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Summary | Traditionally philosophers have held that free will requires the power to choose from among conflicting alternatives: agents act with free will only when they could have refrained from acting as they did. This claim played an important role in explaining the centrality of the compatibility question: did determinism rule out the power to act otherwise? Classical compatibilists argued that agents could indeed act otherwise, developing conditional analyses of this power (for instance an agent can act otherwise if, had they wanted to, they would have acted otherwise). More recently, Frankfurt-style cases, in which an agent lacks alternatives due to the presence of a merely counterfactual intervener, have seemed to many to show that the power to do otherwise is not required either for free will or for moral responsibility. |
Key works | Hume 1998 is an important early state of the conditional analysis of the power to do otherwise; Ayer 1954 is an influential 20th century version. Chisholm 1964 is an important critique of the conditional analysis. Frankfurt 1969 transformed the entire debate, leading many philosophers to think that alternative possibilities were not necessary for free will. Widerker & McKenna 2003 collects many of the most important papers in this debate. Recently there has been a revival of compatibilist accounts of alternative possibilities, by dispositionalist compatibiists. See, for instance, Vihvelin 2004. |
Introductions | McKenna 2008; Fischer 2002 |
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Siblings:
- Determinism (798)
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- Free Will and Responsibility (965)
- Free Will and Foreknowledge (288)
- Responsibility and Reactive Attitudes (390)
- The Consequence Argument (136)
- Topics in Free Will, Misc (442)
- Moral Responsibility (2,927 | 569)
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