"Incompatibilism & Incompossibilism"

"Free Will & Determinism: Can we make progress without a paradigm shift?"

Abstract: What should we make of the suggestion that the age-old debate over the relationship between free will and determinism is puttering out in a stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists? Admittedly, our best arguments, including the Consequence Argument and the Manipulation Argument, seem to be cementing deadlock rather than resolving it. That said, it is unclear what the stalemate charge amounts to, partly because the complaint is stated in ambiguous technical jargon borrowed from the classical analytic paradigm (CAP), a research paradigm which most contemporary philosophers reject (cf. Peter van Inwagen). CAP was dominant during the 1960s to 1980s, but its popularity waned in the wake of Harry Frankfurt’s attacks on the classical “ability to do otherwise” characterization of free will and the uptake of Derk Pereboom’s proposal to use the term ‘free will’ to refer to the control condition on basic-desert moral responsibility. In this talk, I step back from CAP-based jargon and its “compatibility problem” narrative. I propose a new characterization of the problem of free will and determinism which better maps onto the dialectical contours of the contemporary debate, and also explains why CAP theorists believed there were only two viable solutions to this problem. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this alternative framework, I use it to answer outstanding questions about what the Consequence Argument is an argument for, to explain why it matters that Alfred Mele’s Zygote Argument does not have the same conclusion as Pereboom’s Four-Case Argument, and to highlight largely unexplored connections between the problem of free will and the paradox of moral luck.