The position that free will, understood as the kind of control needed for moral responsibility, is compatible with causal determinism. Hume gave the classical statement, arguing that free action requires only that it flow from an agent's own will, undetermined by external constraint, and that this liberty is untouched by the truth of determinism; contemporary compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett and Harry Frankfurt develop reasons-responsive and hierarchical-desire accounts of the control that matters. Compatibilism stands opposed to hard determinism, which denies free will given determinism, and to libertarian free will, which denies determinism itself in order to preserve it.
Facts
Origin YearApproximate; marks Hobbes Of Liberty and Necessity (1654) as the classical-form marker the cited SEP passage credits alongside Hume; compatibilist ideas are older still (Stoic determinism). Connections
Associated With
Dennett defends a contemporary reasons-responsive compatibilism, notably in Elbow Room (1984) and Freedom Evolves (2003).
Source Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Hume's Treatise and Enquiry give the classical statement of compatibilism.
Source Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In Branch
Sources
1. Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Compatibilism
Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism.
Compatibilism, on classical form
The first stage involves the classical form of compatibilism, which was developed in the modern era by the empiricists Hobbes and Hume, and reinvigorated in the early part of the twentieth century.
- Associated With: David Hume
- Associated With: Daniel Dennett
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Van Inwagen's Consequence Argument denies compatibilism can be right: if a person has no power over the past facts and the laws of nature, and no power over the further fact that those facts entail every future fact under determinism, then that person has no power over the future either. If determinism is true, present acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past, and since it is not up to anyone what went on before they were born or what the laws of nature are, the consequences of those things, including present acts, are not up to them either.
A dissenting reading, from Peter van InwagenCompatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Frequently Asked Questions
If determinism is true, can people still be held morally responsible for what they do?
Compatibilists say yes, because moral responsibility only requires the right kind of connection between an act and the agent's own reasoning, not the ability to have done otherwise given the exact same past and laws.
Compatibilism holds that free will, understood as the control needed for moral responsibility, does not require the ability to do otherwise in the strong sense incompatibilists demand. It is enough that the action flows from the agent's own desires, reasoning or values, undisturbed by coercion or manipulation, even if the past and the laws of nature made that very action inevitable. On this view a person can be free and responsible in a fully deterministic universe, because freedom is about the source of the action rather than about branching possibilities.
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