Abstract

This chapter turns to the second and the more important criterion for free will, namely, ultimate responsibility. A series of theses are defended that explain what this criterion entails and why it is incompatible with determinism. In the process, the chapter critically examines new compatibilist accounts of free will, such as the “hierarchical theories” of Harry Frankfurt and others. The chapter also discusses the notion of “covert non‐constraining control,” the kind of hidden control of human behavior that one encounters in scientific utopias like that described in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two. The notion of “self‐forming actions” is defined and shown to be pivotal to understanding what it means to say that something is done “of one's own free will.”