Everyday decisions rarely feel completely predetermined.
We hesitate between two restaurants. We change our minds halfway through an argument. We spend twenty minutes considering two equally reasonable options before choosing one almost at the last moment.
Yet philosophy has long struggled with what that experience actually means.
If every decision is completely determined by what came before it, critics ask where freedom enters the picture. But removing determinism creates another problem: if events can unfold differently, perhaps our choices are simply being pushed around by randomness instead.
A 2026 paper argues that this second problem may not be as damaging to free will as philosophers have often assumed.
The problem is not only determinism
Most popular discussions about free will begin with determinism.
If the state of the universe at one moment completely determines what happens next, then every decision could theoretically trace back through an uninterrupted chain of prior causes.
That seems uncomfortable for anyone who wants to believe they genuinely could have acted differently.
But indeterminism does not automatically solve the problem.
Philosophers have developed what is known as the Luck Objection: if an action is not completely determined, and some element of chance helps produce the outcome, why should the resulting choice count as yours rather than something that simply happened to you?
A coin toss is unpredictable. That does not make the coin free.
Control may not require controlling everything
Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin examine that objection in a paper published in Synthese.
Their argument brings philosophy into conversation with neuroscience, psychology and biological decision-making.
They challenge the idea that an undetermined choice must involve some isolated random event in the brain suddenly deciding what a person does.
Human decision-making is considerably more complicated.
Deliberation unfolds across time. Attention shifts. Goals compete. Previous experiences matter. The brain weighs information across distributed systems rather than waiting for a single microscopic event to determine the outcome.
The authors argue that an agent does not need control over every individual neural fluctuation to exercise meaningful control over the decision as a whole.
That distinction is central to their case.
We already accept this kind of control elsewhere
Complete control is rarely the standard we use in ordinary life.
A driver cannot control every movement of air around a vehicle, every vibration in the road or every mechanical interaction inside the engine.
They can still control the car.
Similarly, a person throwing a ball cannot control the behaviour of every muscle fibre or molecule involved in the movement. What matters is whether their higher-level actions reliably organise those processes towards an intended result.
Potter and Mitchell argue that decision-making may work in a comparable way.
The underlying biological system may contain noise and uncertainty while the person still exercises control through attention, priorities, goals and deliberation.
Freedom, on this view, would not require micromanaging every event inside the brain.
It would require enough control for our reasons to make a meaningful difference to what we do.
Sometimes randomness may even be useful
The paper goes further.
There are situations where people face several acceptable options and no overwhelming reason to select one.
Imagine choosing between two equally appealing places for lunch.
Continuing to deliberate indefinitely would achieve very little. At some point, some variability in the decision-making process may help break the deadlock.
The authors point to behavioural research suggesting that biological organisms can sometimes make use of variability rather than merely suffer from it.
Randomness therefore need not always appear as an enemy of agency.
In some circumstances, it may allow a flexible system to avoid becoming permanently stuck.
That does not mean an arbitrary neural event is secretly making our important decisions.
The authors instead describe decision-making as an interaction between chance, choice and control.
Different situations involve different mixtures of all three.
Free choice would still have limits
This is not an argument for unlimited freedom.
Our decisions remain influenced by biology, upbringing, environment, personality, available information and circumstances beyond our control.
Potter and Mitchell explicitly reject the idea that free will must involve some mysterious ability to step outside physical reality.
Their proposal is naturalistic.
Human agency still depends on the brain. The philosophical question is whether explaining the mechanisms inside that brain removes the person from the explanation.
The authors argue that it does not.
A decision can be physically realised through neural processes while still being meaningfully explained by the person’s reasons, goals and deliberation.
The paper does not prove that free will exists
That limitation matters.
This is a philosophical argument informed by empirical research, not an experiment demonstrating that humans possess free will.
The authors defend one particular account of agency and challenge several versions of the Luck Objection.
Other philosophers can reject their assumptions, dispute their interpretation of causation or argue that the level of control they describe is still insufficient for genuine moral responsibility.
The centuries-old free will debate is not disappearing because of one paper.
What the research does offer is a different way of framing it.
Perhaps freedom does not require a choice to be completely detached from chance.
Perhaps it depends on whether the person can organise an uncertain system well enough for their own reasons to guide what happens next.
That is a less dramatic version of free will than being an entirely independent author of every event in our minds.
It may also be closer to how choice actually feels.
We rarely control everything that brings us to a decision.
The more interesting question is whether we control enough for the decision to remain ours.
Source Information
Study Title: Chance, choice, and control: free will in an indeterministic universe
Authors: Henry D. Potter and Kevin J. Mitchell
Journal: Synthese
Published: 7 May 2026
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-026-05570-5
