The first and most persistent objection is obvious: if two options are exactly equal, why must a rational agent remain motionless? Critics have long suspected that the starving donkey is a philosopher’s simplification rather than a real psychological possibility. In ordinary life, symmetry is rare and even apparent symmetry hides differences of mood, memory, expectation, habit, or bodily state. The objection is not trivial, because if perfect equality never occurs, the case may be an artifact that proves little about actual choice. The scene is so clean, so stripped of contingency, that it can look less like a description of decision-making than a diagram of it.
Yet the force of the example survives precisely because it idealizes. Philosophers often isolate an extreme case to reveal a hidden commitment. Here the commitment is to a theory of reasons as decision-makers. If one says that rational action always follows the strongest reason, then what happens when there is no strongest reason? To dismiss the case as unrealistic is to concede that reasons alone may not settle everything. That concession can be made, but it is a concession all the same. The point is not that actual donkeys regularly face identical bales of hay at identical distances in identical weather. It is that a theory of choice must say what happens when the ordinary supports of preference are gone.
A second line of critique comes from the opposite direction. If the will can choose without a reason, then what differentiates free choice from randomness? Later readers, especially in the early modern period, worried that such freedom would look like chance in disguise. A decision that emerges from no distinguishing ground seems unintelligible, and unintelligibility can be expensive in philosophy. It threatens to make responsibility obscure, because if nothing explains why one option rather than another was taken, praise and blame lose their foothold. The moral stakes are high: a person who cannot be said to have chosen for any reason may still act, but the meaning of that action becomes difficult to recover.
Thomas Aquinas offers an important contrast here, even where the medieval landscape is more diverse than neat textbook oppositions suggest. On many standard readings, Aquinas allows for freedom through reasoned self-motion, but he is less willing than Buridan to let the will stand in a pure equilibrium of alternatives. The practical intellect can be open, but action need not be suspended indefinitely. That makes Aquinas attractive to those who want freedom without stalemate. It also exposes Buridan’s harder problem: a perfectly balanced will may need a source of motion that reason cannot supply. The issue is not merely academic. A theory that cannot explain why motion begins is vulnerable to the accusation that it has described deliberation but not decision.
Another major critic in the long debate is Duns Scotus, whose account of the will emphasizes its capacity for self-determination in a way that can seem to support freedom without simple necessitation. But Scotus and Buridan are not mirrors; their vocabularies differ, and scholars dispute the exact shape of the contrast. What matters is that medieval discussions did not share a single theory of freedom. Buridan’s donkey became memorable because it sat at the fault line between competing models of volition. It dramatized, in a single image, the pressure felt by a tradition trying to preserve both intelligibility and liberty.
A surprising turn in the history of the problem is that some objections came not from denying freedom, but from trying to preserve rationality at all costs. If the will can tip itself without reason, then perhaps rational explanation has reached its limit too soon. But if reason must always determine, then the will is a puppet. The tension is thus internal to the concept of agency. The dilemma is not between philosophy and common sense; it is between rival goods embedded in our ordinary idea of choice. This is why the case continued to attract attention long after the medieval schools had framed it. It asks not only what moves us, but what kind of explanation counts as a sufficient account of movement.
The philosophical price of Buridan’s view is that a person may not always know why they chose as they did. That opacity can look like authenticity to defenders and like danger to critics. A self that can move itself may also surprise itself. The result is a more dynamic human being, but also a less transparent one. Moral theology can live with that; many modern theories of action cannot. Once choice is severed too sharply from discernible reasons, the agent becomes harder to read, and the task of judging action—whether in confession, court, or conscience—becomes more uncertain.
There is also a pedagogical irony. The donkey image has made the issue famous precisely because it simplifies the theory into absurdity. Once the animal is starved, the theory is easy to mock. Yet the caricature can obscure the seriousness of the underlying claim: human decisions often occur under conditions where deliberation no longer yields a verdict. The ancient problem of akrasia, weakness of will, lurks nearby. So does the modern anxiety that perfectly rational agents may still be unable to act without a non-rational push. The image is comic, but the concern is not. In a lecture hall or a manuscript tradition, the point can be missed because the story is so memorable; in lived experience, the paralysis of indecision is far less amusing.
The strongest critique, then, is not that Buridan posed a silly example, but that his example reveals a real tension no theory can entirely avoid. If reasons settle everything, freedom thins out; if they do not, then choice acquires an element that reason cannot fully master. The donkey is an emblem of that unresolved restlessness. The problem does not disappear by refusing the thought experiment. It persists in any account of agency that wants to preserve both order and openness.
By the end of the dispute, Buridan’s idea has been both sharpened and strained. The question is no longer whether the starving animal is plausible, but whether philosophy can explain action without either collapsing it into necessity or dissolving it into chance. The fire has tested the idea; what remains is to see how the problem travels after the medieval classroom has gone quiet. The chapter’s enduring force lies in that pressure. Buridan’s Ass is not simply a joke about indecision. It is a compressed argument about what a rational creature owes to reasons, and what happens when reasons no longer suffice.