Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

Overview

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984) began as Daniel Dennett's John Locke Lectures at Oxford, delivered in 1983 and revised into book form. It is a sustained defense of a compatibilist conception of free will: the claim that the freedom that matters to moral life is fully compatible with a deterministic universe. Dennett does not argue that determinism is true. He argues that it does not matter for the question of whether we can be free in the ways that matter.

The book takes its title from the ordinary phrase "elbow room" — the room to maneuver, the space to act. Dennett's central move is to distinguish the fears people have about determinism from the actual consequences determinism would have. Most of the traditional arguments against the compatibility of freedom and determinism, he claims, trade on confusions about possibility, control, and responsibility that dissolve once the concepts are examined with care.

The book is written in Dennett's characteristic voice: witty, exploratory, and relentlessly concrete. It proceeds by working through a series of "bugbears" — the specters that scare people about determinism — and showing, one by one, that they are either misconceptions or consequences that we should not fear. The result is less a knockdown argument for compatibilism than a detailed map of the conceptual terrain, on which the compatibilist landscape is shown to contain everything worth wanting.

Core Thesis

The core thesis of Elbow Room is that the free will worth wanting is a natural phenomenon, fully compatible with determinism, and that the traditional opponent of free will — the hard determinist — is attacking a caricature. Dennett distinguishes "the varieties of free will worth wanting" from the free will that would require magical, unmotivated breaks in the causal order. The former, he argues, are real, valuable, and ours; the latter is a philosophical fantasy that nobody should want.

The thesis has three parts. First, the ability to do otherwise, properly understood, does not require indeterminism: it requires that under suitably similar circumstances, with different inputs, a person could have responded differently. Second, control is not compromised by determinism: a person is in control when their behavior is guided by their own beliefs, desires, and practical reasoning, even if those states are themselves causally determined. Third, moral responsibility requires the capacity for self-control and the possibility of improvement, not the power to have acted otherwise in a universe exactly like this one.

In making these claims, Dennett rejects the "scientific image" vs. "manifest image" confrontation as a genuine dilemma. The manifest image — persons, choices, reasons — and the scientific image — mechanisms, causes, laws — are not rivals but levels of description. The same event can be described as a caused neural process and as a deliberate choice, and both descriptions can be true. Freedom, on this view, is a real feature of the world at the level of persons.

Key Ideas

The Varieties of Free Will

Dennett's organizing idea is that "free will" is not one thing. The phrase bundles together many distinct capacities: the ability to choose, the ability to act on one's choices, self-control, rationality, moral agency, and the capacity to be held responsible. The compatibilist question is not "do we have free will?" — it is "which of these capacities do we have, and which would determinism threaten?" Dennett's answer is that the capacities that matter survive determinism intact.

He invites the reader to think of freedom not as a single property but as a family of related properties, some more valuable than others. The "free will worth wanting" is the set of capacities that make praise, blame, love, achievement, and moral life possible. Whether some further, more exotic variety of free will exists — the kind that requires the future to be literally open — is a question Dennett regards as largely irrelevant to how we should live.

The Bogey of Determinism

Dennett gives the fears about determinism the name "bogeymen": the idea that if determinism is true, we are puppets; that our choices are "really" caused and therefore "really" not ours; that moral responsibility becomes an illusion; that regret and hope become irrational. Each bogeyman, he argues, depends on a false picture of what causation and control amount to.

A puppet is controlled by a puppeteer — a person with plans and intentions acting through strings. Determinism, by contrast, is a pattern of lawlike regularity. A deterministic world is not a world in which some hidden agent pulls our strings; it is a world in which our actions flow from who we are. And who we are — our characters, values, and capacities for reflection — is exactly the thing that makes us agents rather than puppets.

"Could Have Done Otherwise"

The traditional incompatibilist insists that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise: a person acts freely only if, holding the entire past and the laws of nature fixed, they could have chosen differently. Dennett attacks this requirement from two directions. First, it is not at all clear what "could" means here — the sense in which a person "could have" done otherwise is typically the sense in which, had they weighed the reasons differently, they would have — and that sense survives determinism. Second, the requirement is unnecessary: many of our most important ascriptions of responsibility do not depend on the agent's having alternatives.

Dennett's favorite example concerns a person who performs a morally fine action that they were in some sense "unable" to avoid — the person so constituted that wrongdoing was not a live option for them. We do not, he argues, hold such a person less responsible; we hold them fully responsible precisely because their character made the right action inevitable. The ability to do otherwise, in the strong incompatibilist sense, is not required for responsibility.

Self-Control and the Self

A central theme of Elbow Room is that freedom is not the absence of causation but the presence of self-control. A free agent is one whose actions are governed by higher-order capacities: the ability to reflect on one's desires, to resist temptation, to change course, to learn from feedback. These capacities are real, they develop naturally, and they can be damaged or destroyed — but nothing about determinism threatens them.

Dennett develops this theme with his characteristic interest in the machinery of the self. The self is not a ghostly inner homunculus but a center of narrative gravity, a pattern of organization that emerges from the activities of a self-organizing system. Freedom, on this account, is a real emergent capacity of such systems — not an illusion, but not a supernatural power either.

Moral Responsibility Without Contra-causal Freedom

The book's account of moral responsibility is forward-looking as much as backward-looking. Responsibility is tied to the practices of praising, blaming, punishing, and rewarding — practices that make sense because they shape behavior and character. On this view, holding people responsible is not a metaphysical judgment about the ultimate sources of their actions; it is a practical activity that treats people as reasons-responsive agents.

This means that moral responsibility does not require that the agent "could have done otherwise" in the contra-causal sense. What it requires is that the agent is a certain kind of creature: one whose behavior is responsive to reasons, who can learn from sanctions, who can be improved by moral address. Determinism, Dennett insists, is entirely consistent with being such a creature.

Historical Context

Elbow Room was written at a particular moment in the free will debate. The 1960s and 1970s had seen a revival of incompatibilism, led by philosophers such as Roderick Chisholm and Peter van Inwagen, who argued that responsibility requires genuine alternatives and that determinism removes them. The 1970s had also produced Harry Frankfurt's influential "counterexamples" to the principle of alternate possibilities — the claim that responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise — which undercut the traditional incompatibilist argument.

Dennett's book belongs to this post-Frankfurt moment. It is one of the most systematic statements of the "reason-responsiveness" and "self-control" approach to compatibilism, and it brought the debate into the territory of cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and cybernetics. Where earlier compatibilists — Hume, Mill, and the logical empiricists — had focused on the semantics of "can," Dennett focused on the mechanics of control.

The book also reflects Dennett's broader philosophical project, developed across works such as Brainstorms (1978) and later Consciousness Explained (1991): the attempt to give a fully naturalistic account of the mind. For Dennett, free will is just another case where the manifest image of human life must be reconciled with, not abandoned for, the scientific image. The method of Elbow Room is the method of all his work: take the phenomenon seriously, refuse both supernaturalism and eliminativism, and show how the phenomenon could be realized by natural machinery.

Legacy & Influence

Elbow Room has become a standard reference point in the contemporary free will debate. Its phrase "the free will worth wanting" has entered the vocabulary of the field, and its central distinction — between the free will that matters and the free will that would require indeterminism — frames the compatibilist position for many subsequent writers. Dennett's later book Freedom Evolves (2003) extends the argument by adding an evolutionary perspective, showing how freedom and moral responsibility could have arisen gradually in nature.

The book's influence extends beyond philosophy proper. Its treatment of control, self-control, and reasons-responsiveness has shaped work in moral psychology and the philosophy of action, and its account of the self as a center of narrative gravity has been influential in cognitive science and in philosophical work on personal identity. The compatibilist framework it defends remains one of the three major positions in the free will debate, alongside libertarian incompatibilism and hard determinism.

Critics have objected that Dennett changes the subject: that the "free will worth wanting" is not the free will at issue in the traditional debate, and that compatibilism of this kind concedes too much to the determinist. Others have argued that his account of moral responsibility is too forward-looking and does not capture the retributive character of ordinary blame. Dennett's responses to these objections, in later essays and in Freedom Evolves, are as instructive as the original argument.

For readers coming to the free will debate for the first time, Elbow Room is the best introduction to compatibilism: it is serious, accessible, and unafraid of the objections. It pairs naturally with the Free Will reader and with the essay on free will by Peter van Inwagen, which presents the incompatibilist challenge that Dennett's book is built to answer. For a shorter overview of the terrain, see what is free will and what is compatibilism.

Sources

• Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Free Will.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Compatibilism.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Moral Responsibility.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Daniel Dennett.

Related Topics

• What is free will
• What is compatibilism
• What is determinism
• Freedom
• Agency
• The Oxford Handbook of Free Will
• The philosophy of action