Should We Abandon the Term “free will”?

Debates about the nature of free will, and whether human beings have it, are some of the most famous and longstanding in philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the term “free will” does not serve these debates well. This is not to say that the debates themselves are unimportant; on the contrary, they are some of the most interesting and personal in philosophy. My central claim is that the term “free will” is associated with problematic connotations that complicate these debates, which concern important issues in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and several other fields. Fortunately, the term is unnecessary: we already possess the vocabulary needed to discuss these important issues. Moreover, I argue that a set of replacement questions can be formulated to permit a more precise treatment of these issues.