The Revisionist Turn: A Brief History of Recent Work on Free Will

I’ve been told that in the good old days of the 1970s, when Quine’s desert landscapes were regarded as ideal real estate and David Lewis and John Rawls had not yet left a legion of influential students rewriting the terrain of metaphysics and ethics respectively, compatibilism was still compatibilism about free will. And, of course, incompatibilism was still incompatibilism about free will. That is, compatibilism was the view that free will was compatible with determinism. Incompatibilism was the view that free will was incompatible with determinism. 1 What philosophers argued about was whether free will was compatible with determinism. Mostly, this was an argument about how to understand claims that one could do otherwise. You did not need to talk about moral responsibility, because it was obvious that you couldn’t have moral responsibility without free will. The literature was a temple of clarity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.