Abstract
In this short piece of work, an attempt has been made to revisit the skepticism
about free will, which has historically been directed to it due to certain mistaken
assumptions about determinism and iron it out. Determinism is often conflated with
fatalism, and this is where the skepticism about the possibility of agential autonomy
and control begins. If fatalism is true with respect to volitional actions of agents, then
there is no point in planning or choice making as fatalism dissolves the idea of control.
The main argument proposed in this work consists in showing that even though
deterministic causation involves the possibility of a single unique outcome as a
necessary consequence of the antecedent conditions and the governing laws of nature,
the history of rational behaviour of every agent can be explained within a global
deterministic kind of causal framework. If rightly interpreted, it provides a glimpse
into how different courses of action remain feasibly open to an agent at a given time.
The concept of free will has been outlined first to enable the reader to see later that
looking at the doctrine of determinism with the right kind of mindset only reveals its
pro-free will nature.