Online research in philosophy

Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article's aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism?the consequence argument?has a false premiss. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view. For example, standard libertarians face a problem about luck, and we show that Humean compatibilists face a very similar problem.

If our actions are mostly free, then our doxastic attitudes are mostly free. According to compatibilism, our actions are mostly free. So if the thesis of equal doxastic freedom is true, compatibilism entails that our doxastic attitudes are mostly free. Hence the thesis I will defend is: Compatibilist Doxastic Freedom Compatibilism entails that our actions and our doxastic attitudes are mostly free. My argument in defense of this claim will be that the compatibility of freedom and causal determination is not obvious; it needs explanation. Various explanations can be offered. If we apply these explanations to our doxastic attitudes, we are going to see that there is little reason to think that our doxastic attitudes are less free than our actions.

The debate over free will has pittedlibertarian insistence on open alternativesagainst the compatibilist view that authenticcommitments can preserve free will in adetermined world. A second schism in the freewill debate sets rationalist belief in thecentrality of reason against nonrationalistswho regard reason as inessential or even animpediment to free will. By looking deeperinto what motivates each of these perspectivesit is possible to find common ground thataccommodates insights from all those competingviews. The resulting metacompatibilist view offree will bridges some of the differencesbetween compatibilists and incompatibilists aswell as between rationalists andnonrationalists, and results in a free willtheory that is both more philosophicallyinclusive and more firmly connected tocontemporary research in psychology andbiology.

I argue that God could give us the robust power to do other than we do in a deterministic universe.

This paper suggests that the arguments for compatibilism are invalid because they use incompatible definitions of causal determinism and free will, an illegitimate definition of free will, and a logical fallacy concerning free will and morality.