Free will is generally understood as the capacity to choose between different possible courses of action, exercise control over one's actions for moral responsibility, or be the ultimate source of one's actions. It is a concept based on the belief that people can decide what they want to do and act based on their choices. Free will is closely linked to moral responsibility, praise, culpability, and other judgments that logically apply only to freely chosen actions.
The existence of free will is one of philosophy's longest-running debates. Some conceive of free will as the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. However, determinism suggests that the natural world is governed by cause-and-effect relationships, which is inconsistent with free will. Incompatibilism posits that free will is incompatible with determinism and encompasses metaphysical libertarianism (determinism is false, so free will is possible) and hard determinism (determinism is true, so free will is impossible). Compatibilists, on the other hand, believe that free will and determinism can coexist.
