Libertarianism and Skepticism about Free Will

On one way of putting things, incompatibilism is the view that in some important sense free will (and/or moral responsibility) is incompatible with determinism. Incompatibilism is typically taken to come in two species: libertarianism, which holds that we are free and responsible (and correspondingly, that determinism does not hold), and skeptical incompatibilism.1 The latter includes views such as hard determinism, which hold that we are not free (and/or responsible) and views that argue that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, among others. In this paper, I attempt to provide positive arguments against both of the primary strands of incompatibilism. The first aim of this paper is to take some steps toward filling in an argument that is often mentioned but seldom developed in any detail—the argument that libertarianism is a scientifically implausible view. I say “take some steps” because I think the considerations I muster (at most) favor a less ambitious relative of that argument. The less ambitious claim I hope to motivate is that there is little reason to believe that extant libertarian accounts satisfy a standard of naturalistic plausibility, even if they do satisfy a standard of naturalistic compatibility. The second aim of this paper is to argue against skepticism about free will without denying the presence of incompatibilist intuitions. Indeed, I am