Compatibilist views of freedom and responsibility

Abstract

The term “free will” has emerged over the past twomillennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind ofcontrol over one’s actions. Questions concerning thenature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it requireand do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power ofself-determination?), and what its true significance is (is itnecessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been takenup in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the mostimportant philosophical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine,Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. (We cannot undertake here a review ofrelated discussions in other philosophical traditions. For a start,the reader may consult Marchal and Wenzel 2017 and Chakrabarti 2017for overviews of thought on free will, broadly construed, in Chineseand Indian philosophical traditions, respectively.) In this way, itshould be clear that disputes about free will ineluctably involvedisputes about metaphysics and ethics. In ferreting out the kind ofcontrol at stake in free will, we are forced to consider questionsabout (among others) causation, laws of nature, time, substance,ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal andreasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and moregenerally of human persons. In assessing the significance of freewill, we are forced to consider questions about (among others)rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame andpraise, reward and punishment, and desert. The topic of free will alsogives rise to purely empirical questions that are beginning to beexplored in the human sciences: do we have it, and to what degree?, Here is an overview of what follows. In Section 1, weacquaint the reader with some central historical contributions to ourunderstanding of free will. (As nearly every major and minor figurehad something to say about it, we cannot begin to cover them all.) Aswith contributions to many other foundational topics, these ideas arenot of ‘merely historical interest’: present-dayphilosophers continue to find themselves drawn back to certainthinkers as they freshly engage their contemporaries. In Section2, we map the complex architecture of the contemporary discussionof the nature of free will by dividing it into five subtopics: itsrelation to moral responsibility; the proper analysis of the freedomto do otherwise; a powerful, recent argument that the freedom to dootherwise (at least in one important sense) is not necessaryfor moral responsibility; ‘compatibilist’ accounts ofsourcehood or self-determination; and ‘incompatibilist’ or‘libertarian’ accounts of source and self-determination.In Section 3, we consider arguments from experience, a priorireflection, and various scientific findings and theories for andagainst the thesis that human beings have free will, along with therelated question of whether it is reasonable to believe that we haveit. Finally, in Section 4, we survey the long-debatedquestions involving free will that arise in classical theisticmetaphysics.