Free Will
Take a position on determinism and responsibility and defend it: the Consequence Argument, compatibilism, manipulation cases, the evidence from the brain, and what desert survives.
The question
Two separate demands hide inside the words "free will", and separating them produces the three positions the whole dispute is fought between.
What determinism claims
Determinism is an entailment between a complete state and the laws, and it is not fate, not predictability, not causation in general and not compulsion.
Whether the world is deterministic
What physics actually says about determinism, why the answer depends on an interpretation rather than an experiment, and why the indeterminism on offer is the wrong shape to help.
Fatalism and foreknowledge
Three arguments that abolish free will without using any physics at all, two of which commit the same scope error, and one which does not.
The Consequence Argument
The strongest argument that determinism rules out free will, its transfer principle, and the three places a compatibilist can attack it.
Compatibilism
The majority view, from Hobbes to reasons-responsiveness: freedom is a property of how an action is produced, not of how many futures were open.
Alternatives and Frankfurt cases
A two-page counterexample from 1969 that removes every alternative and leaves responsibility intact, the dilemma that attacks it, and why the whole debate moved to sourcehood.
The manipulation argument
Four cases running from an agent built to order to an ordinary determined agent, with no obvious place to draw a line, and the two ways of answering them.
What libertarianism would need
The position that we are free and determinism is false, the luck objection that faces every version of it, and the two serious attempts to answer it.
The evidence from the brain
Libet's timings, the ten-second decoding result, and the accumulator model that explains the readiness potential without any hidden early decision.
The causes you did not choose
Heritability, situations and tumours give the sourcehood worry an empirical body, and a regress argument claims that no history at all could make anyone self-made.
Moral responsibility
Strawson's argument that blame rests on attitudes rather than on a metaphysical premise, the structure of excuses and exemptions, and the three different things "responsible" means.
Punishment and desert
Which justifications of punishment need free will, what a system without desert would look like, and what the sentencing and recidivism numbers can settle.
Taking a position
The whole dispute as one valid argument with five deniable premises, how to state which one you reject, and how to answer the best objection to that choice.
The whole subject