The Consequence Argument shows that determinism removes one thing, the ability to have done otherwise given the actual past, and the compatibilist reply is that this was never what freedom meant.
That reply is old, unpopular with the public, and held by roughly three philosophers in five. This lesson takes it seriously, which means watching its simplest version fail to a clean counterexample and then following the two repairs that survive. A reader who leaves thinking compatibilism is the claim that "free just means uncoerced" has met the 1748 version and none of the work done since.
The classical statement
Thomas Hobbes put the position in Leviathan in 1651 and in his exchange with Bishop Bramhall soon after. Liberty, he says, is the absence of external impediments to motion. Water is free to flow downhill when the channel is open and unfree when a dam blocks it, and it is no less free for flowing necessarily. A man is free when nothing stops him doing what he wills, and the question of what made him will it is a different question with a different answer.
David Hume made the argument sharper in the eighth section of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1748, which he called a reconciling project. Liberty, on his account, is a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will: if we choose to stay, we may stay; if we choose to move, we may move. This is consistent with every action being necessitated by prior causes, since necessity in Hume's sense is nothing more than the regular succession of like causes and like effects.
Hume then adds the move that makes compatibilism more than a definition, and it is the strongest card the position holds. Not only is responsibility compatible with necessity, it requires it. We blame a person for an action because it flows from their character, and it is evidence about them. If actions were disconnected from character, if they issued from nothing in the agent at all, then a person could not be praised or blamed for them any more than for a lightning strike. On this view the libertarian has the relationship backwards: causal connection to the agent's own dispositions is not the enemy of responsibility but its precondition.
That argument does real work, and every later lesson has to answer it, including the ones sympathetic to the other side.
The conditional analysis, and why it fails
The classical position needs an account of "could have done otherwise", since ordinary people plainly use the phrase and mean something by it. The classical answer is a conditional. To say that Jones could have stayed at home is to say that he would have stayed at home if he had chosen to. G. E. Moore gave the analysis its standard form in Ethics in 1912.
The attraction is that it sorts the ordinary cases correctly, and it sorts them without any reference to physics. A prisoner could not have left, because he would not have left even had he chosen to: the door was locked. A paralysed man could not have raised his arm, on the same test. A man who stayed at home reading could have gone out, because had he chosen to go out he would have gone. Determinism does not disturb any of these verdicts, because each conditional is about what would follow a different choice, not about whether that choice was open.
The analysis is nonetheless false, and the counterexample is due to Roderick Chisholm in 1964 and to Keith Lehrer. Consider a man with a severe phobia of snakes, so severe that he is psychologically incapable of picking one up. Offer him a large sum to do it. It is perfectly true that if he chose to pick up the snake, he would pick it up: his arms work, nothing external prevents him. So the conditional is satisfied, and the analysis says he can. But he cannot, and the reason is that the very choosing is beyond him. The analysis tests the wrong link in the chain.
The obvious repair, adding that he could have chosen otherwise, either reintroduces the categorical ability the analysis was meant to replace or launches a regress of conditionals. Classical compatibilism, in its simple form, is dead, and this is worth stating plainly because it is often assumed that compatibilists have never faced a serious objection. They faced this one and rebuilt.
Example. Apply the conditional analysis to two cases and say where it goes right and where it goes wrong. First, a woman does not donate to a charity because she has no money in her account. Second, a heroin addict does not refuse a dose.
For the first, the analysis works. Had she chosen to donate, the transfer would still have failed, so the conditional is false and the analysis correctly says she could not have donated. It also gets the moral verdict right: nobody blames her. For the second, the analysis gives the wrong answer. Had the addict chosen to refuse, he would have refused, since nobody was holding him down, so the conditional is true and the analysis says he could have refused. Yet the whole point of addiction is that the choosing is what has been compromised. This is the phobia case in more familiar clothes, and it shows that the defect is not an exotic one: the cases we most want a theory of freedom to handle are exactly the cases where the impairment lies inside the will.
Now you. A compatibilist proposes to repair the analysis: Jones could have done otherwise if and only if he would have done otherwise had he chosen to, and he could have chosen otherwise. What is wrong with the repair?
Answer
The second conjunct contains the same phrase the analysis was supposed to explain, so either it is analysed in turn, giving "he would have chosen otherwise had he chosen to choose otherwise", which starts a regress of choices nobody makes, or it is left unanalysed, in which case a categorical ability to do otherwise has been readmitted and the Consequence Argument applies to it directly. Compatibilism's later versions accept the lesson and stop trying to analyse the phrase at all. They give an account of what makes an action free that does not use it.
Frankfurt's hierarchy
The first successful repair came from Harry Frankfurt in 1971, and it relocates the question from what an agent can do to what an agent wants.
Human beings, unlike other animals, have desires about their desires. A smoker wants a cigarette and also wants not to want one. Frankfurt calls the first level first-order desires and the second level second-order desires, and when a second-order desire concerns which first-order desire should actually move you to act, he calls it a second-order volition.
Now compare three agents, all of whom take the drug. The unwilling addict wants the drug, wants not to want it, and is defeated by his craving: the desire that moves him is one he repudiates. The willing addict wants the drug and wants that desire to be the one that moves him: if the craving were to fade he would seek it out again. The wanton simply has cravings and no view whatever about which of them should move him; he is not fighting his desires or endorsing them, because he does not have the reflective structure to do either.
All three are determined, all three take the drug, and our reactions to them differ sharply. Frankfurt's proposal is that this is what freedom of the will consists in: your will is free when the desire that moves you is the one you want to be moved by. The unwilling addict acts on a desire that is in him but not of him, and that, rather than any fact about alternative futures, is why we treat him as unfree.
The account explains a great deal, including why we regard someone in the grip of a compulsion as unfree while regarding a person acting on carefully considered reasons as free, even though both are equally caused. It has two well-known problems. The first is regress: what makes a second-order volition authoritative, given that a third-order desire might repudiate it? Frankfurt answers with the notion of decisive identification, which critics find stipulative. The second is that the hierarchy can be installed from outside, and a manipulated agent might endorse exactly the desires their manipulator wanted them to endorse. That objection is powerful enough to have its own lesson.
The deep self, and whether it must be sane
Between the hierarchy and reasons-responsiveness lies a family of views usually called deep-self accounts, and they are worth a section because they contain the objection that leads to the rest of this course.
Gary Watson argued in 1975 that Frankfurt's levels are the wrong currency. What matters is not a desire about a desire, which is just another desire, but the distinction between what you happen to want and what you actually value: between a motivational system and an evaluative one. An action is free when it flows from your values, and the addict's tragedy is that his motivations have come apart from his judgement of what is worth pursuing.
Susan Wolf then pressed the case that no such account can be enough on its own, in a 1987 paper and in Freedom Within Reason in 1990, using an example that has stayed in the literature. JoJo is the son of a brutal dictator, raised in his father's company, given every advantage, and encouraged to admire everything his father does. He grows into an enthusiastic tyrant. He tortures people, and he wholeheartedly endorses torturing people: his values, his second-order volitions and his actions are in perfect agreement, and his mechanism responds to reasons of the sort he recognises.
Every structural account says JoJo is free and responsible. Most readers say he is not, or at least much less so than an ordinary tyrant who chose his cruelty from an ordinary childhood. Wolf's diagnosis is that the accounts have left out a condition she calls sanity: the ability to know what one is doing and to recognise that it is wrong, understood as a normative competence rather than a clinical category. JoJo's evaluative system is itself deformed, so tracing the act back to it settles nothing.
Adding the condition has a price that Wolf accepts openly. It makes responsibility depend on getting the moral facts roughly right, and so produces an asymmetry: a person who does the right thing for the right reasons is responsible even if they could not have done otherwise, while a person who does wrong because they cannot see it as wrong is not. Many find that asymmetry attractive and many find it unprincipled, and either way it is the first point in this course where a theory of freedom has to lean on a theory of value.
Example. Apply the hierarchy, the deep self and the sanity condition to JoJo, and say what each verdict depends on.
The hierarchy says JoJo is free: he wants to torture, wants that desire to move him, and is not alienated from it in the way the unwilling addict is. The deep-self account agrees, since his action flows from what he genuinely values rather than from a craving he repudiates. The sanity condition disagrees, because his capacity to recognise the wrongness of what he does was destroyed in childhood by his upbringing, and that capacity is a precondition of the whole practice rather than one more preference. So the first two verdicts depend only on the internal structure of his psychology at the moment of acting, and the third depends on a fact about how that psychology was formed. Watch that division carefully: it is the same division the manipulation argument exploits, and JoJo is a manipulation case with the manipulator replaced by an ordinary upbringing.
Now you. Does the sanity condition let a compatibilist answer every case of a deformed upbringing?
Answer
No, and the gap is instructive. The condition applies where the upbringing damaged the agent's ability to recognise what is wrong, which is a real and testable incapacity. It does nothing about the agent whose upbringing left the recognition intact and merely made him care less: a man who knows perfectly well that cruelty is wrong, feels the force of that reason, and is simply moved more by his own advantage, because that is the disposition his childhood installed. He is sane by Wolf's criterion and his character is as unchosen as JoJo's. Handling that case is what historical compatibilism attempts, and whether it succeeds is the subject of two lessons from now.
Reasons-responsiveness
The second repair is the dominant one in the current literature, developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza in Responsibility and Control in 1998, and it starts from a concession.
They concede the Consequence Argument entirely. If determinism is true, nobody can do otherwise; they call the ability to do otherwise regulative control and give it up without a fight. What they claim instead is that moral responsibility never required it. What responsibility requires is guidance control: that the action issue from the agent's own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism. Because this position defends responsibility while conceding the leeway argument, it is called semi-compatibilism.
The content is in the two conditions. A mechanism is moderately reasons-responsive when, holding the mechanism fixed, the agent would recognise a range of reasons for acting otherwise across a range of possible situations, and would act on at least one sufficient reason in at least one of them. The test is a counterfactual one, but note carefully what it does not require: it does not require that the agent could actually do otherwise in this world, since the mechanism is being tested across worlds where the reasons differ.
That distinction does the work. Take an ordinary shoplifter. Would he have refrained if a police officer had been standing beside him, or if the item had cost him his job, or if his mother had been watching? Plainly yes, in many such cases. His larcenous mechanism tracks reasons. Now take a genuine kleptomaniac, who steals objects he does not want, cannot use and often discards, and who steals with the store detective visibly watching. His mechanism is not tracking reasons at all, and the difference is measurable in his behaviour rather than postulated in his metaphysics.
The second condition, ownership, requires that the agent has taken responsibility for the mechanism: that they see themselves as an agent whose actions have effects, view themselves as a fair target of the reactive attitudes, and hold these views on the basis of their own experience. It exists chiefly to handle manipulated and brainwashed agents, whose mechanisms may be perfectly reasons-responsive while nobody thinks them responsible, and it is the part of the theory that critics press hardest.
Example. Two people fail to keep a promise. One forgot because he was drunk; the other has advanced dementia and has no recollection of ever making the promise. Apply guidance control.
The drunk's mechanism is reasons-responsive in the relevant sense, though not at the moment of failure: he is responsible via the earlier decision to drink, which was itself taken by a mechanism that responded perfectly well to the reason that he had an obligation the next day. This is the standard tracing analysis, and it is how the theory handles all cases of culpable incapacity. The person with dementia is different: no mechanism available to him now would register the reason across the relevant range of situations, because the capacity to hold and retrieve the commitment has gone. He is exempted rather than excused, and the theory says so without any appeal to what physics permits.
Now you. A hypnotised subject is given a post-hypnotic suggestion to open a window at three o'clock, and does so, inventing a reason afterwards about the room being stuffy. Which condition of guidance control fails, and what does that show about the theory's structure?
Answer
Reasons-responsiveness fails first: the mechanism producing the act does not track reasons, since the subject would have opened the window whatever the temperature, whatever the noise outside, and whatever anyone said to him. Ownership fails too, since the mechanism was not one he took responsibility for in any sense. The case shows that the theory does its work through the actual causal mechanism of the act rather than through the agent's later story about it, which is important because confabulated explanations are extremely common in ordinary life and not just under hypnosis. Notice also that nothing in the diagnosis mentions determinism: the hypnotised subject and the ordinary window-opener are equally determined, and the theory separates them anyway. That is the whole compatibilist claim in miniature.
The charge of redefinition
The standing objection to all of this is that it changes the subject. Kant called compatibilist freedom a wretched subterfuge and compared the agent to a turnspit which, once wound up, carries out its motions by itself. William James called the position a quagmire of evasion. The complaint is that being free to act on desires you did not choose, produced by a history you did not select, is the freedom of a clock, and dressing it up in second-order volitions does not change what it is.
Compatibilists have two answers, and it is worth being clear that they are different answers.
The first is deflationary: the concept of freedom that our practices actually use is the compatibilist one, and this can be checked. We excuse the coerced, the compelled, the ignorant and the insane, and we do not excuse the ordinary well-informed adult on the ground that his upbringing shaped his character. If the incompatibilist were describing our concept, ordinary practice would look entirely different from how it looks.
The second is dismissive: the freedom the objector wants is impossible in principle, not merely absent in fact, since it would require an agent to be the uncaused cause of their own character. If a demand cannot be met in any possible world, failing to meet it is not a deprivation. That argument is developed properly in a later lesson, and it belongs as much to the hard incompatibilist as to the compatibilist, which is one of the odder alliances in the subject.
Both answers concede something to Kant. Compatibilist freedom is not the power to have been a different person; it is a property of how an action is produced in the person you are. Whether that is enough for desert is the question the last third of this course is about.
There is one more move available, and it is the most radical thing in the compatibilist arsenal. Everything so far has assumed that responsibility requires alternative possibilities in at least some sense, and has argued about how to interpret them. In 1969 Frankfurt published a two-page counterexample designed to show that responsibility never required alternatives at all, and it reset the entire field. That is the next lesson.