Abstract

Traditional compatibilism is the view that free will is compatible with determinism. Humean-law compatibilism (a.k.a. weak-law compatibilism), is the view that free will is compatible with determinism, where determinism is defined in terms of a broadly Humean view of the laws of nature. A growing number of philosophers hold that Humean-law compatibilists are targeted by and have special resources to resist arguments for traditional incompatibilism, including the Consequence Argument (cf. Beebee and Mele 2002, Perry 2004, Hetherington 2006, Berofsky 2012, Mele 2013). In this paper, I argue that Humean-law compatibilism is not a proper target of the Consequence Argument and that Humean-law compatibilists have no unique resources to show that the Consequence Argument is unsound. Moreover, I attribute the rise of the paradoxical notion of Humean determinism, upon which Humean compatibilism is based, to Peter van Inwagen’s failed attempt to capture the traditional metaphysical doctrine of determinism (as he himself characterizes it) in the impoverished language of symbolic logic. For the most recent version of this manuscript, plz gmail me: kristin.mickelson.42