*The reframing.* The dispute between libertarianism, compatibilism, and hard determinism has been organized for centuries around a single load-bearing question: does free will require exemption from prior causation, or is some form of causally embedded freedom sufficient? The structural account dissolves the question by relocating the variable. Freedom is neither metaphysical exemption nor any single compatibilist criterion (higher-order endorsement, reasons-responsiveness, sanity); it is the modal depth an agent achieves within the field that the modal pressures (T, S, Φ — see [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)) make available. Libertarianism named depth and called it exemption. Compatibilism named depth and called it the right kind of cause. Hard determinism noticed that exemption was unavailable and concluded freedom must therefore be illusory. Each tracked a real feature of the same architecture from an incomplete angle.

*Depth is necessary but not sufficient: fidelity and endorsement.* Modal depth names the space freedom requires but not the whole of its structure, and the cases that follow show why. A wanton — Frankfurt's (1971) agent who is moved by whichever first-order desire is strongest without caring which one moves them — can command an enormous field and still fail to be free, because nothing in the agent settles which mapped line counts as their own. The agent under volitional necessity runs the other way: Luther's *Here I stand, I can do no other* (Frankfurt 1982, 1988) has the field collapsed to a single option by the depth of what is cared about, and is not thereby less free but more. Depth points the wrong direction in both — the wanton has it without freedom, the resolute agent has freedom without it — which shows that freedom is the degree to which an act is governed by the valuation the agent identifies with, operating over a field that is both deep enough and uncorrupted.

This is the point at which Watson's regress must be stopped rather than relocated. Were the valuation the agent identifies with authoritative merely by being a higher-order desire — one more want ranked above the rest — the question would simply climb a level: what confers authority on that desire, and why not one higher still? The structural account does not rank desires at all. Identification, on the [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) result, is not a further-order preference the agent happens to hold but the operation by which the self-model is constituted — the recursion's identifying with some valuations and against others is the same operation by which it builds the I. A valuation the agent identifies with is authoritative not because it wins a contest among desires but because it is partly constitutive of who the agent is; there is no higher tribunal to appeal to, because the identifying is the self any appeal would be made to. This is the move that dissolves agent-causation earlier in the section — the agent is the structured recursion, not a substance behind it ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>), [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)) — applied to endorsement: the regress halts at the self-model, because the endorsement is not a desire the self has but the self the desires are had by.

The modal-mapping network must therefore meet several conditions, each of which fails recognizably. Its *depth* can be too shallow: an agent who does not know an option exists is not free with respect to it, however available it is in the world — the diner who never learns the kitchen will prepare a dish that is not on the printed card has exactly the freedom the card's depth allows and no more, which is why part of the relevant competence is knowing that one's field has edges and can be probed. Its *fidelity* can be compromised: a field that misrepresents what an act makes possible defeats freedom even where depth is intact, which is why honest disclosure expands freedom without adding any new act — the consumer who learns a product carries a lethal long-term risk gains freedom over the identical choice once the consequence-branch is installed, and why the law counts consent obtained by concealment or fraud as no free consent at all (the competence-and-consent variable [§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>) tracks). Knowledge feeds the field directly at this point: since whatever is actual is possible, every fact an agent holds is already an entry in the modal field, and inference projects from those entries to the further possibilities they license — the precise sense in which knowledge ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) is a condition of will.

Corruption can also be internal rather than external: where the salience-weighting that decides which valuation governs is set so that it reliably under-serves the agent's endorsed priority — as in conditions of executive-function dysregulation such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — the endorsed valuation can remain wholly intact and still lose, which marks the seam where a corrupted field shades into a defeated endorsement. Its *endorsement*, finally, can simply be overridden in the moment: judging one course best and being carried by the stronger immediate pull into another is the weakness of will the tradition has named since Aristotle and sharpened in Davidson (1970) — the episodic form of the wanton's standing failure. Beneath all three, will rides on a substrate it does not author. The thick will of this section is the thin directedness of drive ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>)) brought under a field that is deep, faithful, and owned, and like all drive it stays embodied: a current can override a standing drive such as hunger by the valuation it endorses, but only to the limit the body itself permits. Freedom is depth, fidelity, and endorsement together, instantiated by a living current — none alone suffices, and the tradition's single-criterion accounts each seized one and mistook it for the whole.

These conditions concern the field and the agent's ownership of the act made over it; freedom needs one thing further, external to them all. It also requires *latitude* — the standing room to act on the selection once made — which coercion removes without touching depth, fidelity, or endorsement: the coerced agent can map the field truly, endorse the refusal, and still be made to act against it. Depth, fidelity, and endorsement settle whether a selection is genuinely the agent's; latitude settles whether the agent can enact what has genuinely been selected. So *modal freedom*, the whole of which freedom consists, resolves into two pillars — modal depth (the grasp) and latitude (the room to enact) — with fidelity and endorsement as the conditions under which the depth-side selection is truly the agent's own.

*Frankfurt cases reconsidered.* The proliferation of Frankfurt-style counterexamples in the late twentieth century revealed that something about responsibility was decoupled from metaphysical branching, but the literature could not say what. The structural account names it. What the cases preserve while removing external alternatives is internal modal depth: the agent's mapping network, the alternatives the network holds open at the time of action, and the agent's participation in which mapped line runs. Branching in the world matters less than branching in the map. The Frankfurt literature was right that responsibility survives the loss of external alternatives and could not specify why because it had no account of the modal-mapping variable.

*The Eden challenge revisited.* The reading developed in [§8.9.1](<8.9.1 What is Disputed.md>) — that Eden subjects undeveloped will to morally decisive choice — does not depend on rejecting the classical endowment view's conceptual coherence; it depends on the structural-depth account being the correct read of what freedom is. If freedom is modal-mapping depth accumulated through encounter, no act of divine endowment can substitute for the encounter. A perfectly oriented will with no developed modal terrain has the form of a will and lacks the substance the form requires. The endowment view answers a structural-depth requirement with a metaphysical decree, and the decree cannot do what the depth would. What the classical reading offers as a higher-order resolution is on the structural reading a relocation of the problem one register deeper.

*The divine-will dilemma revisited.* The dilemma at the end of [§8.9.1](<8.9.1 What is Disputed.md>) — *actus purus* has no modal depth, maximal modal depth gives Nature — admits no escape that preserves the classical view of divine will as both transcendent of structure and genuinely will-shaped. Stump's (2003) refinement secures simplicity at the cost of the modal architecture *will* names; alternative refinements that secure the modal architecture surrender the transcendence. The dilemma is structural, not rhetorical. Will is what modal depth makes available within Nature, not what stands outside it.

*The inversion at the level of will.* What the inversion of greatness names at the level of consciousness ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)) returns at the level of will. The freedom traditionally located above Nature — exempt from causation, prior to creation, transcendent of structure — is what modal depth within Nature looks like at sufficient recursion. The motion is again inward, not upward. Free will is not what we have despite being natural creatures. It is what being a sufficiently deep natural creature consists in.

*Responsibility, asymmetry, and moral practice.* The structural account does not collapse responsibility into determinism. Two agents facing the same external option may bring different modal maps to it, and the moral practice that tracks responsibility — praise, blame, punishment, gratitude, resentment, forgiveness — calibrates against those maps. Strawson's (1962) reactive-attitudes account, the Hart-Honoré tradition in legal philosophy, and the bioethical apparatus of competence and consent are all calibrations of the same variable. The framework explains why the calibrations work without committing to libertarian sourcehood and without surrendering moral practice to hard-determinist deflation.

The framework models will as action mediated by a representation of alternatives, accumulated experience, valuation, and practical latitude. It proposes that richer modal mapping supports more reflective forms of agency. This does not dissolve the standing debate between libertarian, compatibilist, and hard-determinist accounts; it supplies one compatibilist-leaning framework for interpreting it. The relation between reasoning, knowledge, valuation, will, and responsibility remains a substantive philosophical question. The medium through which such an agent makes itself legible to others is taken up at [§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>).


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← [8.9.4 What is Confirmed](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.10 Language](<8.10 Language.md>) →
