Abstract

According to standard compatibilist accounts of freedom, human beings act freely just so long as they are, when they act, free from constraints of certain specified kinds. Such accounts of freedom are examples of what one may call Constraint Compatibilism (CC). I will argue that, properly understood, CC entails not only that we are virtually always able to act freely, but also that virtually all if not all our actual actions are free. The suggestion is not so much that this is a hitherto unnoticed consequence of CC, but, rather, that there is a certain way of conceiving of freedom implicit in CC that has not been taken sufficiently seriously.