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.

This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts (...) of laws: "Humean" regularity accounts, laws as relations among universals, and the dispositional essentialist account. I argue that there is nothing in the very nature of a law - in any of the accounts surveyed - that implies a positive answer to questions (i) and (ii). I show that this has important consequences for the free will problem. I then turn to the compatibility of free will and determinism. I focus on the Humean view and the dispositional essentialist account of laws. And the bulk of this discussion concerns the consequence argument, especially the question of whether the laws of nature are "up to us". I show that, on the dispositional conception of laws, there is no sense in which the laws of nature are up to us, contrary to the Humean view. However, this does not mean that there is no room for free will on the dispositional account. I argue that free will requires the laws of nature to be limited in scope, rather than being indeterministic. I conclude by showing that this allows one to resist the claim that indeterminism rules out free will. (shrink)

I refute Bailey's claim that his argument for incompatibilism is immune to Campbell's No Past Objection. In my refutation I stress a simple point, that nomological necessitation by future world states does not undermine one's freedom with respect to the present world state. My analysis reveals that the No Past Objection challenges van Inwagen's second consequence argument about as much as it does the others, and suggests that the (uncompromising) incompatibilist must pursue some of the options that Bailey regarded as (...) costly in order to overcome the No Past Objection. (shrink)

Helen Steward holds that an agent’s settling something does not require a conscious, full-fledged intention. Rather, sub-intentional acts can be instances of settling by the agent if that act is subordinated to the agent’s personal-level conscious systems. I argue that this position is mistaken, and that agential settling does in fact require a conscious intention. I argue for this claim by offering a case which on Steward’s position has counterintuitive implications. I consider a variety of ways in which Steward might (...) respond, and show how each response incurs serious dialectical burdens. I then propose my preferred view of agential settling which does not share the aforementioned counterintuitive claims. (shrink)

The consequence argument for the incompatibility of free action and determinism has long been under attack, but two important objections have only recently emerged: Warfield’s modal fallacy objection and Campbell’s no past objection. In this paper, I explain the significance of these objections and defend the consequence argument against them. First, I present a novel formulation of the argument that withstands their force. Next, I argue for the one controversial claim on which this formulation relies: the trans-temporality thesis. This thesis (...) implies that an agent acts freely only if there is one time at which she is able to perform an action and a distinct time at which she actually performs it. I then point out that determinism, too, is a thesis about trans-temporal relations. I conclude that it is precisely because my formulation of the consequence argument emphasizes trans-temporality that it prevails against the modal fallacy and no past objections. (shrink)

There is a new objection to the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism. I argue that the objection is more wide-ranging than originally thought. In particular: if it tells against the Consequence Argument, it tells against other arguments for incompatibilism too. I survey a few ways of dealing with this objection and show the costs of each. I then present an argument for incompatibilism that is immune to the objection and that enjoys other advantages.