We all possess a sense of justice, knowledge of what ought to be as opposed to what is. The law of nature may just be survival of the fittest, but we are more than animals. We are moral beings. It is wrong to murder, wrong to steal; an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, if not literally at least the sense of it—no one has to tell us—these are self-evident truths, so much so that they became the basis for Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. He called them the “moral law within.” 
In Critique of Practical Reason , Kant sees the vastness of “the starry heavens above” and thinks himself an “animal creature... a mere speck in the universe.” The physical world, this deterministic clockwork universe, “annihilates” our importance. But when he sees “the moral law within,” he becomes aware of our spiritual nature beyond “animality and... the world of senses,” and this awareness is “not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite.” He is saying we are spiritual entities with an innate sense of right and wrong, and more valuable than anything else in the phenomenal world.
For Kant, this moral law is foundational to our life as human beings. We could deny it in the abstract but, as we live, “practical reason” necessitates that we acknowledge its reality and power over us. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Raskolnikov, an impoverished former university student, decides to murder an old pawnbroker and steal her money. He believes himself to be exceptional, a kind of proto-Nietzschean Ubermensch to whom the conventions of society do not apply. But after his crime, he experiences guilt, and it wrecks him from the inside. It’s only after he confesses and goes to prison that real life steps “into the place of theory” and he begins to feel human again. It’s easy to philosophize about how life is meaningless and there is no right or wrong because nothing matters, until someone points a gun at you. Or points it at passersby going about their lives in a shopping mall, or at innocent children in their classroom or the teacher trying to shield them with her own body. Please don’t do that, we would say, you have no right. Why not, he would say. Nothing matters. Nothing angers us more than to see a mass shooter sitting in court blank-faced because he believes nothing matters. That sense of outrage we feel is life stepping
into the place of theory. There we find our moral law within.
What does all this have to do with free will? Kant says the moral law within can only exist if we have free will, only if we could have done otherwise. This is known as libertarian free will. If we are not the author of our own decisions, then we cannot ultimately be praised or blamed for our actions. But we do see moral law operating in our lives. It is real. Therefore, free will must also be real. We call this the moral argument for free will. We must believe in free will to make sense of our moral experience.
But now we face causality. How do we make free will hang together with it? Libertarians argue that we are autonomous beings, agents of causation. We can break the existing causal chain that governs the rest of the world and start a new one. We are causa sui (self-cause),meaning we can cause things to happen without our choices being determined by “heteronomous” forces. It is a breathtaking claim to make for ourselves because the only other being in the universe with the purported power of causa sui is God. We are thus said to be made in the image of God. 
 The weakness of this argument is that agent causation is almost impossible to defend. We are physical bodies after all, so how do we exercise this godly power? At the end of the day, autonomous will is an assertion, mostly based on religious faith, not an argument. We may assert that we are spiritual entities with godlike powers, but for all intents and purposes, we interact with the world as physical bodies like all other lifeforms. Advances in disciplines like cognitive science also make it increasingly harder these days to deny that our mind, the seat of free will, is a function of our brain, that our decisions are the workings of billions of cortical neurons. Libertarians are thus left appealing to a mystery against science.
Where does this leave us? It seems we have arrived at a contradiction or an impasse. The reach of causality is absolute (determinism), but we also cannot live as human beings without free will (libertarianism). How do we square this circle? Next stop: compatibilism.

Peter Lee
Assistant Professor
School of English Language and Literature