Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism 57

own uncompelled desires and acting unencumbered are necessary for free will,
they will not capture what is required for free will independently of a condition
that rules out causal determination. If this is right, the incompatibilist can build
off the classical compatibilist account by tacking on a condition that the classical
compatibilist cannot accept. Here is what she might specify as an adequate
account of a free action:

An agent acts freely if and only if, (1) she does what she wants; (2) she acts

unencumbered; and (3) she could have done otherwise.

Can the classical compatibilist answer this classical incompatibilist objection by
showing that, contrary to what the incompatibilist might think, a determined
agent can satisfy all three conditions?
Some compatibilists did not take up this incompatibilist challenge. They
opted for a one- way freedom—source freedom—requiring only that what a
person did do, she did unencumbered as an upshot of her own agency. Thus, the
one- way compatibilists settled for satisfaction of the conditions 1 and 2 above,
while not attempting to account for condition 3. But mainline classical compati-
bilists took the challenge seriously and argued for two- way freedom—that is,
leeway freedom. Mainline classical compatibilists defended a Garden of Forking
Paths model of control. They responded by accounting for an agent’s ability to
do otherwise in hypothetical or conditional terms. Here, for example, is how
Hume meant to capture the ability to do otherwise:

By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, accord-

ing to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest,

we remain at rest; if we chose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical

liberty is allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.

Here, then, there is no subject of dispute.^14

Notice that in this brief passage Hume mentions all three conditions, doing what
one wants (in Hume’s terms, acting as one chooses); doing so unencumbered
(not being a prisoner in chains); and being able to do otherwise, captured hypo-
thetically: if we choose to remain at rest we do, if we choose to move we do.
Consider how similar Hume’s remarks are in comparison with A.J. Ayer’s:

to say that I could have done otherwise is to say, first, that I should have

done otherwise if I had chosen otherwise; secondly, that my action was vol-

untary... and thirdly, that nobody compelled me to choose as I did....

When [these three conditions] are fulfilled, I may be said to have acted

freely. (Ayer, 1954, in Watson, 1982: 22)

In the early twentieth- century work of various analytic philosophers, begin-
ning with G.E. Moore, and including Ayer, this approach was refined and
came to be known as the conditional analysis of “could have done otherwise.”^15