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A well known issue in Western Philosophy is that of "freedom of the will":
whether, how and in what sense human beings have genuine freedom of action in
the context of a broad range of external and internal conditioning factors. Any
system of ethics also assumes that humans have, in some sense, a freedom to
choose between different courses of action. Buddhist ethics is no different in
this—but how is freedom of action to be made sense of in a system that sees
human beings as an interacting cluster of conditioned and conditioning
processes, with no substantial I-agent either within or beyond this cluster?
This article explores this issue within Theravāda Buddhism, and concludes
that the view of this tradition on the issue is a "compatibilist" middle
way between seeing a person's actions as completely rigidly determined, and
seeing them as totally and unconditionally free, with a variety of factors
acting to bring, and increase, the element of freedom that humans have. In a
different way, if a person is wrongly seen as an essential, permanent Self, it
is an "undetermined question" as to whether "a person's acts of
will are determined" or "a person's acts of will are free." If there
is no essential person-entity, "it" can not be said to be either
determined or free.
