Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to contribute to the clarification of the dialectics between compatibilists and incompatibilists on free action. I describe a new incompatibilist position that has been neglected in the literature. I also provide a proper rationale for such a position. First, I present a justification for incompatibilism that is composed of an old idea and a new one. The old idea is the FRAP principle: freedom requires alternative possibilities. Compatibilists and incompatibilists alike usually share a Key Assumption about how the open alternative possibilities allowed by indeterminism are supposed to support the libertarian case: the existence of alternative possibilities should make a metaphysically relevant difference concerning the control and/or the authorship of the agent over the action. The other component in the justification for incompatibilism is the rejection of the Key Assumption. Why to preserve FRAP when the Key Assumption is dropped? The answer has three parts: we have a strong pre-theoretical intuition in favour of FRAP; a crucial anti-libertarian argument, known as the Luck Argument, can be interpreted as showing that FRAP and the Key Assumption cannot both be true; the Luck Argument doesn't work when directed against FRAP itself.