The Indetermination of Reason and the Role of the Will in Aquinas's Account of Human Freedom

Thomas Aquinas argues that human choices are made by the will and reason working together. It is easy to misinterpret his argument and suppose that the reason alone works out what should be done while the will simply ratifies this. Instead Aquinas believes that in practical matters the reason is often undetermined since it arrives at many simultaneous conclusions. This is the often unacknowledged heart of Aquinas's account of freedom. All these simultaneous rational conclusions derive from the objective circumstances of the world; each one could give rise to a different rationally justified course of action; yet only one can be acted upon. The reason cannot decide between them. It is the will that accepts and affirms one of these conclusions and gives force to the reasonableness of one course of action. This is why a choice is always rational and personally willed - which is what makes it free. The indetermination of reason is what allows the future to be open-ended for the deliberating agent; it allows past and present to be interpreted in different ways, each of which has its own coherence and rationality. In this way Aquinas's account of human freedom avoids both an irrational voluntarism and a deterministic intellectualism