Free will is a term for the free choice most of us assume we have in making decisions. Our moral and legal systems, which praise, blame, reward, and punish, seem to assume that people have free will. If people lack free will, it seems unreasonable to hold them responsible for their decisions and actions. It would be difficult justifying the rewarding or punishing of people for actions they could not help doing.
The idea that there is free will has been questioned because it seems to conflict with the widely held belief in determinism. Determinism is the view that every event is already determined by previously existing conditions or causes. According to this view, the present state of the world determines everything that will happen in the future. Then human decisions and actions, like all other events, would be determined by causes that precede them. Critics of free will maintain that our choices are not really free if they are already determined before we make them.
