Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom

Are we free in wanting what we want to do? Could we ever have acted differently from how we actually acted? A growing number of scholars believe the answer to these questions is No. Over the past century, confidence in free will has been decreasing proportionally to the increasing willingness to acknowledge that humans are natural beings and, hence, so it is assumed, determined by the laws of nature. Natural scientists, neuroscientists and metaphysicians are sceptical that free will is anything but a self-misunderstanding based on ignorance of natural facts. The research project Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom aims to argue the opposite. Free will scepticism, it claims, rests upon inadequate metaphysical assumptions about nature, namely on outdated mechanistic views that neglect the biological and, hence, fundamentally processual character of those beings whose agency and free will is at stake: living beings. Drawing on cutting- edge research in biology, the project provides support for the thesis that free will, far from being ruled out by our biological condition, is an integral part of human nature; and not only of the human. Humans, like many other organisms, are naturally free. The project will proceed in three steps. It will first argue that in order to get a grip on the free will problem we need to think clearly about what agents and actions are. The free will problem does not come as a surprise given the difficulties standard theories have with accommodating the very capacity of agency in nature. However, these difficulties vanish once we stop conceiving of agents and actions as neatly bounded, static things. The second step of the project consists in acknowledging the biological and, hence, processual constitution of natural agents and their actions. Organisms are dynamical systems that must continuously interact with the environment to keep themselves alive. The key insight is that actions are a particular form of these interactions constitutive of organisms. Finally, the project will demonstrate how this new framework, together with an accurate understanding of the particular sort of indeterminism characterising living systems, can ground a convincing defence of agency and free will as robust natural capacities. Free will becomes demystified as a natural means of survival and well-being for bio-agents. The project breaks new ground in defeating free will scepticism on the basis of cutting-edge findings in biology. The project brings together the so far separate debates on agency and free will in the philosophy of action, metaphysics and the philosophy of biology, stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue.