Two intuitions about free will: Alternative possibilities and intentional endorsement

Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the making of choices that are intentionally endorsed, not just indeterministically picked. According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, this indeterminism may threaten freedom: if each of several distinct actions could have been actualized, then none of them is necessitated by the agent’s prior history, and the actual action seems nothing more than the result of indeterministic picking. We argue that this tension is only apparent, distinguishing between actions an agent can possibly do and actions he or she can do with endorsement (or rationally do). One can consistently say that someone who makes a particular choice has several alternative possibilities, and yet that, far from merely indeterministically picking one of them, the agent chooses an action he or she endorses. An implication is that although free will can consistently require (i) and (ii), it cannot generally require the possibility of acting otherwise with endorsement