“The Minority Report” functions as an in-depth exploration of the philosophical question of free will vs. determinism. Anderton is faced with a question: knowing that he has been predicted to murder a man he has never met within a week, will he commit the murder? Or does he have the option to change his actions and prevent it? One way of reading the story is by tracing the different ways Anderton answers this question. In the first half of the story, Anderton is convinced that he is being framed, that he has no intention of murdering Kaplan, and that he must exercise his free will to flee Earth for another planet and thus make it impossible for him to commit the murder. However, during the second half of the story Anderton is forced to grapple with the possibility that if he has been wrongly accused, then possibly others have too, which suggests that the predictions of the precogs can be changed, and that people have free will to change their minds. The discussion is further complicated by the fact that Anderton himself actively decides to murder Kaplan, thus seemingly exercising his free will in order to fulfill the path that has been determined for him by the precogs. In the end, the story lands in a middle ground, in which it is only those who have the burden of foreknowledge who are able to escape the determinism of the precogs, and thus it is only those who are able to read the precogs’ predictions who have free will.
