Every position in this course is a choice about which premise of a single argument to deny, and holding a view responsibly means naming the premise, paying its price and knowing what would change your mind.
This lesson assembles the material. It contains no new arguments, which is deliberate: the work now is to see the structure whole, and to practise the discipline of defending a view rather than merely holding one. If you have arrived here from a search engine, everything you need is stated below, though the reasons behind each premise are in the lessons named beside it.
The master argument
Here is the case against moral responsibility, in five premises, each of which has been examined in this course.
One. If determinism is true, then nobody is able to do otherwise than they actually do. This is the conclusion of the Consequence Argument, and it rests on the fixity of the past, the fixity of the laws, and a transfer principle.
Two. If nobody is able to do otherwise, nobody is morally responsible for what they do. This is the principle of alternate possibilities, the target of Frankfurt's counterexample.
Three. An agent whose character is wholly the product of factors outside their control is not the ultimate source of what they do. This is what the manipulation cases and Galen Strawson's regress are designed to establish.
Four. Moral responsibility in the basic desert sense requires being the ultimate source of what one does. This is the premise that fixes how demanding the notion of responsibility is.
Five. Determinism, or something near enough to it, is true of us.
From one, two and five, nobody is responsible. From three, four and five, nobody is responsible. The argument is over-engineered on purpose: it runs by two independent routes, one through leeway and one through sourcehood, which is why blocking a single premise is rarely enough.
Where each position stands
Now place the views on it.
A classical compatibilist denies premise one, holding that the ability the argument removes is not the ability the phrase "could have done otherwise" picks out in ordinary use. This is the Humean line, and it must survive the collapse of the conditional analysis, so a modern version has to deny premise one via something like Lewis's local-miracle account rather than by a simple conditional.
A semi-compatibilist grants premise one and denies premise two. Determinism does remove leeway, and responsibility never needed leeway; what it needs is guidance control, a reasons-responsive mechanism the agent owns. This is Fischer and Ravizza's position, and it must answer the manipulation argument, which attacks it through premises three and four rather than through the leeway route it has conceded.
A libertarian grants premises one to four and denies premise five. The cost is the whole of the ninth lesson: locating indeterminism where it can do the work, and answering the rollback argument's charge that undetermined events are lucky rather than controlled.
A hard incompatibilist grants all five and accepts the conclusion, then argues that what remains is enough to live on: attributability, answerability, moral protest, and a public-health approach to dangerous conduct in place of deserved suffering.
A revisionist, in Manuel Vargas's sense, splits the question. Our inherited concept of responsibility may well include the demanding requirement in premise four, in which case the sceptic is right about the concept we have; but a successor concept, justified by what our practices actually accomplish in cultivating agency, is compatibilist, and adopting it is a reform rather than a discovery. This is the most self-aware option and it has the corresponding drawback of being a proposal rather than a claim about how things are.
Example. Someone says: "Determinism is probably true, people never could have done otherwise, and none of that stops a manipulative liar from being blameworthy, because his lying flows from a mind that tracks reasons perfectly well." Which premise are they denying, and what must they defend?
Premise two. They have conceded premise one, and their claim is that responsibility survives its loss, which makes them a semi-compatibilist. What they must defend is the sufficiency of the reasons-responsiveness criterion, and the attack will come from the manipulation cases: a liar whose reasons-responsive psychology was installed by a neuroscientist, or by a designed zygote, satisfies their criterion exactly. So their real work is at premises three and four, either by finding a historical condition the manipulated agent fails, which is the soft line, or by accepting that the manipulated liar is blameworthy too, which is the hard line. Note that Frankfurt's counterexample supports them on premise two but does nothing for them here, which is a common way of mistaking the state of one's own position.
Now you. Diagnose this position: "The brain experiments show that decisions are made before we are aware of them, so free will is an illusion." Which premise is it attacking, and is it succeeding?
Answer
It is not attacking any of the five. The timing experiments bear on whether conscious awareness initiates action, which is a claim about the mechanism of decision that appears nowhere in the argument, and the argument would run unchanged in a world where every decision was consciously initiated with fanfare. What the speaker probably intends is premise five, that we are determined, and the experiments do not establish that either: an accumulator crossing a threshold can be stochastic, and no timing measurement distinguishes the cases. The response to give is not that the experiments are bad, since they are not, but that they are evidence for a different conclusion: that the folk picture of a conscious self initiating action from outside the causal order is wrong. Nearly every party to this dispute agreed with that already.
Four questions that fix a position
If you want to locate yourself, answer these in order and write the answers down.
First: does responsibility require the ability to do otherwise? If yes, you are a leeway theorist and the Consequence Argument is your central problem. If no, you are a source theorist and the manipulation argument is.
Second: does being the source of an action require being the source of your own character? If yes, you have accepted premise four in its strong form and you are heading for scepticism or for libertarianism. If no, you owe an account of why a reasons-responsive mechanism you did not build is enough.
Third: is determinism true? Answer honestly, which for almost everyone means "unknown, and the interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree". Then check whether your position depends on the answer. If it does, you have taken an empirical risk, and you should say so.
Fourth: what happens to punishment if you are right? A position that leaves the criminal law exactly as it is, or that abolishes it entirely, is probably not being thought through, and the thirteenth lesson gives the middle ground both ways.
Example. Run the four questions on a reader who answers: no, no, unknown, and "sentences should be shorter and based on risk".
The first two answers make them a source theorist who denies that sourcehood requires self-creation, which places them as a compatibilist of the reasons-responsive family, denying premise two and premise four. The third answer is the right one and is consistent with their position, since nothing in it depends on how physics turns out, and that independence is a genuine strength worth claiming out loud. The fourth answer is where the tension lies: a compatibilist who keeps desert has grounds for sentences that track the gravity of the past act, so a purely risk-based policy sits oddly with the metaphysics they have just endorsed. They should either supply a separate argument for the policy, which is easy enough since desert sets a ceiling rather than a target, or notice that their practical convictions are running ahead of their theory. Finding that kind of mismatch is the main use of the exercise.
Now you. A friend says: "I'm a compatibilist. Free will obviously exists, because otherwise nothing would make sense." What is missing?
Answer
Everything except the label. There is no premise identified, so it is impossible to tell whether they deny premise one, premise two or premise four, and those are three different positions with three different best objections. There is no cost accepted, and the phrase "obviously exists" suggests they think there is none, which no compatibilist writing today believes. There is no defeater. And the reason given, that otherwise nothing would make sense, is an argument from the unpalatability of the conclusion, which is not evidence: the world is not obliged to leave our practices intact. Note that the same diagnosis applies with the labels swapped, to the person who announces that free will is obviously an illusion because everything is physical. Neither has stated a position; both have stated a preference.
Stating a position properly
A defensible position has four parts, and stating fewer is what makes philosophical argument circular.
The thesis, in one sentence, in the vocabulary of the master argument rather than in slogans. "Free will is real" is not a thesis; "responsibility requires guidance control and not leeway, and guidance control is compatible with determinism" is.
The premise denied, named explicitly. This is what stops two people arguing past each other for an hour before discovering they disagree about premise two.
The cost accepted. Every position has one. The semi-compatibilist accepts that nobody could ever have done otherwise. The libertarian accepts that some decisions have no complete explanation. The hard incompatibilist accepts that no murderer has ever deserved anything. The compatibilist accepts that a person's whole character may have been installed by their upbringing without that touching their responsibility. Stating your cost out loud is the single best test of whether you understand your own view.
The defeater: what would make you change your mind. For a libertarian, a demonstration that decision-making is effectively deterministic at the neural scale, or a convincing account of why the rollback distribution is not luck, would do it in opposite directions. For a compatibilist, a demonstration that our excusing practices do in fact track causal history rather than capacity. For a sceptic, a successful principled distinction between the manipulated agent and the ordinary one. If you cannot name a defeater, you are not holding a position, you are expressing a temperament.
Answering the best objection
The final skill is answering the strongest objection rather than the most convenient one. Each view has a standard best objection, and the standard best reply.
Against compatibilism: the manipulation argument, that an agent designed by another to have exactly this psychology meets every condition you name and is plainly not responsible. The best reply is the soft line with a historical condition, and it must survive the junction between programming and ordinary upbringing, which is where it is weakest.
Against libertarianism: the rollback argument, that if the world were replayed the outcome would vary with nothing about the agent to explain the variation. The best reply is Kane's, that both branches are willed and endorsed by the agent, so responsibility does not need an explanation of the difference.
Against hard incompatibilism: that its conclusion cannot be lived, since resentment and gratitude are not optional for creatures like us, and a theory that no one can act on is idle. The best reply is Pereboom's, that only the desert-presupposing attitudes need to go, that relationships survive on the rest, and that partial versions of this transition happen whenever anyone forgives someone by understanding them.
Against revisionism: that it changes the subject, answering a question about what responsibility is with a proposal about what it would be useful to call responsibility. The best reply is that conceptual reform is ordinary and often correct, and that the question of what we should do with our practices is the one that matters.
Example. Steel-man the objection to your own view, using a compatibilist as the subject, and then answer it in one paragraph.
The objection: the compatibilist's conditions are all satisfiable by an agent whose entire psychology was built to specification by someone else, and in such a case blame is obviously misplaced; since the ordinary determined agent differs only in lacking a designer, and a designer's intentions are facts about the designer rather than about the agent, blame is misplaced in the ordinary case too. The answer: the argument's force comes from a verdict about an artificial case, and the experimental literature shows such verdicts moving from 14 percent agreement to 72 percent on the same question with framing alone; the ownership condition marks a real difference, since an agent who has come to see themselves as an agent through their own history of acting and being held to account has a relation to their mechanism that a freshly programmed agent lacks; and if that reply fails, the hard line remains available, at the cost of a verdict that offends intuition in a case nobody will ever face. That paragraph is not a refutation, and it should not pretend to be. It is a defence with its costs visible, which is what a defence in this subject looks like.
Now you. Take the position you actually hold and write its four parts: thesis, premise denied, cost accepted, defeater. Then write the strongest objection to it and your best reply.
Answer
There is no model answer, since the point is that you produce one. What can be given is the marking scheme. The thesis should be stated in the vocabulary of the five premises and should be falsifiable by argument. The premise denied should be one of the five, named by number, not a general expression of doubt. The cost should be something you genuinely dislike about your own view: if it does not sting slightly, you have probably picked a cost that belongs to somebody else's position. The defeater should be a specific finding or argument, not "if someone proved me wrong". The objection should be the one your view's best-informed opponents actually make, stated in the form that makes it strongest, and your reply should engage its premise rather than its tone. If your reply is that the objector is confusing determinism with fatalism, or with compulsion, or with predictability, check the second lesson: sometimes they are, and if so say which, but that reply is used far more often than it is true.
What this subject leaves you with
Three things worth keeping, beyond a position.
The first is the habit of asking what a claim requires. Almost every popular argument in this area, in both directions, fails because it never states its premises: the puppet picture, the neuroscience headline, the appeal to how choosing feels from the inside, the claim that scepticism would destroy society. Each dissolves on being written out.
The second is a calibrated sense of what is known. Determinism is unsettled by physics and probably will remain so. The neuroscience shows something real and narrow. The behavioural genetics is solid and widely misread. The philosophical arguments are unresolved, and their being unresolved after sixty years of concentrated attention by very able people is itself evidence about how hard the problem is, rather than a sign that everyone has missed something obvious.
The third is that the practical stakes do not wait for the metaphysics. Sentencing policy, the insanity defence, how we treat addiction, how much we blame people for the character they were handed: these are being decided continuously, mostly by people who have never heard of the Consequence Argument, and often on the basis of intuitions this course has shown to be unstable. Arguing carefully about them is the applied form of everything here, and it is available to you now whichever premise you decided to deny.