹

“After this, therefore because of this” is not a scientific method or principle but a logical fallacy.

Whatever the relationship of brain activity to choice, introspective observation of our ability to choose to think (or not) is direct evidence of free will. And any experiment that ignores direct introspective evidence of the fact that a person can choose to think (or not) violates the primary, most fundamental principle of science: Perceptual evidence is the ultimate standard of knowledge and truth.

Stolen Concept

Concept stealing consists in using a concept while denying or ignoring more basic ideas on which it logically depends—the ideas that connect it to reality and thereby give it meaning.³⁰ Whereas question begging consists in relying on an idea you are trying to affirm or prove, concept stealing consists in relying on an idea you are trying to deny or disprove.

We’ve already seen a clear-cut case of this fallacy: the notion that there can be “thinking” without a thinker. To claim or assume that thinking can happen while denying the very thing that makes thinking possible (a being who can think) is to steal the concept of “thinking.”

Another example is any experiment allegedly proving that free will does not exist. When someone claims that an experiment has shown that all human action is caused and necessitated by forces beyond our control, he steals the concept of “experiment” (among others).

Think about what an experiment involves, presupposes, and depends on. To perform an experiment, the experimenter must choose the variables he will control, the factors he will isolate, the data he will include or exclude from his thinking, and so forth. If these mental actions were not freely chosen but determined by forces beyond his control, then his alleged experiment would not be an experiment; rather, it would be a series of predetermined actions over which he had no control. Consequently, his alleged conclusion could neither be true nor false. It would be merely a necessary outcome of the prior actions and events that caused it. It would be no more or less “true” or “valid” or “scientific” or “controlled” than any other result of any other antecedently necessitated actions performed by any other alleged experimenters—including those whose alleged “experiments” allegedly show that human beings do possess free will. If people could not choose to think (or not), no one’s uncontrolled noises or preordained utterances would have any greater cognitive status or truth value than any other. Indeed, none would have any greater truth value than a dog’s bark, a snake’s slither, or a river’s flow.

An experiment presupposes and depends on acts of choice. To claim that an experiment proved that choices are an illusion is like claiming that a mathematical equation proved that numbers are an illusion. It is to steal the concept of “experiment”—to tear it away from the context that connects it to reality and gives it meaning.

This same basic analysis applies to people’s use of normative terms such as “ought” or “should” while denying the existence of free will. For instance, if someone says, “Science shows that we don’t have free will; and, of course, we ought to go by science!,” he steals the concept of “ought.” Ought implies can. To say that someone ought to act this way rather than that way presupposes that he can choose to act one way or the other. This principle applies both to epistemology (“you should go by evidence and logic”) and to ethics (“you ought to act in accordance with the requirements of human life”). If we had no free will, then all “oughts” and “shoulds” would be meaningless. To use “ought” or any prescriptive concept while denying free will is to steal the prescriptive concept—to tear it away from the foundation that grounds it in reality and gives it meaning: namely, free will.

Indeed, because all concepts and ideas ultimately are caused by and depend on the use of reason (i.e., the choice to think), to use any concepts at all to deny or even to challenge free will is to steal literally every concept used in the effort.

No concepts could exist or be used were it not for the faculty of reason and its corollary: the choice to think or not. Free will makes concepts possible.

Self-Exclusion

The fallacy of self-exclusion consists in making a claim that contradicts the very act of making it. Examples include “There is no such thing as truth” (is that true?), “No one can be certain of anything” (are you certain of that?), and “Knowledge is impossible” (do you know that?). If the claim is “true,” it’s toast; and if it’s not true, it’s toast. To “get around” this glaring contradiction, those who make such claims either say or imply that their claim should be excluded from itself: “There is no such thing as truth—except this truth!”

When determinists claim that people are biochemical puppets being played by the universe—that nothing anyone thinks, says, or does could have been otherwise—do they include themselves in this claim? Are they—the determinists—biochemical puppets being played by the universe such that nothing they think, say, or do could have been otherwise? If so, their claim is just predetermined noise, like a clap of thunder. If not, their claim falls flat. “This biochemical puppet issues truths, whereas those biochemical puppets issue falsehoods” is not a rational claim but a comedy skit.

Fat Cattle Fallacy

The fat cattle fallacy consists in assuming that a cause must be like its effects, or vice versa. It is so named because any such assumption is like assuming that a person who drives cattle and thus causes them to be fat must himself be fat.³¹

When someone assumes or argues that neither free will nor even consciousness can exist or function in a manner different from physical things because consciousness and free will, if they exist, must be caused by physical things and thus be like physical things, he is committing the fat cattle fallacy.

There is no reason to assume that a cause must be like its effects—or vice versa. And there is a world of evidence showing that such an assumption is false. For instance, the cause of a wooden table is the table maker who made it. The table is made of wood, yet the table maker is not. The table has four legs and a flat surface, yet the table maker does not. Likewise, the cause of a tsunami is shifting tectonic plates; the plates are solid, yet the tsunami is liquid. You can multiply examples endlessly.

Whatever the cause or origins of consciousness and free will, there is no reason to believe that they must be like their cause—or that their cause must be like them.

Claims and arguments against free will involve many other fallacies as well, but the foregoing are some of the most prevalent.

Implications of Free Will

What are the implications of human beings having free will? They are precisely the same as the implications of human beings possessing the faculty of reason—because reason and free will are the same faculty viewed from different perspectives. Reason is our capacity to think; free will is our ability to activate that capacity.

If we have free will, if we have direct control over whether we think and thus control over our corresponding actions—and we do—then we are in a bright and beautiful place. Among other things:

• Moral responsibility is in. People are morally responsible for their choices and actions. If you choose to study for an exam, then you legitimately get credit for the effort and the outcome. If you build a company and create wealth, then you morally own both. And when faith-driven monsters attack, torture, and murder people, they are morally responsible for the evil they committed, and we are morally justified in ending their undeserved existence.

• Romantic love is in. Romance is all about celebrating your life, values, and experiences with someone you choose because he or she brings you great joy. Romantic love is a consequence of myriad choices that form your soul and your lover’s soul and make you sublimely suitable to live and love life together.

• Friendship is in—for the same reason as romance. You do choose your friends, and they choose you. You choose to spend time together, to share experiences, and to support each other through thick and thin. When you enjoy your friends’ company, you are enjoying the presence of individuals with minds, values, and control over their lives. They are worthy of your friendship because they choose to think and because they have substantial values that you enjoy together.

• Purpose is in. You choose your aims. You are able to set long-range goals, pursue a career, develop hobbies, engage in soul-fueling projects, and take deliberate steps to achieve your aims. Your life has meaning and purpose because you have a mind and choose your goals.

• Self-esteem is in—for the same reason as purpose. When you set and achieve worthy goals—when you create an app, climb El Capitan, build a business, or raise children with logic and love—you did that. You can and should take pride in your achievements. They are real, and they are yours. You can and should reflect on your successes, gain confidence by acknowledging them, and thus feel capable of success and worthy of happiness.

• Political freedom is in. If people have free will—and we do—then we need freedom from coercion so we can make choices, act on our own judgment, and thus live fully as human beings. This is why the enslavement of Frederick Douglass and every other slave was a moral abomination: Humans are beings with free will—and for them to live as human beings, they must be free to act as they choose, so long as they don’t force others to act against their will. Because free will exists, the moral difference between Abraham Lincoln and the United States, on the one hand; and Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, on the other, is profound, and we should shout it from the rooftops.

In sum, because free will is real:

1. You are responsible for your thoughts and actions—and for the self-made soul and life you build with them.

2. The “you” that you know yourself to be is the integrated being of body and mind whose rational faculty operates by choice and who is, therefore, fundamentally in control of his or her life.

3. Your future is open, and it includes your power to shape your mind, your ideas, your actions, your emotions—your life—into a beautiful, enjoyable, unified whole of which you can be proud.

It is time to accept what we directly observe about free will: We have it. And it is a beautiful thing to use correctly.

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This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

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1. See Sam Harris, “Final Thoughts on Free Will” (full, 1.5-hour episode), https://samharris.org/episode/SE801D247DE); and Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 44–47.

2. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

3. Alex O’Connor and Alex Carter, “Free Will vs. Determinism: Who’s Really in Control?,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRpsJgYVl-8; Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

4. See Harris, “Final Thoughts”; Harris, Free Will, 7, 22–23, 29; and Brand Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, edited by Sidney Hook (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 19–20.

5. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

6. Skeptic, “Sam Harris on ‘Free Will,’” March 27, 2012, https://youtu.be/pCofmZlC72g.

7. Joe Rogan, “Joe Rogan Experience #543—Sam Harris,” September 2, 2014, https://youtu.be/w8Q6CWv7IXo.

8. Gary Gutting, “Sam Harris’s Vanishing Self,” New York Times, September 7, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/sam-harriss-vanishing-self.

9. O’Connor and Carter, “Free Will vs. Determinism.”

10. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

11. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

12. Harris, Free Will, 39.

13. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

14. Skeptic, “Sam Harris on ‘Free Will.’”

15. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

16. Harris, Free Will, 34–35.

17. Harris, “Final Thoughts.”

18. Harris, Free Will, 29–30. Note that although Harris and other determinists claim that determinism is somehow different from fatalism—which Harris correctly defines as “the idea that the future will be whatever it will be regardless of what we think and do” (see “Final Thoughts”)—there is no difference between the two. If you are determined, if you have no control over anything; your future is fated.

19. See Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1963), 120–127. The capacity to exert mental effort depends on a normal, healthy brain and frame of mind; it can be throttled or thwarted by injury, disease, or mental disorders.

20. Rand, For the New Intellectual, 120.

21. Rand, Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964]), 22.

22. See Rand, For the New Intellectual, 14–15; and Virtue of Selfishness, 22.

23. Rand, For the New Intellectual, 127.

24. Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 7–8.

25. James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter, “On Control, Saying No, and Keeping an Open Mind,” April 9, 2020, https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/april-9-2020; Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Ballantine, 2006), 230.

26. Rand, For the New Intellectual, 151; see also H. W. B. Joseph, Introduction to Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 408.

27. See Ayn Rand, “Collectivized Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, 94; and Craig Biddle, “The Is-Altruism Dichotomy,” in The Objective Standard, 8, no. 2 (Summer 2013).

28. Harris, Free Will, 8–9.

29. Benjamin Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8–9 (1999): 47–57.

30. For more on concept stealing, see Rand, For the New Intellectual, 154–155; Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” in The Objectivist Newsletter 2, no. 1: 2; and Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, 1993), 136–37.

31. See David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 169–170.