One of the central problems within the free will debate lies in the apparent incompatibility of an agent's ability to do otherwise and determinism. Recently, compatibilist libertarianism was proposed as an actualist position intended to finally reconcile both. In this article, we argue that in order to maintain consistency, this position must be understood as a variant of classical compatibilism rather than a version of libertarianism. Though this seems to be an undesired consequence for proponents of compatibilist libertarianism, we think (...) that it is not that bad. We show that recent objections to this position can be avoided by embracing its compatibilist nature and argue that a modified version of compatibilist libertarianism might very well be as close to an actualist account of free will in a deterministic world as one can hope for. (shrink)

Strong notions of free will are closely connected to the possibility to do otherwise as well as to an agent’s ability to causally influence her environment via her decisions controlling her actions. In this paper we employ techniques from the causal modeling literature to investigate whether a notion of free will subscribing to one or both of these requirements is compatible with naturalistic views of the world such as non-reductive physicalism to the background of determinism and indeterminism. We argue that (...) from a causal modeler’s perspective the only possibility to get both requirements consists in subscribing to reductive physicalism and indeterminism. (shrink)

List (2014, 2019) has recently argued for a particular view of free will as a higher-level phenomenon compatible with determinism. According to List, one could refute his account by showing that determinism at the physical level implies the impossibility of doing otherwise at the agential level. This paper takes up that challenge. Based on assumptions to which List’s approach is committed, I provide a simple probabilistic model that establishes the connection between physical determinism and the impossibility of doing otherwise at (...) the agential level that is needed to refute free will as a higher-level phenomenon. (shrink)