Psychological Freedom

Psychological Freedom: Choice & Alternatives

Whether the concept of “could have done otherwise” requires alternative possible worlds or alternative interpretations

The question reveals a deeper paradox: our concept of freedom might create the very freedom it describes.

Consider your last moral choice—perhaps refusing to lie to a friend. The standard debate asks: did genuine alternative possibilities exist (lying was really possible) or do we just need alternative interpretations (you would have lied under different circumstances)?

But both approaches miss something crucial. The moment you considered lying, alternative possibilities didn’t simply exist or fail to exist—they became psychologically real through the very process of deliberation. Your freedom emerged from contemplating alternatives, not from metaphysical facts about possible worlds.

This suggests a radical thesis: “could have done otherwise” is neither about alternative worlds nor alternative interpretations, but about the psychological reality of choice construction.

When you deliberate, you simulate potential selves—the you who lies, the you who tells the truth. These aren’t metaphysical possibilities waiting to be actualized but cognitive constructions that shape your actual choice. The alternatives become real precisely because you consider them real.

Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples supposedly show that alternative possibilities aren’t necessary for moral responsibility. A neuroscientist stands ready to force you to choose coffee, but you choose it freely, so no intervention occurs. Frankfurt concludes you’re responsible despite lacking genuine alternatives.

But Frankfurt misses the psychological dimension. Even with the neuroscientist present, your deliberation process still constructs the tea alternative as a live option. You experience choice even if metaphysical alternatives don’t exist. The psychological construction of alternatives creates responsibility independently of their metaphysical status.

This resolves the traditional debate. Libertarians demand real possible worlds to ground freedom, but psychological alternatives don’t require metaphysical branching. Compatibilists reduce alternatives to counterfactuals, but miss how deliberation creates genuine psychological possibilities.

The construction theory suggests that freedom operates through what we might call “phenomenological branching”—the lived experience of confronting genuine alternatives during choice, regardless of determinism’s truth.

Consider moral development. Children learn responsibility not by grasping metaphysics of possible worlds but by practicing the construction of alternatives. “What if you had shared your toy?” creates psychological space for different choices. Moral education works by expanding our capacity to generate alternative possibilities during deliberation.

This explains why moral responsibility varies with psychological capacity. We don’t hold young children, the mentally ill, or the severely intoxicated fully responsible not because they lack metaphysical freedom but because they cannot adequately construct alternative possibilities during choice.

The theory also explains moral luck paradoxes. Two equally reckless drivers—one hits a child, one doesn’t—seem equally responsible despite different outcomes. But the driver who hit the child faces reconstructed alternatives (“I could have driven more carefully”) that differ qualitatively from the lucky driver’s alternatives. The construction of alternatives, not just their pre-choice existence, determines responsibility.

Neuroscience supports this view. Brain imaging reveals that moral choices involve simulating alternative actions and their consequences. The anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex actively model different choice outcomes. We literally construct neural representations of alternative selves.

But if freedom depends on psychological construction rather than metaphysical facts, does this make freedom illusory? Not if the construction itself creates genuine differences in the world. The person who constructs rich alternatives during moral choice becomes different from someone who doesn’t—more reflective, more sensitive to reasons, more capable of complex moral reasoning.

The pragmatic implications are profound. Rather than debating whether people “really” could have done otherwise, we should ask: how can we cultivate better alternative-construction capacities? Education, literature, moral dialogue, and contemplative practices all enhance our ability to construct meaningful alternatives during choice.

This shifts focus from metaphysical freedom to psychological freedom. We’re free not because determinism is false or because counterfactuals are true, but because we can construct alternative possibilities that make our choices genuinely our own.

The deepest insight may be reflexive: our capacity to construct alternatives includes constructing alternative theories of alternatives themselves. Libertarians construct metaphysically robust possibilities, compatibilists construct counterfactual alternatives, and hard determinists construct the alternative of rejecting alternatives altogether.

Perhaps “could have done otherwise” is itself a choice we make about how to understand choice. The alternatives we construct when thinking about alternatives shape the kind of agents we become.

In the end, you couldn’t have done otherwise in some pre-given metaphysical sense. But your capacity to construct the possibility of having done otherwise creates the psychological space in which genuine agency operates. Freedom emerges from the practice of freedom-construction itself.

The alternatives that matter most aren’t the metaphysical ones behind us but the psychological ones we’re building right now, choice by choice, through the ongoing work of becoming moral agents.