Are we free? What does "freedom" mean here? In the following, I shall only focus with freedom of action. My main thesis is that there is not just one basic type of free action but more. Philosophers, however, tend to assume that there is just one way to act freely. Hence, a more detailed analysis of free action is being called for. I will distinguish between different kinds of free action and discuss the relations between them. The analysis of different (...) types of coercion will lead to a different view on freedom – a view which stresses the many faces of free action. (shrink)

The consequence argument of van Inwagen is widely regarded as the best argument for incompatibilism. Lewis’s response is praised by van Inwagen as the best compatibilist’s strategy but Lewis himself acknowledges that his strategy resembles that of Lehrer. A comparison will show that one can speak about Lehrer-Lewis strategy, although I think that Lewis’s variation is dialectically slightly stronger. The paper provides a response to some standard objections of incompatibilists to the Lehrer-Lewis reply.

I insist that I was able to raise my hand, and I acknowledge that a law would have been broken had I done so, but I deny that I am therefore able to break a law. To uphold my instance of soft determinism, I need not claim any incredible powers. To uphold the compatibilism that I actually believe, I need not claim that such powers are even possible. My incompatibilist opponent is a creature of fiction, but he has his prototypes (...) in real life. He is modeled partly after Peter van Inwagen and partly on myself when I first worried about van Inwagen's argument against compatibilism. (shrink)

An influential version of the Consequence argument, the most famous argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, goes as follows: For an agent to be able to do otherwise, there has to be a possible world with the same laws and the same past as her actual world in which she does otherwise. However, if the actual world is deterministic, there is no such world. Hence, no agent in a deterministic world can ever do otherwise. In this paper, (...) I discuss a recent version of this argument due to Christopher Franklin: the ‘No Opportunity argument’. I argue that the No Opportunity argument overgeneralizes. If its premises were true, things would be obstacles to doing otherwise that have nothing to do with determinism and that intuitively are not obstacles. (shrink)

I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of (...) meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will. (shrink)

Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...) compatibilist denies that determinism has the consequences the incompatibilist thinks it has. According to the compatibilist, the truth of determinism does not preclude the existence of free will. (Even if we learned tomorrow that determinism is true, it might still be true that we have free will.) The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of understanding, how, if at all, the truth of determinism might be compatible with the truth of our belief that we have free will. That is, it's the problem of deciding who is right: the compatibilist or the incompatibilist. (shrink)

“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...) closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action. (Clearly, there will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as being aware—or failing that, being culpably unaware—of relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives' moral significance.) But the significance of free will is not exhausted by its connection to moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a condition on desert for one's accomplishments (why sustained effort and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy and dignity of persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. (See Kane 1996, 81ff. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1.). (shrink)

I explore some issues in the logics and dialectics of practical modalities connected with the Consequence Argument (CA) considered as the best argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to Lewis (1981) in one of the possible senses of (in)ability, the argument is not valid; however, understood in the other of its possible senses, the argument is not sound. This verdict is based on the assessment of the modal version of the argument, where the crucial notion is (...) power necessity (“no choice” operator), while Lewis analyses the version where the central notion is the locution “cannot render false.”Lewis accepts closure of the relevant (in)ability operator under entailment but not closure under implication. His strategy has a seemingly strange corollary: a free predetermined agent is able (in a strong, causal sense) to falsity the conjunction of history and law. I compare a Moorean position with respect to radical skepticism and knowledge closure with ability closure and propose to explain Lewis’s strategy in the framework of his Moorean stance. (shrink)

Helen Beebee has recently argued that David Lewis’s account of compatibilism, so-called local miracle compatibilism, allows for the possibility that agents in deterministic worlds have the ability to break or cause the breaking of a law of nature. Because Lewis’s LMC allows for this consequence, Beebee claims that LMC is untenable and subsequently that Lewis’s criticism of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument for incompatibilism is substantially weakened. I review Beebee’s argument against Lewis’s thesis and argue that Beebee has not refuted LMC (...) and concomitantly has not demonstrated that Lewis’s criticism of the Consequence Argument fails. (shrink)

Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because that there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. According to consequentialism an action A is wrong if and only if there was another action B that the agent could have performed such that, if the agent had performed B instead of A, the consequences would have been better. Relatively little attention has (...) been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of ‘could have’ in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that the following conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism: the agent could have done B instead of A if and only if, there is a decision such that had the agent made this decision, then she would have done B, and not A. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of ‘could have’, but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of ‘could have’ in a consequentialist criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to identify different sorts of freedom putatively linked to moral responsibility; I then explore the relationship between such notions of freedom and the Consequence Argument, on the one hand, and the Frankfurt-examples, on the other. I focus (in part) on a dilemma: if a compatibilist adopts a broadly speaking "conditional" understanding of freedom in reply to the Consequence Argument, such a theorist becomes vulnerable in a salient way to the Frankfurt-examples.

Keith Lehrer has been publishing on free will and compatiblism since 1960. Our concern here is to present an account of the development on his work on the subject.

This paper revisits a well-known rebuttal of Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument. This CS-rebuttal, as I shall call it, focuses on the counterfactual structure of alternative possibilities. It shows that the ability to do otherwise is such that if the agent had exercised it, the distant past and/or the laws of nature would have been different. On the counterfactual scenario, there is, therefore, no need for the agent to exercise an ability to change the past or the laws of nature. (...) I first present van Inwagen’s original version of the consequence argument. After exposing some difficulties with Lewis’ famous version of the CS-rebuttal, I proceed by explaining and defending an older and, in my view, superior version. I subsequently discuss a traditional incompatibilist rejoinder, which insists that the past and the laws of nature are fixed. Although this rejoinder delivers a valid argument against the existence of alternative possibilities, it relies on premises the compatibilist explicitly rejects. The outcome of the debate is therefore properly characterized as a genuine dialectical stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. In the final sections of the paper, I demonstrate that attempts by Fischer, Holliday and Fischer and Pendergraft to move beyond the stalemate in favor of the incompatibilist position all fail. I thereby show that the debate is marred by a misunderstanding of the semantics underlying the backtracking conditionals sometimes associated with the compatibilist position. In view of my arguments, the dialectical stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists regarding the counterfactual structure of the ability to do otherwise remains fully intact. (shrink)

The objection to R-S accounts that was raised by the possibility of external agents requires the acceptance of two premises, viz., that all R-S accounts allow for puppeteers and that puppeteers necessarily make us unfree. The Metaphilosophical reply shows that to the extent that puppeteers are more problematic than determinism per se, pup-peteers may be explicitly excluded since they violate our paradigm of free will. The Metaphilosophical reply also suggests that we should not expect our mature R-S account to supply (...) logically necessary and sufficient conditions for free will, but rather give us answers that agree with our intuitions regarding paradigms of free and unfree decisions. The Irrelevancy reply completed our reply to incompatibilists who continue to object that determinism per se destroys the R-S program. It may be debated whether my autonomy variable account is a satisfactory way to spell out the Irrelevancy reply, but I think that this type of approach suggests the way to vindicating the R-S view from an important type of objection. (shrink)