The consequence argument purports to show that determinism is true only if no one has free will. Judgments about whether the argument is sound depend on how one understands locutions of the form 'p and no one can render p false'. The main interpretation on offer appeals to counterfactual sufficiency: s can render p false just in case there is something s can do such that, were s to do it, p would be false; otherwise, s cannot render p false. (...) Here I show that, in the context of the consequence argument, this interpretation conflicts with widely endorsed principles governing the logic of counterfactuals. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen contends that free will is a mystery. Here I present an argument in the spirit of van Inwagen's. According to the Assimilation Argument, libertarians cannot plausibly distinguish causally undetermined actions, the ones they take to be exercises of free will, from overtly randomized outcomes of the sort nobody would count as exercises of free will. I contend that the Assimilation Argument improves on related arguments in locating the crucial issues between van Inwagen and libertarians who hope to (...) demystify free will, while avoiding objections these arguments have faced. (shrink)

Among challenges to libertarians, the _Mind_ Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the _Mind_ Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the _Mind_ Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument (...) serves to renew the challenge. The Assimilation Argument challenges libertarians to explain how ostensible exercises of free will are relevantly different from other causally undetermined outcomes, outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. In particular, libertarians must explain how agents can have the power to settle which of two causally possible futures becomes the actual future. This will require them to distinguish cases where this power is supposedly present from similar cases where it’s clearly absent. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts (...) of laws: "Humean" regularity accounts, laws as relations among universals, and the dispositional essentialist account. I argue that there is nothing in the very nature of a law - in any of the accounts surveyed - that implies a positive answer to questions (i) and (ii). I show that this has important consequences for the free will problem. I then turn to the compatibility of free will and determinism. I focus on the Humean view and the dispositional essentialist account of laws. And the bulk of this discussion concerns the consequence argument, especially the question of whether the laws of nature are "up to us". I show that, on the dispositional conception of laws, there is no sense in which the laws of nature are up to us, contrary to the Humean view. However, this does not mean that there is no room for free will on the dispositional account. I argue that free will requires the laws of nature to be limited in scope, rather than being indeterministic. I conclude by showing that this allows one to resist the claim that indeterminism rules out free will. (shrink)