32 The Free Will Problem
determinism is true.^3 But most are committed to the thesis that even if it is, this
would have no bearing on whether persons have free will. One can endorse this
compatibilist position even while strongly believing, perhaps in light of respect-
able scientific evidence, that determinism is false. The “soft” in the expression
“soft determinism” is meant to be descriptive of an accommodating position
about what is consistent with determinism’s truth—that it does not preclude free
will and moral responsibility.^4
Hard determinism is in a certain respect a dated thesis that does not usefully
apply to the current debates. This is because many who are inclined to the main
insight of the hard determinist position allow that determinism may be false, but
even if it is, that the sort of indeterminism that remains, say in the form of
almost- determinism, mechanism, or naturalism, is no more compatible with free
will than determinism is. These philosophers, hard incompatibilists, have taken
up the hard determinists’ cause and refined it to address a contemporary way of
approaching the debate:
Hard incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with deter-
minism (incompatibilism is true), that either determinism is true or a form
of indeterminism is true which is also incompatible with free will, and so no
one has free will regardless of whether determinism is true or false.Hard incompatibilism as defined here is consistent with the metaphysical pos-
sibility that some persons have free will. Because hard incompatibilism
includes incompatibilism, it is committed to the thesis that it is metaphysically
impossible for persons to have free will in any world in which determinism is
true. But it permits the metaphysical possibility that indeterminism is true in a
way that is consistent with persons having free will. It is only committed to the
empirical thesis that the form of indeterminism that we have reason to believe
is true (perhaps in the form of mechanism or naturalism) is not enough to
permit the existence of free will. So as an empirical fact about the world
we inhabit, no one has free will, and hence, no one is morally responsible
(Pereboom, 2001, 2014).
Hard incompatibilism, so defined, like its predecessor hard determinism, is a
kind of skepticism about free will. It involves a particular way of advancing this
form of skepticism. But there is a more general view to be identified here:
Free will skepticism is the thesis that no one has free will, or at the very
least, that we have insufficient reason to believe that any one does have
free will.While hard incompatibilism as we have defined it is a form of free will skepti-
cism, it is not as modally strong as other versions are. It leaves open that
some person in some possible world (not ours) has free will. Stronger forms of
skepticism would deny this. Here, then, is a more stringent form of free will
skepticism: