Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Determinism

This chapter provides characterizations of free will, moral responsibility, and determinism. It considers a range of related matters, such as what the will is, and it introduce the notions of indeterminism, mechanism, and naturalism. Free will is the strongest control condition necessary for moral responsibility. One would think, just given the expression free will itself, that those who use it assume that there is a power or faculty as the will, and when considering whether one has free will, they are asking whether that power can be regarded as free. Philosophers in the Humean tradition often opt to understand free will just in terms of acting freely. Others hold that important distinctions are lost if the discussion is restricted to freedom of action, and that a distinct notion of free will needs to be invoked. The sort of indeterminism discussed here, almost-determinism, and mechanism, as well as determinism itself, might all be captured under the very general umbrella of naturalism.