Abstract
It’s called “the problem of free will and determinism,” but much depends on what determinism is taken to mean and entail. Incompatibilists claim that it is impossible for people to have free will and moral responsibility if determinism is true, and they often suggest that this is the natural position to take, supported by our pre-theoretical intuitions. Robert Kane, for instance, states that “ordinary persons start out as natural incompatibilists” (1999, 217), and Galen Strawson claims that “it is in our nature to take determinism to pose a serious problem for our notions of responsibility and freedom” (1986, 89). Sometimes people take “determinism” to mean “the opposite of free will,” in which case incompatibilism is indeed intuitive, but at the cost of being an empty tautology. In philosophical debates, determinism has a technical meaning: a complete description of the state of the universe at one time and of the laws of nature logically entails a complete description of the state of the universe at any later time.1 However, it is not obvious why determinism, defined in this way, is supposed to be incompatible with free will; rather, a further explanation of just why determinism precludes some ability associated with free will seems required. The explanations generally offered by incompatibilists are that determinism precludes either (i) the ability to choose among alternative possibilities for action, while holding fixed the actual past and the laws of nature (AP), or (ii) the ability to be the ultimate source of one’s actions, such that one is ultimately responsible for some aspect of the conditions that led up to one’s actions (US).
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© 2011 Eddy Nahmias, Dylan Murray
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Nahmias, E., Murray, D. (2011). Experimental Philosophy on Free Will: An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions. In: Aguilar, J.H., Buckareff, A.A., Frankish, K. (eds) New Waves in Philosophy of Action. New Waves in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304253_10
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