The idea of free-will is often invoked to resolve some apparent philosophical problems, for example problems of assigning personal morality under determinism and the problem of evil. It seems to me that even positing a will, one has to decide whether it's deterministic or random; either result seems to return us to the original problem, albeit at a more fundamental level. What attempts/theories (if any) have been proposed where free-will is somehow separate from the deterministic/randomized dichotomy, and what are it's features in these theories?
Note: I'm not interested in free-will per se, but rather in the idea that there are phenomena that are neither deterministic nor random. This post involves free will since this is one area where considerations of what is determined vice random (vice some other modality) are important. It seems plausible for someone to assert that will is its own phenomena that has its own rules of being. What are the implications of this?
In my own (brief) thinking on the subject, I've identified the idea that both randomness and determinism require the ability to construct "essentially equivalent conditions", either in the real world or as possible worlds, in order to assess whether we can predict aspects of the phenomenon, or not. Thus, one way that will could be neither is for there to be constraints on our ability (either practically or as thought experiments) to construct "essentially equivalent conditions" and thus, the comprehensive dichotomy between (apparent) randomness and determinism doesn't apply when wills are involved. I'm not claiming that the idea that wills limit our ability to construct essentially equivalent conditions is a particularly good one, but is an example of the kind of ontological implications that might be tied up with asserting that will is a principle that behaves distinctly from both determinism and randomness.
