Libertarian Free Will

 

Sterling's Core Stoicism: The Six Philosophical Commitments

Two: Libertarian Free Will

The Commitment

The act of assent — granting or withholding endorsement of an impression's claim — is genuinely free in a strong sense. At the moment of the pause more than one outcome is genuinely possible. The impression does not fix the response. Prior psychological states do not fix the response. Prior physical states do not fix the response. The choice is not produced by the world. It is introduced into the world.

Why Sterling Needs It

Substance dualism establishes that there is a real self capable of withholding assent. Libertarian free will establishes that the withholding is genuine rather than illusory. Without it the pause is theater — a feeling of openness masking a result already fixed by prior causes. Responsibility requires authorship. Authorship requires that the act originate in the agent rather than in conditions outside the agent. Virtue and vice are only meaningful if the agent could genuinely have chosen otherwise.

The source texts are explicit: "The pause is the experiential manifestation of libertarian freedom: the fact that the next act of assent is not necessitated by any prior condition." And: "At the point of decision, more than one outcome is genuinely possible. The impression does not necessitate assent. The past does not necessitate assent. The psychological state does not necessitate assent. Three alternatives are open: assent, refusal, suspension. None is forced. None is excluded by prior conditions. None is illusory. This is not freedom from coercion. It is freedom from determination. The choice is not produced by the world. It is introduced into the world."

Sterling's entire practical program — the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, the five steps — presupposes that the outcome of each examination is genuinely open until the agent decides.

The Competing Positions

Hard determinism holds that every event including every mental event is necessitated by prior causes operating according to physical law. There are no genuine alternatives at any moment. What feels like choice is the inevitable output of a causal chain that extends back before the agent existed. On this view assent is determined, the pause is illusory, and responsibility is a useful fiction at best.

Compatibilism — the dominant position in contemporary academic philosophy — holds that free will and determinism are compatible. Freedom does not require the ability to have done otherwise in a strong sense. It requires only that the action flow from the agent's own desires, values, and reasoning without external compulsion. On this view assent can be both determined and free, because freedom means acting from one's own nature rather than being coerced.

Compatibilism was the position of Chrysippus and the early Stoics. The cylinder rolls as it must according to its own nature — determined, but genuinely its own rolling. Epictetus is in tension with this position throughout the Discourses, teaching as though the pause is a real achievement of a real agent rather than the inevitable unfolding of a determined psychology.

The Answers

Against hard determinism: if assent is determined, the practical program is incoherent. Epictetus cannot meaningfully instruct students to pause, examine, and decide if the outcome is already fixed. Training would be pointless — the trained student was always going to pause and the untrained student was always going to react, and neither could have been otherwise. Moral education presupposes that the student can genuinely change — not merely that change was always going to occur in some students and not others.

Against compatibilism: compatibilism preserves the language of freedom while surrendering its substance. If what the agent does is fully determined by prior causes — even causes internal to the agent — then the agent is not the originating source of the act. The act flows through the agent rather than from the agent. This matters practically because the Stoic student is not trying to act from his current nature — he is trying to change his nature through genuine acts of will. If his acts are determined by his current nature, he cannot genuinely initiate change. He can only wait for change to occur in him.

The positive case rests on the structure of the pause itself. The pause is not a feeling of openness. It is ontological openness — the genuine indeterminacy of what assent will follow. This indeterminacy is not ignorance about a fixed result. It is the real absence of a fixed result until the agent decides. As the source texts state: "Without indeterminacy, there is no pause. Without the pause, there is no agency." Without libertarian free will the self is not the author of its acts. It is their location.