Free will. The question has haunted philosophy, psychology, and law for centuries: do we truly choose, or are our actions determined by prior causes? The debate oscillates between determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism, with each position endlessly defended and contested.
As with time, the self, and consciousness, the problem is not a lack of reasoning — it is a misalignment between the question and the underlying ontology. This post reframes free will within the relational perspective, showing how the classical debate dissolves and how agency can be meaningfully traced.
The Question
“Do we really have free will?”
Presented sympathetically, this question feels immediate and practical. We make choices, we act in the world, we take responsibility. The question seems to demand a yes/no answer: either free will exists as an agentive capacity, or it is an illusion imposed by ignorance.
Why It Feels Legitimate
Several pressures make this question compelling:
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Phenomenological immediacy: We feel ourselves choosing.
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Moral and social structures: Responsibility, praise, blame, and law presuppose agentive control.
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Deterministic frameworks: Science, neuroscience, and physics describe constraints that appear to limit choice.
All these pressures converge to make the question appear foundational.
The Hidden Commitments
The question silently assumes:
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Substantial agency: There is a self-contained “will” capable of independent action.
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Isolation of cause: Decisions can be traced to intrinsic capacities, apart from relational context.
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Binary actuality: Actions either are freely willed or are determined; there is no relational gradient.
These commitments embed the problem in the same structural trap as the questions about time, self, and consciousness.
The Endless Loop
Once these assumptions are in place:
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Libertarian camp: Agents possess genuine freedom; determinism is false or incomplete.
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Determinist/compatibilist camp: All actions are causally constrained; freedom is illusory or redefined.
Both sides are caught in the same thing-based framing. The debate oscillates endlessly because it treats agency as an object rather than as a phenomenon arising from relational patterns.
The Structural Diagnosis
From a relational perspective:
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Agency is not a property of an isolated self, but an emergent pattern of relational actualisation.
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What appears as “choice” arises from structured potential interacting with constraints: biological, cognitive, social, and environmental.
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Free will is not a binary condition but a graded, perspectival phenomenon, shaped by relational dynamics.
In this view, “freedom” is not an attribute of a thing; it is the capacity for potential to be actualised in multiple compatible ways given relational conditions. Responsibility and moral accountability remain meaningful because patterns of relational actualisation are observable, predictable, and influenceable.
What to Ask Instead
Adopting the relational frame opens productive lines of inquiry:
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How do relational constraints and affordances shape the actualisation of agency?
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Under what conditions does potential translate into diverse actualised outcomes?
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How can understanding relational actualisation inform social, moral, or cognitive practices?
These questions shift inquiry from metaphysical speculation to analysis of dynamics, focusing on how agency manifests in practice rather than whether it exists “in itself.”
Closing
Free will debates persist because they smuggle in a thing-based ontology, assuming isolated, substantial agents whose choices can be evaluated in abstraction. The relational ontology dissolves the classical puzzle: agency is not “found” or “denied,” it is observed as relational actualisation across structured potentials.
With this reframing, we can retain the sense of choice, responsibility, and moral meaning, while recognising that they are produced by relational patterns, not intrinsic substances. Just as with time, the self, and consciousness, the classical problem collapses when the ontology aligns with the phenomena.
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