The Zygote Argument Is Still Invalid: So What?

Abstract

In “The Zygote Argument is Invalid: Now What?”, Kristin Mickelson argues that Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Argument is invalid: its two premises tell us merely that the truth of determinism is (perhaps spuriously) correlated with the absence of free human agents, but the argument nonetheless concludes with a specific explanation for that correlation, namely that deterministic laws (of the sort described by determinism) preclude—rule out, destroy, undermine, make impossible, rob us of—free will. In a recent essay, Gabriel De Marco grants that the original Zygote Argument is invalid for the reasons that Mickelson has identified, and claims that he has developed two new solutions to her invalidity objection. In this essay, I argue that both of his proposed solutions are nonstarters, the first fails as a “rescue” because it simply restates an extant solution in new jargon and the second fails because it consists in another invalid variant of the original Zygote Argument.