The term and concept of freedom can refer to different things: absence of coercion or psychic ability to choose. Mental freedom seems incompatible with causal determinism, but in reality it is not if both are understood properly.

The freedom defended by liberalism is economic, ethical, social or political: it is respect for the right to property and the absence of aggression or violence; is to be able to choose oneself in a legitimate way, that others do not impose decisions on you by force or through legal coercion; it is to act in an institutional environment with universal and functional norms, without privileges or oppression. However, in economic theory, psychology and philosophy is also important the concept of free will, freedom understood as the mental capacity to choose between alternatives according to the will of the agent, which is usually considered a necessary requirement for responsibility moral or legal.

Frequently, free will and determinism have been contrasted as if they were incompatible, but that this is so depends on how determinism and free will are understood. Determinism means natural regularities, descriptive laws of repetitive patterns in reality, connections between causes and effects. The opposite of determinism is randomness, chance, indeterminism, absence of regular interactions and causal relationships. Reality is deterministic, indeterministic, or a combination of both attributes, but there are no other possibilities: will or consciousness are not alternatives or complements to the regular or random nature of what exists.

If by free will we mean a metaphysical or ontological freedom that overcomes or violates causal determinism, then that free will does not exist or is nothing more than an illusion or fallacy. On the other hand denying determinism implies accepting randomness, and ensuring that free will is not compatible with determinism implies reducing free will to simple randomness: the will would be the result of chance (quantum mechanics is not the answer to this dilemma, and those who erroneously believe that it is so maybe they know about physics but do not know about biology, cybernetics and psychology).

Excuse me if I got excited writing is that I am like this ..