They argue that the very act of willing is sufficient to favor one of two identical possibilities over the other, and that no cause for this favoring exists apart from the will itself. Just as the will, in their view, produces generic specification, so too does it produce particular specification; for selecting certain contingent events rather than others does not arise from knowledge alone, nor from power alone, but requires a specifier—and that specifier, they claim, is the will. What reason truly affirms, however, is only that the genus of will specifies the genus of originated things: that this specific entity should be willed instead of that one is not entailed by the mere genus of will, unless the thing willed is distinguished by some cause that demands its being willed in preference to something else, and unless there exists within the willing agent a factor that obliges him to will this rather than that. Yet these thinkers maintain that will alone singles out one equivalent from another without any determinate cause, whether in the agent or in the object willed, even though its relation to all intended objects is exactly the same.

The great majority of rational people hold that the falsity of this claim is self-evident. If the will’s relation to all intended objects, their times, qualities, and forms were identical, then its preferring one equivalent over another would amount to a preference without a preferring cause. If such a thing were admissible, it would likewise be admissible to say that a capable agent could single out one equivalent over another without any will at all, in which case no will would exist—precisely the position of the Muʿtazilites of Baghdad. And if that were admissible, it would entail preferring