4 Introduction
rather than treacherous characters like Robert Alton Harris. Cases like those of
the alcoholic or drug addict struggling to resist their plight can be viewed either
in terms of what a person is free to overcome or instead in terms of the under-
lying physiology driving an addict’s or alcoholic’s cravings and decision-
making.
As is illustrated by reflecting upon the case of Harris, the philosophical con-
troversy regarding the freedom of the will is about the prospects for a distinctive
sort of agency. Put simply, are persons like Harris able to control their own
conduct? Likewise, was Dr. King, or the alcoholic, or any of us for that matter?
Do they possess and act from a sufficiently rich freedom enabling them to shape
themselves and their futures as they prefer and as they judge best? Can they, as
an upshot of this sort of freedom, be morally responsible for their conduct, and
so be justifiably held to account for how they treat themselves and others? And
what must the natural order be like for it to be true that persons do have free will
and thereby act freely? Must they be able to “free” themselves from the influ-
ences of their past to then act freely, or can their freedom still arise from within,
or instead, due to their histories? Or is the presumption of the freedom we
suppose people have really just mistaken and undermined by a more enlightened
understanding of the underlying hidden causes of the human condition?
There are at least four distinct philosophical questions regarding free will:
First, what is free will? What is its nature? Second, why is free will important?
What value, if any, does it bring to human life? Third, is free will compatible
with certain assumptions about the natural world? For instance, is it compatible
with determinism? Is it compatible with indeterminism? Whether determined or
undetermined, is it compatible with our being purely physical beings, part of a
natural order on a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom? Fourth, do
we possess free will and, sometimes, act freely? As we shall see, these questions
are usually not compartmentalized but are answered together as part of an overall
theory. Nevertheless, it is probably correct to say that contemporary philosophi-
cal discussions of free will have focused primarily on the third question, which
might be called the compatibility question. This book will be no exception to
that general trend. We will structure it around different approaches to answering
that question. It is in light of this question—Is free will compatible with
determinism?—that this topic is often characterized as one of the classical prob-
lems of philosophy, the problem of free will.
Our book is set out as follows:
Chapter 1 is devoted to getting clear on the main concepts in the debate, in
particular the concepts of free will, moral responsibility, and determinism. In
Chapter 2, we turn to explaining the free will problem and to showing that the
debate actually features a range of related problems, not just one. In Chapter 3,
we present the classical free will debate as we find it in the twentieth century
during the heyday of analytic philosophy.
In Chapters 4 through 6 we focus on three developments, all of which
occurred in the 1960s, that resulted in major changes to the way the free will