54 Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism
person’s self, a person could act “out of character,” thereby resisting her natural
(that is, causally influenced) inclinations. But, in similar fashion, compatibilists
attempted to explain the phenomena of acting out of character by showing that,
even in such a case, some aspect of an agent’s character figured in the cause of
the agent’s action.
A final alleged confusion involves a failure to distinguish different kinds of
freedom. Hume wrote:
Few are capable of distinguishing betwixt the liberty of spontaneity and the
liberty of indifference; betwixt that which is oppos’d to violence, and that
which means the negation of necessity and causes. The first is even the most
common sense of the word; and as ’tis only that species of liberty, which it
concerns us to preserve, our thoughts have been principally turn’d towards
it, and have almost universally confounded it with the other.^11It’s clear that we are often free from “violence”—compulsion, constraint, or
coercion—and this sort of freedom does not require indeterminism. Some classi-
cal compatibilists claim that it’s only when we fail to distinguish this kind of
freedom from a sort that requires indeterminism that the temptation to incompat-
ibilism arises.
From the contemporary vantage point, the classical compatibilists’ contention
that incompatibilism rests only on confusions seems somewhat obtuse. It’s one
thing to claim that a philosophical thesis is false, or is not supported by the best
reasons, but it is quite another to suggest that no good reasons speak for it at all,
that it is, really, a philosophical non- starter. Does incompatibilism rest entirely
on confusion, on for instance, a conflation between causation and compulsion?
Reflect upon the considerations speaking on behalf of incompatibilism as set out
above (in Section 2.3). There, two different intuitive sources for incompatibilism
were explored. One had to do with understanding free will in terms of leeway
freedom modeled on a garden of forking paths into the future. Another had to do
with understanding free will in terms of source freedom. From each intuitive
source, and working with the proposition that determinism is true, different
formulations of a free will problem were constructed (formulations F5 and F6).
Now, perhaps careful thought might reveal that each of these problems can be
resolved in favor of a compatibilist conclusion, but it is hard to understand how
either of these plausible intuitive sources of incompatibilist concern could be
explained away in terms of assuming that all causes compel, or by way of any of
the other conceptual confusions that classical compatibilists attributed to incom-
patibilist thinking. The classical compatibilist charge that incompatibilism is all
illusion—a mere pseudo- problem—looks to be mostly unsubstantiated polemics,
mere bluster that ignores the serious reflections that would give a reasonable and
fair- minded inquirer grounds to question whether a determined agent could act
with freedom of will.