Consider only this present act: my trying, here and now.
The Libertarian Imperative
The Libertarian Imperative is a philosophical argument proposed by Undo Uus (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999). The argument does not attempt to prove that libertarian free will exists. Instead it shows that, when we consider our own present act of volitional effort, a truth-seeker must adopt the following stance:
One must always try to act in accord with the thesis that one is not a law-governed creature.
What this means in practice
The Imperative is a directive about trying, not a theoretical proof that free will exists.
Trying to act in accord with the thesis of free will includes:
- treating one’s own present volitional effort as genuinely open,
- refusing to regard that effort as merely a law-governed event,
- and, when the issue arises, affirming and defending the libertarian thesis.
In this sense, trying to act as free also includes trying to believe that one is free.
This does not mean claiming to know that free will exists. Rather, it means that the act of trying itself is undertaken in accordance with the thesis that one is free, and therefore the agent attempts to adopt that thesis as true.
Because the Imperative applies only to one’s own present act of trying, it does not logically compel claims about other minds or about the metaphysical structure of the universe. It governs only how one must engage in this act of volitional effort now.
The Core Lemma
There are exactly two live possibilities about it:
- N (nomic): this trying is wholly law-governed (deterministic and/or probabilistic) at some fundamental level.
- F (Free): this trying is not law-governed at any fundamental level (libertarian Free-Volitional).
The question is practical, not theoretical: not "Which is true?" but "How must I engage in this trying, as a truth-seeker, under this uncertainty?"
Use one asymmetry:
- If an error is avoidable, a truth-seeker must try to avoid it.
- If an error is unavoidable, there is nothing one can be required to try to avoid.
Compare two stances toward the thesis in this present trying:
- T: try to act in accord with the thesis that this trying is not law-governed (treat it as Free-Volitional).
- ¬T: do not try to act in accord with that thesis (e.g., treat the trying as law-governed, refrain from the thesis in practice, or attempt practical agnosticism).
If F is true, then ¬T is an avoidable misalignment with truth (because in F I could have tried to engage in my action according to the true thesis). Therefore truth-seeking requires T.
If N is true, then both T and ¬T are unavoidable outcomes of the nomic causal order. Therefore adopting T cannot be condemned as a failure to avoid avoidable untruth, because nothing else was possible.
Therefore, under truth-seeking, the only stance that is correct if F and not action-guidingly refutable if N is:
Always try to act in accord with the thesis that you are not a law-governed creature.
Scope restriction (crucial): this lemma justifies only the present first-person attempt. It does not by itself justify claims about your other acts, the distant future, or other minds.
Mental substitutions that make the Imperative look wrong
The Libertarian Imperative is often misunderstood because the mind automatically replaces its narrow target with a more familiar question.
If you find yourself thinking one of the following, you have already shifted the problem.
What it feels like: "But is the claim true? What evidence do we have? What metaphysical theory supports it?"
Why it's a shift: The Imperative is not primarily a theoretical command about what belief to adopt on the basis of evidence, probabilities, or a completed metaphysical theory. It is a directive about trying under uncertainty.
Correct target: The question is not simply What should I believe about free will in general? but What must I try to do now if I seek truth?
In that practical sense, the Imperative can include affirming and defending the libertarian thesis, and thus even trying to believe that one is free. But this is not belief adopted as the outcome of evidential weighing or probabilistic calculation. It is belief as part of one's present act of trying to act in accord with freedom.
What it feels like: "But determinists will disagree with you. Doesn’t that cancel your conclusion?"
Why it’s a shift: The Imperative is not designed to defeat other people’s philosophical positions.
Correct target: It asks only: What must I try to do, here and now, if I seek truth under the N/F uncertainty?
What it feels like: "If you had tried harder to understand determinism, you would have realised the world is nomic and would not have proposed this imperative."
Why it’s a shift: This argument quietly changes the conditions. It imagines a different past ("if you had tried harder") and then infers a different result.
Correct target: The Imperative asks whether the agent could have acted differently given exactly the same total situation and laws. In a fully nomic world the next state is fixed by the current state and the laws, so the agent could not have tried otherwise in that same situation, even though different earlier causes would have produced a different outcome.
What it feels like: "Explain the physical mechanism of free will first. Otherwise the argument is incomplete."
Why it’s a shift: The Imperative is not a theory of how free will works.
Correct target: It is a self-referential practical rule for how to engage in the present act of trying under the uncertainty between nomic and non-nomic functioning.
What it feels like: "This is basically Pascal’s Wager or William James’ will to believe."
Why it’s a shift: Pascal’s Wager weighs gains and losses and depends on probabilities and payoffs.
Correct target: The Libertarian Imperative does not weigh gains or losses. Its conclusion follows from a logical asymmetry between avoidable and unavoidable wrongness in a uniquely self-referential situation: one is asked to decide whether one can decide.
Common objections and misunderstandings
Drawn from actual correspondence with philosophers, editors, and referees.
What it sounds like:
If determinism is true, the libertarian cannot avoid believing in free will, and the determinist cannot avoid rejecting it.
So there are people who do avoid the libertarian belief (namely determinists).
Therefore the claim that the fallacious free-will thesis "could not have been avoided" cannot be correct.
What actually happened:
The objection interprets the statement "the fallacious free-will thesis could not have been avoided" as meaning that no person in the world could end up not believing it.
Why it's a misreading:
The Imperative is not making a claim about the distribution of beliefs across different people.
It concerns the avoidability of one's own mistaken belief.
If the world is nomic and the libertarian belief is false, then the person who holds that belief could not have avoided holding it, because their trying and believing are themselves products of the causal order.
Correct understanding:
The Imperative therefore relies on this very point.
Under nomism, a mistaken libertarian stance is unavoidable for the agent who holds it.
This is why adopting the stance "act as non-nomic" cannot be condemned as a failure to avoid avoidable error.
The argument concerns the avoidable or unavoidable status of one's own present trying, not whether different people in the world hold different beliefs.
What it sounds like: The decision to behave as if free could itself be part of a deterministic causal process.
What actually happened: The objection demands a causal explanation of the trying itself.
Why it’s a shift: The Libertarian Imperative does not claim that the present act of trying is already known to be free. It explicitly allows two possibilities: the trying is nomic, or the trying is Free-Volitional.
Correct understanding: The Imperative is a practical rule about how to engage in the present act of trying under uncertainty. If the trying is nomic, acting as non-nomic is one more nomic event; if it is Free-Volitional, the same act may succeed as genuine freedom.
What it sounds like: If someone had reflected more carefully, they would not have held the mistaken libertarian belief.
What actually happened: The objection silently changes the conditions by imagining a different earlier state of the agent.
Why it’s a shift: The Imperative uses a stricter notion of avoidability: whether the agent could have done otherwise given exactly the same total situation and the same laws of nature.
Correct understanding: In a nomic world, if the agent formed the belief, that formation was nomically inevitable. "Could have avoided it if he had thought harder" only describes what happens under different prior conditions.
What it sounds like: The reasoning is a pragmatic wager selecting whichever belief has better consequences.
What actually happened: The Imperative is interpreted as payoff psychology.
Why it’s a shift: Pascal’s Wager is game-theoretical and depends on probabilities and payoffs. The Libertarian Imperative depends on none of these.
Correct understanding: The Imperative rests on logical asymmetry: if freedom is real, failing to act as free is avoidable misalignment with truth; if the world is nomic, mistaken belief in freedom is unavoidable.
What it sounds like: The argument is primarily ethical, grounded in responsibility and duty.
What actually happened: The Imperative is interpreted as a moral doctrine.
Why it’s a shift: The Imperative does not derive force from ethics, accountability, or social responsibility.
Correct understanding: It is grounded in a truth-seeking constraint on one’s own present act of trying. Moral responsibility may follow if freedom is real, but it is not the basis of the argument.
What it sounds like: Free will may be compatible with probabilistic causation, so anti-nomic framing is too strong.
What actually happened: The debate shifts from the logic of the Imperative to competing metaphysical theories of free agency.
Why it’s a shift: The Imperative is not trying to settle how free will works metaphysically. It targets nomism: the thesis that all processes are governed by universal deterministic or probabilistic laws.
Correct understanding: The formulation is intentionally anti-nomic. It denies that volitional activity is entirely law-governed, which is the key premise behind standard arguments against free will.
Why this argument is easy to misunderstand
Even though the logic of the Libertarian Imperative is simple, readers often drift away from it. The reason is largely psychological.
In most areas of life we must decide before acting whether something is true.
Examples from everyday life:
- Before stepping onto a bridge we ask: Will it carry my weight?
- Before eating a fruit we ask: Is it poisonous?
- Before stepping forward we ask: Is there danger ahead?
The same structure governs moral and legal reasoning:
- We listen to testimony.
- We examine evidence.
- Only then do we judge whether someone is guilty or innocent.
In both the physical world and the moral world, acting first and discovering the truth later would be reckless. Therefore we develop a deeply ingrained habit:
Act in accord with a thesis only after we have reason to believe that the thesis is true.
Even though exceptions to this rule are rare, we can still imagine cases in ordinary physical reality where the structure of the situation itself justifies acting in accordance with a thesis before independently establishing that it is true.
The following example helps make that kind of exception clearer, and in turn makes the Libertarian Imperative easier to understand.
An illustrative example
Imagine that a scientific expedition is sent to an alien planet with the task of studying the planet’s ionosphere.
Upon landing, however, all measuring equipment is destroyed. The researchers are therefore unable to learn anything about the physical properties of the planet’s ionosphere.
Nevertheless, the expedition is justified in sending the following type of report to Earth:
The planet’s ionosphere lets through radio waves at the frequency used to transmit this message.
Sending such reports is justified because they cannot reach their destination if they are false.
Attempts to send such messages can therefore do only epistemic good:
- If the statement is true, knowledge is gained.
- If the statement is false, the message simply never arrives.
The structural lesson
This example shows that in some special situations the logical structure of the situation itself can justify acting in accordance with a thesis, even when we have no prior reason to believe that the thesis is true.
The Libertarian Imperative belongs to this rare class of cases.
The question concerns the nature of one’s own present act of trying. Because the situation is self-referential, the asymmetry between avoidable and unavoidable error makes it rational to:
Try to act in accord with the thesis that one is not a law-governed creature.
The argument therefore feels unusual not because it is logically obscure, but because it reverses our ordinary habit of judging first and acting afterwards.
Rejecting truth-seeking itself
The Libertarian Imperative rests on one fundamental premise:
In the question of our own freedom of will, we ought to seek the truth.
The argument then shows that, under this commitment, the only rational stance is to try to act in accord with the thesis that one is not a law-governed creature.
However, one could challenge the Imperative at a deeper level by rejecting its starting point.
A radical alternative
One might argue that seeking the truth about the nature of reality is not always reasonable.
Undo Uus himself later considered this possibility in a speculative discussion about the metaphysical implications of free will and consciousness.
If free will and phenomenal experience ultimately point toward a radically non-materialist picture of the world, perhaps involving a Creator of Experiences and a merely virtual physical reality, then it might be argued that discovering this truth could undermine the very structure of the world we inhabit.
In such a scenario, cooperating with the hidden structure of reality might require the opposite stance:
Do not seek the truth about consciousness and free will.
Instead, one should publicly defend a materialist picture of the mind and avoid inquiries that could reveal the deeper structure of reality.
As Uus put it provocatively:
It is primitive to think that pursuing the truth is always reasonable.
If someone accepts this radical position, the Libertarian Imperative loses its force.
The Imperative does not attempt to prove that truth-seeking must always prevail over every other possible goal. It simply shows that if one is committed to truth-seeking in the free-will question, then the Imperative logically follows.
Rejecting that commitment is therefore the only genuine escape from the argument.
Sources and further material
The ideas summarized on this page originate from:
Undo Uus
The Libertarian Imperative
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1999.
The repository below contains the original articles, drafts, correspondence with philosophers, and related materials documenting the development and reception of the argument.
About Undo Uus
Undo Uus is a physicist and philosopher of consciousness.
His work explored the relationship between free will, consciousness, and the structure of physical reality.