On the Increments podcast, Ben Chugg and Vaden Masrani attacked and I defended the concept of free will. We found eventually that we agreed on two important points: (1) all good explanations of any physical event must invoke preceding causes and (2) some of these explanations may mention only abstract, emergent causes such as ideas. In discovering this two-point agreement, I announced too hastily my sense that we “completely” agreed, ascribing our apparent disagreement to differences in terminology. In fact, I had assumed we agreed on a third point that I failed to state, namely that some good explanations of physical events invoke a specific type of abstract and emergent cause called a person, and that in these explanations people sometimes choose their next actions by using ideas that they, or that other people, have created. To discuss this fact we can use the concept of free will as a good means both of distinguishing creative from mechanical causes of events, and of understanding events, such as the emergence of civilization, that we cannot explain purely in terms of uncreative or mechanical causes. This conception of free will also preserves the notion of moral responsibility that Ben and Vaden reject, a rejection that in my opinion denies the causal power of creative thought.