46 The Free Will Problem
Kane, Robert. 2005. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Strawson, P.F. 1992. “Freedom and Necessity,” Chapter 10, Analysis and Metaphysics:
An Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Timpe, Kevin. 2008. Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives. New York: Continuum
Press.
van Inwagen, Peter. 1993. “The Powers of Rational Beings: Free Will,” Chapter 11,
Meta physics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
For a spirited essay criticizing our preferred way of framing the free will
problem, see:
van Inwagen, Peter. 2008. “How to Think About the Problem of Free Will.” Journal of
Ethics 12 (3–4): 327–41.
For an excellent book- length treatment that builds on van Inwagen’s way of
framing the free will problem, see:
Vihvelin, Kadri. 2013. Causes, Laws, & Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Notes
1 Some philosophers pry apart the conditions for free will and the conditions for moral
responsibility in a way that would make possible incompatibilism about free will and
compatibilism about moral responsibility. They make a considerable deal about there
being different compatibility questions. (Of course, philosophers who argue this way
would not do so by treating free will in terms of being a necessary condition for moral
responsibility.)
2 An even stronger version of soft determinism includes the thesis that free will requires
determinism (Hobart, 1934; Hume, 1748). The truth of indeterminism would, on this
view, undermine free will.
3 For example, see David Lewis, who explicitly distinguishes compatibilism from soft
determinism, and claims that while he is a compatibilist, he is not a soft determinist
(Lewis, 1981).
4 It is easy to be misled by the language of hard and soft determinism into thinking that
the words “hard” and “soft” modify determinism, so that, if determinism is true, on
the hard approach, that means that events are determined in an especially strict or
strong or tough way; whereas, if determinism is true on the soft approach, that means
that events that are determined are determined in a gentler way, perhaps by there
being some permissible range of outcomes but not that many. This is a misunder-
standing to be avoided. On either soft determinism or hard determinism, there is no
variation in what it is for something to be determined; it’s that it is the only thing that
was physically possible, given the past and the laws. The variation on these competi-
tor views—hard or soft—is only about what conclusions we should draw, given the
assumption of determinism regarding freedom and responsibility, not about how
“hard” or “soft” the thesis of determinism is.
5 See Wilfred Sellars (1966: 145).