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In a book I once wrote about free will, I contended that the best and most important argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism was “the Consequence Argument.” I gave the following brief sketch of the Consequence Argument as a prelude to several more careful and detailed statements of the argument: If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.[i] The reading that follows this one, Reading 41, “The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom,” contains a statement of the Consequence Argument. The argument is contained in the paragraph (p. xxx) that starts, “As Carl Ginet has said . . . .” But, as you will see if you compare the “brief sketch” with that paragraph, “The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom” presents the Consequence Argument in a disguise that is not easy to penetrate. Some teachers of philosophy who have used the first edition of Metaphysics: The Big Questions as a textbook have asked for a more straightforward statement of the Consequence Argument (since much of the recent discussion of the question of the compatibility of free will and determinism in the philosophical literature has taken the form of criticisms of the Consequence Argument that are rather hard to apply to the argument in the form in which it is presented in Reading 41). This essay is an attempt to meet this request.

The consequence argument is at the core of contemporary incompatibilism about causal determinism and freedom of action. Yet Helen Beebee and Alfred Mele have shown how, on a Humean conception of laws of nature, the consequence argument is unsound. Nonetheless, this paper describés how, by generalising their main idea, we may restore the essential point and force (whatever that might turn out to be) of the consequence argument. A modified incompatibilist argument — which will be called the so-far consequence argument — may thus be derived.

Peter van Inwagen has offered two versions of an influential argument that has come to be called ‘the Consequence Argument’. The Consequence Argument purports to demonstrate that determinism is incompatible with free will.1 It aims to show that, if we assume determinism, we are committed to the claim that, for all propositions p, no one has or ever had any choice about p. Unfortunately, the original Consequence Argument employed an inference rule (the β-rule) that was shown to be invalid. (McKay and Johnson 1996) In response, van Inwagen revised his argument. I shall argue that the conclusion of the revised Consequence Argument is wholly independent of the premiss of determinism, and hence that the revised Consequence Argument is useless in showing that determinism is incompatible with free will.

Incompatibilism about freedom and causal determinism is commonly supported by appeal to versions of the well known Consequence argument. Critics of the Consequence argument have presented counterexamples to the Consequence argument's central inference principle. The thesis of this article is that proponents of the Consequence argument can easily bypass even the best of these counterexamples.