Freedom of action in philosophy has been distinguished from freedom of the will at least since the work of Thomas Hobbes[1] and David Hume,[2] who claimed that human freedom was the lack of external coercion (sometimes called negative freedom) and not the supposed "free will," which they took to be a will that could act (impossibly at random) independently of the circumstances just prior to a decision.
Free will was the positive freedom to do otherwise in the same circumstances. This requires alternative possibilities for thought and action that Hobbes and Hume denied could exist. It implies the existence of absolute chance in the universe, which they thought impossible since all events have necessary causes.[3] And it implies more than one possible future, which may conflict with religious views of God's foreknowledge.
Hobbes called free actions "voluntary" and the actor a "free agent."
He said:
"I hold that ordinary definition of a free agent, namely that a free agent is that which, when all things are present which are needful to produce the effect, can nevertheless not produce it, implies a contradiction and is nonsense; being as much as to say the cause may be sufficient, that is necessary, and yet the effect shall not follow." [4]
Hobbes was the modern inventor of compatibilism, the idea that necessary causes and voluntary actions are compatible. (In antiquity, compatibilism was first proposed by the Stoic Chrysippus)
"when first a man has an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposes not, it follows that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes and therefore are necessitated." [5]
David Hume agreed:
"By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; this is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here, then, is no subject of dispute." [6]
Rogers Albritton was a philosopher of independent mind who was once chair of the philosophy department at Harvard, and later the chair at UCLA.
Out in California, he became the president of the American Philosophical Association's western division. His 1985 presidential address, "Freedom of Will and Freedom of Action," to the APA clearly distinguished freedom of action (the freedom to do what we will) from freedom of the will itself.
"Where there's a will, there just isn't always a way," as he put it.
Albritton was particularly critical of Elizabeth Anscombe and her essay "Soft Determinism." William James had called the Hobbes-Hume freedom "soft" determinism, and a "quagmire of evasion."[7]
"Most philosophers seem to think it quite easy to rob the will of some freedom. Thus Elizabeth Anscombe, in an essay called "Soft Determinism," appears to suppose that a man who can't walk because he is chained up has lost some freedom of will. He "has no 'freedom of will' to walk," she says, or, again; no "freedom of the will in respect of walking." "Everyone will allow," she says, "that 'A can walk, i.e. has freedom of the will in respect of walking' would be gainsaid by A's being chained up." And again, "External constraint is generally agreed to be incompatible with freedom", by which she seems to mean: incompatible with perfect freedom of will, because incompatible with freedom of will to do, or freedom of the will in respect of doing, whatever the constraint prevents. [8]