Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism 51

explicitly endorsed an account that retains the term “free will,” even though they
shared Locke’s concern that attributing freedom to the will itself was problem-
atic. For instance, Hobbes writes:

From the use of the word Free- will, no liberty can be inferred of the

will, desire, or inclination, but the Liberty of the man; which consisteth in

this, that he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination

to doe.^6

Hobbes’s claim is that free will is in fact a condition of action, and not a con-
dition of will.^7 Regardless of whether classical compatibilism is better described
as forsaking the notion of free will (as Locke advises), or instead as offering a
deflationary account of it (as Hobbes suggests), the classical compatibilists were
in agreement that the freedom at issue did not modify a condition of willing.
Whatever control is relevant for freedom, it is taken to be mistaken to think in
terms of a person’s freedom or control over her will; the right way to think of it
is as freedom of action.
To avoid confusion generated by the use of differing formulations, let us,
with Hobbes, characterize the freedom pertinent to classical compatibilism as
free will, keeping in mind that this notion is meant to be a deflationary one that
attributes nothing special to the will itself. We’ll define the first major com-
ponent of it as follows: the unencumbered ability of an agent to do what she
wants.^8 It is plausible to assume that this component of free will, so understood,
is compatible with determinism since the truth of determinism allows for agents
to do what they want to do unencumbered. It’s consistent with determinism, for
example, that an agent who wants to leave the room faces no impediments in
doing so—that there are, for example, no chains holding him back.
The classical compatibilist account of free will is often characterized as speci-
fying only negative freedom, as opposed to positive freedom. This might seem
puzzling since this account does feature both a positive aspect (doing what one
wants) and a negative aspect (being unencumbered). But according to this other
characterization, a positive account would analyze the requisite freedom by
attributing a power to the will itself, or to the agent who acts a power over and
above what is involved in the power to do what one wants. The classical com-
patibilists would reject any such proposal. On their view, given an agent’s ability
to act according to her desires, no other positive power needs to be added to it.
In advancing their account of free will, the classical compatibilists sometimes
distinguished between the liberty of spontaneity and the liberty of indifference.
The liberty of spontaneity just is the freedom to act as one wants without an
impediment. The liberty of indifference requires the ability to act without the
causal determination of a motivational state such as a desire. (We’ll discuss this
in more detail below.) Liberty of spontaneity, on the other hand, is compatible
with causal determination, since determination does not imply that no person
ever acts unencumbered. As might be expected, the classical compatibilists,
while embracing liberty of spontaneity, rejected outright liberty of indifference.