Absolutely. The interesting thing is that process-relational philosophy has a complicated relationship with compatibilism: it shares some of compatibilism's intuitions about causation and freedom, but it can also go beyond traditional compatibilism by understanding freedom as something that emerges through an ongoing relational process.
1. What is compatibilism?
The basic question in the free-will debate is:
Can human beings genuinely be free if everything that happens is causally determined by prior conditions?
Compatibilists answer yes.
They reject the idea that freedom requires being an absolutely uncaused cause.
A simple example
Suppose you decide to go for a walk.
Your decision has causes:
- you enjoy walking,
- the weather is pleasant,
- you remembered that you wanted exercise,
- your upbringing shaped your values,
- your brain and body have a particular history.
A strict incompatibilist might say:
"If all of those factors causally determined your decision, then you didn't really choose to go walking."
A compatibilist says:
"Why should being caused mean that it wasn't your choice?"
If you went walking because you wanted to, understood what you were doing, and weren't forced at gunpoint, your action can still be free—even though your desire and decision have causal histories.
So compatibilism distinguishes:
"My action was caused"
from
"My action was forced."
Those aren't the same thing.
2. Compatibilism usually has two ideas of freedom
There are slightly different versions, but a useful distinction is between freedom from constraint and freedom as self-determination.
Freedom from constraint
I am free when I can act according to my motivations without external coercion.
For example:
I choose to give you my book because I want to.
versus:
Someone puts a gun to my head and orders me to give you the book.
Both actions have causes, but the second isn't free in the ordinary sense because the action doesn't express my own will.
Freedom as acting from "oneself"
This goes deeper.
A compatibilist such as Harry Frankfurt argues that freedom involves the relationship between your desires and your higher-order commitments.
For example, imagine someone addicted to smoking.
They have a desire:
"I want a cigarette."
But they also have a higher-order desire:
"I don't want to be the kind of person who wants cigarettes."
Their behavior may be caused by their addiction, but there is a difference between merely having a desire and identifying with the desire.
This gives compatibilism a richer idea of freedom:
Freedom isn't freedom from causation; it is the capacity to act through the kind of psychological organization that constitutes you as an agent.
3. Now enter process-relational philosophy
"Process-relational philosophy" is most strongly associated with thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, and later process philosophers/theologians such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Ray Griffin.
Its starting point is quite different from the traditional picture of reality.
Instead of thinking of the universe as fundamentally made up of things, process philosophy thinks reality is fundamentally composed of events, processes, relationships, and becoming.
Instead of:
"There is a thing called a person, and the person sometimes enters into relationships."
it tends toward:
"A person is constituted through an ongoing history of relationships and experiences."
That's a very important difference for thinking about free will.
4. Whitehead's basic picture
Whitehead doesn't ultimately picture reality as a collection of static substances bumping into one another.
He describes reality in terms of what he calls actual occasions of experience.
Very roughly, each occasion:
- inherits a world from the past,
- receives influences from that past,
- integrates those influences,
- has some capacity for its own response,
- becomes a determinate event,
- and then contributes to the future.
You can picture it like this:
Past → present experience/decision → future
But importantly, the present isn't simply a passive product of the past.
The present inherits the past while also responding to it.
That gives process philosophy a distinctive conception of freedom.
5. "Determined by the past" doesn't mean "nothing new can happen"
This is where process philosophy starts to depart from simple mechanical determinism.
Imagine that you are presented with a difficult situation.
Your response is influenced by:
- your genetics,
- childhood,
- memories,
- culture,
- relationships,
- current bodily state,
- social circumstances,
- previous choices.
You don't create yourself from nothing.
But process philosophy says that the present moment prehends or takes account of this inherited world and synthesizes it into a new occasion.
So:
The past conditions the present, but the past does not exhaustively determine what the present becomes.
Whitehead calls the novelty introduced into the world creativity.
This is one of the most important concepts for connecting process philosophy with free will.
6. So is process philosophy compatibilist?
It depends on what you mean by compatibilism.
This is the crucial qualification.
If compatibilism means:
"Even if the universe is completely deterministic, we can still call human actions free."
Then process philosophy is not necessarily compatibilist.
In fact, much process philosophy explicitly rejects a universe in which the complete state of the past mechanically determines one unique future.
Whitehead's universe has genuine novelty and creativity.
So process philosophers can be closer to indeterminism than traditional compatibilism.
But there's another sense in which process philosophy has a strong affinity with compatibilism.
7. Process philosophy and compatibilism converge on one important idea
Both can reject this assumption:
"An action is free only if it is completely independent of causal influences."
Process philosophy strongly rejects that picture.
For process thinkers, being influenced by other things isn't the opposite of freedom.
Being relational is what makes agency possible in the first place.
You become the kind of person capable of making decisions because of your relationships with:
- parents,
- friends,
- teachers,
- communities,
- culture,
- nature,
- your own past experiences.
So your freedom doesn't increase by becoming causally disconnected from everything.
Instead, your agency can develop through relationships.
That's a major point of contact with sophisticated compatibilism.
8. But process philosophy adds something important
Traditional compatibilism often says:
"You are free when your action flows from your internal motivations rather than external coercion."
Process-relational philosophy can ask a deeper question:
Where did this "self" and these motivations come from in the first place?
And its answer is:
They emerged through a history of relationships and processes.
So rather than imagining:
Self → desires → action
process philosophy gives us something more like:
world/relationships → experience → self-formation → decision → new experience → transformation of self
The self is not a completely finished entity sitting behind its choices.
The self is continually becoming.
9. This creates a very interesting conception of freedom
Consider two possible conceptions.
Traditional libertarian freedom
"At the moment of choice, I could have chosen A or B in exactly the same circumstances, and nothing prior to the choice determined which I would choose."
This is often called libertarian free will.
Compatibilist freedom
"My choice is caused, but it is free because it expresses my reasons, values, desires, and character rather than external coercion."
Process-relational freedom
Something closer to:
"My present response arises out of the past, but I actively integrate that inherited reality and contribute something genuinely new to what comes next."
That's neither simply classical libertarianism nor simple deterministic compatibilism.
It is a creative, relational conception of agency.
10. An example
Imagine someone who grew up in a very angry household.
They learned:
"When someone insults you, attack them."
That history profoundly influences them.
One day someone insults them.
The past is present:
Past experiences → present emotional response
They feel anger immediately.
But now suppose they pause.
They recognize:
"This is what I've learned to do. I don't want to continue it."
They choose to respond differently.
The process-relational interpretation isn't:
"The past had no influence on me."
Nor is it:
"The past completely determined me."
Instead:
"The past lives within the present, but the present can creatively transform what it has inherited."
That is a very process-oriented account of freedom.
And it has an interesting relationship to compatibilism because the person's choice is still deeply caused by their history—but their history has become something they can creatively reinterpret and reorganize.
11. The relational part is especially important
Process philosophy also challenges the idea that freedom means independence.
A common intuition is:
"The freer I am, the less dependent I am on other people."
Process-relational philosophy tends toward almost the opposite conclusion:
Greater relational richness can produce greater possibilities for agency.
A child has relatively limited possibilities for action.
Through relationships with parents, teachers, friends, language, culture, and institutions, the child acquires an enormous repertoire of possible responses.
So relationships don't merely restrict freedom.
They also create possibilities for freedom.
This is why "relational" is so important in the phrase process-relational philosophy.
12. There is also a moral dimension
This has consequences for responsibility.
If I am constituted through relationships, then my behavior isn't simply the product of an isolated individual.
Suppose someone becomes violent.
A purely individualistic account might ask:
"What is wrong with this person?"
A process-relational account might also ask:
"What relationships, environments, institutions, experiences, and patterns contributed to the person becoming this way?"
That doesn't necessarily eliminate responsibility.
Instead, it can expand the scope of responsibility.
We can be responsible not only for our own choices but for the relationships and environments through which people develop their capacities for choice.
That leads toward a much more relational ethics.
13. The deepest difference
I'd put the difference this way:
Classical compatibilism:
"How can I be free even though my actions have causes?"
Process-relational philosophy:
"How does freedom emerge within the causal and relational process of becoming?"
That is a subtle but important shift.
Compatibilism often begins with freedom and asks how it can coexist with causation.
Process philosophy begins with process, relationship, inheritance, and becoming, and asks how agency and freedom emerge within that process.
A useful map
| View | What determines/conditions us? | What is freedom? |
|---|---|---|
| Hard determinism | Past causes completely determine action | No genuine free will |
| Libertarianism | Past does not completely determine choice | Genuine alternative possibilities |
| Classical compatibilism | Causal history | Acting according to one's own motives without coercion |
| Process-relational | Past + relationships + inherited conditions | Creative self-determination within those conditions |
The last row is a little simplified, because process philosophy isn't a single unified theory of free will. Whitehead himself is more complicated than this table suggests.
The really interesting possibility
You could therefore develop a process compatibilism along these lines:
Human freedom does not require being uncaused. We are always products of a history and a network of relationships. But within that inherited situation, living processes possess capacities to interpret, integrate, respond, and introduce novelty. Freedom is the increasing capacity of a relationally constituted agent to participate creatively in determining what comes next.
That position preserves something compatibilism gets right—freedom doesn't require causal independence—while taking seriously something process philosophy emphasizes—the future isn't merely the mechanical replay of the past, and the self is something that continually emerges through relationships.
If you're interested, I can also explain how Whitehead's "creativity," "self-determination," and "concrescence" provide a fairly technical process-philosophical account of free will, and then compare that directly with Dennett, Frankfurt, and Robert Kane. That comparison gets especially interesting.
Yes—there is a real danger of equivocation between freedom and novelty in process-relational philosophy, especially in some interpretations of Whitehead. But I wouldn't say that process philosophers necessarily commit that equivocation. The stronger claim is that they need to provide an argument for why novelty constitutes freedom, rather than simply assuming it.
The distinction is important.
1. Novelty and freedom are not obviously the same thing
Something can be novel without being free.
For example:
- A random number generator produces something novel.
- A quantum event might be genuinely indeterministic.
- An evolutionary mutation can introduce novelty.
- A chaotic physical system can produce unpredictable outcomes.
But none of these things obviously possesses free will.
So:
Novelty ≠ freedom
and likewise:
Indeterminacy ≠ agency.
If I say, "Your decision was free because something genuinely new entered the causal chain," I've not yet established that you exercised freedom.
2. This creates a problem for Whitehead
Whitehead famously gives creativity a fundamental role in reality.
An actual occasion inherits its past but also has some degree of self-determination in how it synthesizes what it has inherited.
That gives us something like:
past → inherited data → selection/integration → novel outcome
The tempting move is:
"The outcome isn't completely determined by the past, therefore the occasion has freedom."
But that's too quick.
Why?
Because there are at least three possibilities:
A. Deterministic
The past necessitates A.
B. Random/indeterminate
The past permits A or B, but nothing determines which occurs.
C. Agentive
The agent exercises a capacity to determine whether A or B occurs.
Process philosophy needs to explain why its account of self-determination belongs in category C rather than merely B.
3. Whitehead actually gives us more than mere novelty
This is where I would resist saying that Whitehead simply equivocates.
His concept of self-determination isn't supposed to mean merely "something unpredictable happened."
The actual occasion receives its inherited world and then actively synthesizes that world according to its own subjective aim.
So the relevant structure is not merely:
past → novelty
but something more like:
past → experience → valuation → integration → decision → novel actuality
The word decision is important here.
Whitehead says that an actual entity is "the subject-superject of its own experience," and his account treats an occasion as undergoing a process in which it progressively determines what it will become.
Thus there is a potential argument:
Freedom consists not in producing novelty per se, but in self-determination through the appropriation and valuation of inherited possibilities.
That's considerably stronger than equating novelty with freedom.
4. But there's still a serious philosophical gap
You can press the process philosopher:
Why does "self-determination" amount to freedom?
Suppose an occasion inherits possibilities A, B, and C.
It evaluates them and selects B.
What explains the selection?
If the selection is completely determined by the occasion's inherited state, then we've returned to determinism.
If the selection isn't determined, then perhaps it's random.
And if the process philosopher says:
"Neither—the occasion itself determines which possibility is actualized."
we can ask:
What does it mean for the occasion itself to determine it?
This is the crucial question.
Simply saying "self-determination" can become a label for the very thing that needs explanation.
5. This is essentially the old problem of luck
There's a famous problem in libertarian theories of free will.
Suppose your decision wasn't determined by prior causes.
You choose A rather than B.
We ask:
Why did you choose A?
If the answer is:
"Because nothing determined which one you'd choose."
then your choice begins to look arbitrary or lucky.
Process philosophy has to avoid that dilemma:
Determined → not free
Undetermined → potentially random
So what is the third possibility?
A process philosopher might answer:
The agent creatively determines itself.
But now we need an account of what creative self-determination actually is.
That's where the philosophical work really begins.
6. There is another possible equivocation: unpredictability
There's an even weaker version of the problem.
Sometimes "novelty" gets discussed in terms of what could not have been predicted from the past.
But:
unpredictable ≠ undetermined
and
undetermined ≠ free.
A deterministic system can be unpredictable because we don't possess enough information or computational ability.
And an indeterministic system can be unpredictable without anyone exercising agency.
So if process philosophy moves:
"The future is genuinely open"
to
"Therefore the agent is free,"
there is a missing premise.
7. Where I think the strongest process-relational position lies
I think process philosophy is much more interesting if it doesn't define freedom as novelty.
Instead, we could distinguish three concepts:
Novelty
Something genuinely different from what existed previously becomes actual.
Agency
A system has an internal capacity to respond to its circumstances in an organized way.
Freedom
An agent has some capacity to appropriate its inherited conditions and participate in determining its own becoming.
Then we get:
Novelty is a necessary feature of processual becoming, but it is not sufficient for freedom.
That formulation avoids the equivocation.
8. And this connects directly to your original compatibilism question
This is where process philosophy can potentially make a genuinely interesting contribution to compatibilism.
A compatibilist doesn't need:
freedom = absence of causation.
And a process philosopher doesn't necessarily need:
freedom = absence of determination.
Instead, we could say:
Freedom is a particular kind of causally embedded self-determination.
The difference between a rock and a person isn't simply that the person is "more novel."
It's that the person has increasingly sophisticated capacities to:
- perceive possibilities,
- evaluate them,
- reflect on them,
- incorporate past experience,
- form intentions,
- respond to reasons,
- modify future behavior,
- and participate in transforming the relational environment that subsequently conditions them.
That's much closer to emergent or relational agency than to mere novelty.
So, in one sentence:
Yes, process-relational philosophy can equivocate between freedom and novelty if it argues that because the future contains genuine novelty, it therefore contains freedom; but Whitehead's richer notions of self-determination, valuation, subjective aim, and decision give process philosophy resources for distinguishing genuine agency from mere novelty or randomness.
And I think that distinction is actually one of the most important pressure points in process accounts of free will. If you push it hard enough, you arrive at the question: What exactly makes an act of self-determination "mine," rather than simply another event in the process? That is where process philosophy runs into the deepest problems—and potentially the deepest resources—for a theory of free will.
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