Question

Imagine you are instructed to stay in a room for an hour and wait. Unbeknownst to you, the only exit from the room is locked from the outside. Still, you voluntarily sit in the room patiently. After an hour, someone unlocks and opens the door—you never come to know that it was locked at all. Was your confinement in that room for that hour a free choice? Explain.

Answer 1

Free will, in layman, is free choice. Speaking in simple terms, the existence of free will is spoken about prolifically in a certain branch of philosophy called, Libertarianism, the antithesis of which is determinism.

In the scenario mentioned above, free will, for that one hour of confinement in the room, wouldn't hold true as the theory is based on the premise that the agent should be able to make a decision or take a course of action more than the one that has been imposed under a given set of circumstances.  

The set of circumstances, even though the individual in question is oblivious of, are the confinement in a room, which is - veritably - locked from the outside for an entire hours duration; which subsequently insinuates that the set of circumstances, which the individual has been put under, do not provide the individual with the power or the ability to make or take a course of action that could be plausible/possible under the given conditions.

Although, one could also argue that the voluntary decision to sit in the room is also taking a particular course of action, which is deemed plausible/possible under the given set of conditions, which further proves the existence of free will, but that is only if we chose to override physical causality.

There exists a dialectic approach between the two theories, and there can't be a single well defined answer for one school of thought as both posits can pose an equally handsome argument claiming one over the other. The synchronicity betwixt the two is where one can find the semblance of an answer.