The Problem of Determinism and Free Will Is Not the Problem of Determinism and Free Will

Abstract

Incompatibilism about determinism and free will is typically formulated as the claim that free will is impossible in a deterministic world: every possible world where determinism obtains is a world without free will. Van Inwagen’s “consequence argument” (van Inwagen, 1983, ch. 3) is often taken to support that claim. Recently, however, it has been suggested that the consequence argument does not support incompatibilism, since it rests on at least one contingent assumption—such as the assumption that there is a past, or the assumption that there is a past without any human beings (see Warfield, 2000, and Campbell, 2007).1 If the argument indeed relies on an assumption that is at best contingently true, then it cannot be used to show that free will is absent in every deterministic world. Furthermore, the objection appears to be more far-reaching than previously noticed: a similar objection can be raised against other key arguments for incompatibilism (see Bailey, 2012). In what follows I refer to objections of this kind as “contingency objections.” Proponents of contingency objections believe that the fact that the relevant incompatibilist arguments are subject to those objections shows that the arguments are flawed in some important way.2 I argue that the lesson we should draw from that fact is significantly different. Contingency objections OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Tue May 06 2014, NEWGEN