thesis statements about free will

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Foreknowledge and Free Will

Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

Fatalism seems to be entailed by infallible foreknowledge by the following informal line of reasoning:

For any future act you will perform, if some being infallibly believed in the past that the act would occur, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed what he believed since nobody has any control over past events; nor can you make him mistaken in his belief, given that he is infallible. Therefore, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed in a way that cannot be mistaken that you would do what you will do. But if so, you cannot do otherwise than what he believed you would do. And if you cannot do otherwise, you will not perform the act freely.

The same argument can be applied to any infallibly foreknown act of any human being. If there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future, no human being has any control over the future.

This theological fatalist argument creates a dilemma for anyone who thinks it important to maintain both (1) there is a deity who infallibly knows the entire future, and (2) human beings have free will in the strong sense usually called libertarian. But it has also fascinated many who have not shared either of these commitments, because taking the argument’s full measure requires rethinking some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, especially ones concerning time, truth, and modality. Those philosophers who think there is a way to consistently maintain both (1) and (2) are called compatibilists about infallible foreknowledge and human free will. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Incompatibilists accept the incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and human free will and deny either infallible foreknowledge or free will in the sense targeted by the argument.

1. The argument for theological fatalism

2.1 the denial of future contingent truth, 2.2 god’s knowledge of future contingent truths, 2.3 the eternity solution, 2.4 god’s forebeliefs as “soft facts” about the past, 2.5 the dependence solution, 2.6 the transfer of necessity, 2.7 the necessity and the causal closure of the past.

• 2.8 The rejection of Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

3. Incompatibilist responses to the argument for theological fatalism

4. logical fatalism.

• 5. Beyond fatalism

Other Internet Resources

Related entries.

There is a long history of debate over the soundness of the argument for theological fatalism, so its soundness must not be obvious. Nelson Pike (1965) gets the credit for clearly and forcefully presenting the dilemma in a way that produced an enormous body of work by both compatibilists and incompatibilists, leading to more careful formulations of the argument.

A precise version of the argument can be formulated as follows: Choose some proposition about a future act that you think you will do freely, if any act is free. Suppose, for example, that the telephone will ring at 9 am tomorrow and you will either answer it or you will not. So it is either true that you will answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow or it is true that you will not answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow. The Law of Excluded Middle rules out any other alternative. Let T abbreviate the proposition that you will answer the phone tomorrow morning at 9, and let us suppose that T is true. (If not- T is true instead, simply substitute not- T in the argument below).

Let “now-necessary” designate temporal necessity, the type of necessity that the past is supposed to have just because it is past. This type of necessity plays a central role in the argument and we’ll have more to say about it in sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.7 , and 5 , but we can begin with the intuitive idea that there is a kind of necessity that a proposition has now when the content of the proposition is about something that occurred in the past. To say that it is now-necessary that milk has been spilled is to say nobody can do anything now about the fact that the milk has been spilled.

Let “God” designate a being who has infallible beliefs about the future, where to say that God believes p infallibly is to say that God believes p and it is not possible that God believes p and p is false. It is not important for the logic of the argument that God is the being worshiped by any particular religion, but the motive to maintain that there is a being with infallible beliefs is usually a religious one.

One more preliminary point is in order. The dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and human free will does not rest on the particular assumption of fore knowledge and does not require an analysis of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist, which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge. She has knowledge just in case what she believes is true and she satisfies the other conditions for knowledge, such as having sufficiently strong evidence. Ordinary knowledge does not require that the belief cannot be false. For example, if I believe on strong evidence that classes begin at my university on a certain date, and when the day arrives, classes do begin, we would normally say I knew in advance that classes would begin on that date. I had foreknowledge about the date classes begin. But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge because events could have proven me wrong even though as events actually turned out, they didn’t prove me wrong. Ordinary foreknowledge does not threaten to necessitate the future because it does not require that when I know p it is not possible that my belief is false. The key problem, then, is the infallibility of the belief about the future, and this is a problem whether or not the epistemic agent with an infallible belief satisfies the other conditions required by some account of knowledge, such as sufficient evidence. As long as an agent has an infallible belief about the future, the problem arises.

Using the example of the proposition T , the argument that infallible foreknowledge of T entails that you do not answer the telephone freely can be formulated as follows:

Basic Argument for Theological Fatalism

This argument is formulated in a way that makes its logical form as perspicuous as possible, and there is a consensus that this argument or something close to it is valid. That is, if the premises are all true, the conclusion follows. The compatibilist about infallible foreknowledge and free will must therefore find a false premise. There are four premises that are not straightforward substitutions in definitions: (1), (2), (5), and (9). All four of these premises have come under attack in the history of discussion of theological fatalism. Aristotle’s concern about future contingent truth has motivated an increasing number of compatibilists to challenge premise (1). Boethius and Aquinas also denied premise (1), but on the grounds that God and his beliefs are not in time, a solution that has always had some adherents. William of Ockham rejected premise (2), arguing that the necessity of the past does not apply to the entire past, and God’s past beliefs are in the part of the past to which the necessity of the past does not apply. This approach to the problem was revived early in the debate stirred up by Pike’s article, and has probably attracted more attention, in its various incarnations, than any other solution. There are more radical responses to (2) as well. Premise (5) has rarely been disputed and is an analogue of an axiom of modal logic, but it may have been denied by Duns Scotus and Luis de Molina. Although doubts about premise (9) arose relatively late in the debate, inspired by contemporary discussions of the relation between free will and the ability to do otherwise, the denial of (9) is arguably the key to the solution proposed by Augustine. In addition to the foregoing compatibilist solutions, there are two incompatibilist responses to the problem of theological fatalism. One is to deny that God (or any being) has infallible foreknowledge. The other is to deny that human beings have free will in the libertarian sense of free will. These responses will be discussed in section 3 . The relationship between theological fatalism and logical fatalism will be discussed in section 4 . In section 5 we will consider whether the problem of theological fatalism is just a theological version of a more general problem in metaphysics that isn’t ultimately about God, or even about free will.

2. Compatibilist responses to theological fatalism

One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will is to deny that the proposition T can be true, on the grounds that no proposition about the contingent future is true: such propositions are either false (given Bivalence), or neither true nor false. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up. Since God wouldn’t believe a proposition unless it were true, premise (1) is, on this account, a non-starter. The idea behind this response is usually that propositions about the contingent future become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of De Interpretatione IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers have used Aristotle’s move to solve the dilemma we are addressing here.

This approach to the problem had already been endorsed, three years before Pike’s seminal article, by A.N. Prior (1962), but it received little initial attention. John Martin Fischer’s first anthology of essays on the problem (1989) does not contain a single paper advocating this solution. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when it was defended by Joseph Runzo (1981), Richard Purtill (1988), and J.R. Lucas (1989), that it began to gain traction in the debate. More recently, Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt (2006) have argued for the “Peircean” semantics favored by Prior (1967, 113–36), on which the predictive use of the word ‘will’ carries maximal causal force and all future contingents turn out false, while Dale Tuggy (2007) has defended the position that future contingents are neither true nor false. A critique of both Rhoda et al . and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Another supporter of the all-future-contingents-are-false solution to the problem of theological fatalism is Patrick Todd (2016a), whose recent book (2021) offers a vigorous defense of this approach against various objections. Many (but not all) of those who reject future contingent truth base their position, at least in part, on presentism, according to which only the present exists. Statements about the future, especially the contingent future, would then arguably lack the grounding necessary for truth. D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both logical and theological fatalism, as has Dean Zimmerman (2008). A measure of how much the debate has shifted in this direction is that Fischer’s second anthology (Fischer and Todd 2015) contains an entire section on “The Logic of Future Contingents.” The connection between this solution and “open theism” will be discussed in section 3 .

While there is considerable prima facie appeal to the idea that statements about the contingent future aren’t yet true, and that they become true only when the future arrives, both the semantic and the metaphysical justifications for this idea can be challenged. A semantics that collapses truth into necessity and falsehood into impossibility, at least for propositions about the future, may appear insufficiently attentive to people’s actual use of the predictive ‘will’, not to mention logically problematic. The true futurist theory (“the thin red line”), allowing for future contingent truth, is defended by Øhrstrøm (2009) and by Malpass and Wawer (2012). Presentist opponents of future contingent truth, for their part, need to explain how there can be contingent truths about the past but not about the future, given that, on presentism, the past is no more real than the future. (This is not a problem on the growing block theory.) Rhoda (2009) and Zimmerman (2010), for example, have independently suggested that truths about the past could be grounded in God’s present beliefs about the past; but if this move is allowed, it would seem just as legitimate to assume God has present beliefs about the future and use this to ground truths about the contingent future. The semantic and metaphysical issues surrounding future contingent truth are complex and highly contested, so it isn’t possible to do more than note them here.

It is not clear, however, that the denial of future contingent truth is sufficient to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. Hunt (2020) suggests that future contingents that fail to be true for presentist reasons alone might nevertheless qualify as “quasi-true” (Sider 1999, Markosian 2004), and argues that the quasi-truth of God’s beliefs about the future is enough to generate the problem. The following consideration tends in the same direction. According to the definition of infallibility used in the basic argument, if God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is false. But there is a natural extension of the definition of infallibility to allow for the case in which T lacks a truth value but will acquire one in the future: If God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is either false or becomes false. If so, and if God believes T , we get an argument for theological fatalism that parallels our basic argument. Premise (4) would need to be modified as follows:

(6) becomes:

The modifications in the rest of the argument are straightforward.

It is open to the defender of this solution to maintain that God has no beliefs about the contingent future because he does not infallibly know how it will turn out, and this is compatible with God’s being infallible in everything he does believe. It is also compatible with God’s omniscience if omniscience is the property of knowing the truth value of every proposition that has a truth value. But clearly, this move restricts the range of God’s knowledge, so it has religious disadvantages in addition to its disadvantages in logic.

If T is true, there is still the question how God could come to believe T rather than not- T , and believe it without any possibility of error, given that T concerns the contingent future. T is contingent only insofar as it is still possible for you to refrain from answering the phone at 9 tomorrow morning, though we’re supposing for the sake of argument that you will answer the phone at 9. But then it’s still possible for T to turn out false (though it won’t), and still possible for the belief that T to be incorrect (though it isn’t). This is hard to square with the claim in premise (1) that God’s belief that T was infallible.

This problem for infallible belief about a contingent future parallels a problem for God’s knowledge of a contingent future. Though the argument for theological fatalism rests only on divine belief rather than knowledge (since the additional conditions for knowledge, beyond true belief, don’t play any role in the argument), God nevertheless wouldn’t believe without knowing. But it’s unclear what could have been cognitively available to God yesterday, when your answering the phone at 9 am tomorrow was still future and contingent, to raise his belief that T from a correct guess to genuine knowledge. Prior (1962) held this to be a further problem for premise (1), beyond the nonexistence of future contingent truths. For William Hasker (1989, 186–88), Richard Swinburne (2006, 22–26), and Peter van Inwagen (2008), who maintain (contrary to Prior) that there are future contingent truths, the impossibility of foreknowing them is the problem with premise (1). This “limited foreknowledge” view has been critiqued by Arbour (2013) and Todd (2014a), among others.

Defenders of divine foreknowledge need something to say in response to skeptical questions about how such knowledge could be available to God. One possible response is that it’s a conceptual truth that God is omniscient, and his knowledge, including his knowledge of future contingent truths, is simply innate (Craig 1987). Skeptics might regard this response as closer to a non-response. But others have offered detailed if speculative proposals. These include Ryan Byerly (2014), whose book-length treatment of the issue grounds God’s infallible foreknowledge in a divine “ordering of times” that is supposed to leave human free will intact.

It is relatively easy to see how God can know what is (contingently) “going to” happen if this refers to the present tendency of things. All it takes is exhaustive knowledge of the present. But what is “going to” happen can change, as the present tendency of things changes, and what God foreknows on this basis (his knowledge of what is going to happen ) will change along with this change in present tendencies. This “mutable future” position, defended by Peter Geach, has been revived by Patrick Todd (2011, 2016b). On the “Geachian” view, God’s beliefs about the contingent future constitute genuine knowledge, because they track the changing truth about where the future is headed. What this view doesn’t provide is the infallibility required by premise (1).

Fischer (2016, 31–45) tries to fill the gap with his “boot-strapping” account of divine foreknowledge. Even human beings are sometimes in a “knowledge-conferring situation,” or KCS, with respect to the contingent future. Since God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, God is in a position to know (some) future contingents in the same way that human beings can know them: by being in the appropriate KCS. But this presupposes a fallibilist theory of knowledge. What accounts for the infallibility of God’s beliefs? Fischer argues that God can “bootstrap” his way to certainty by combining his beliefs about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own infallibility. Hunt (2017b) objects that the account is circular, and that it couldn’t support anything close to exhaustive foreknowledge, since most future contingent truths will lack KCS’s at any given time. Fischer (2017, and forthcoming) elaborates and defends the view.

The most straightforward account of the matter, accommodating the infallibility of God’s beliefs, is that he simply “sees” the future. If God is in time, this requires that he be equipped with something like a “time telescope” that allows him to view what is temporally distant. A hurdle faced by time telescopes is that they probably involve retrocausation. If God is not in time, however, he wouldn’t need a time telescope to view the future along with the present and past. This brings us to the next solution.

A third challenge to premise (1), independent of the first two, is that it misrepresents God’s relation to time. What is denied according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and not that God believes the content of proposition T , but that God believed T yesterday . This solution probably originated with the 6 th century philosopher Boethius, who maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before the mind of God at once. To say “at once” or “simultaneously” is to use a temporal metaphor, but Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of temporal reality as being before God’s mind in a single temporal present. It is an atemporal present in which God has a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.

Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius. One is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the center of a circle is present to each and every point on its circumference ( SCG I, 66). In contemporary philosophy an important defense of the Boethian idea that God is timeless was given by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who applied it explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991). Recently it has been defended by Katherin Rogers (2007a, 2007b), Kevin Timpe (2007), Michael Rota (2010), Joseph Diekemper (2013), and Ciro De Florio (2015).

Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself, arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling, such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121–129; Wolterstorff 1975; Swinburne 1977, 221). Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 2 and 2011) that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be reformulated as follows:

Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as God’s timeless knowing are now -necessary, yet we have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowing. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows T . The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do about what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything about the future.

The Boethian solution does not solve the problem of theological fatalism by itself, but since the nature of the timeless realm is elusive, the intuition of the necessity of the timeless realm is probably weaker than the intuition of the necessity of the past. The necessity of the past is deeply embedded in our ordinary intuitions about time; there are no ordinary intuitions about the realm of timelessness. One possible way out of this problem is given by K.A. Rogers, who argues (2007a, 2007b) that the eternal realm is like the present rather than the past, and so it does not have the necessity we attribute to the past.

If God’s timeless knowledge doesn’t threaten free will, there’s still the question whether it can be confined to the timeless realm; if not, it might still cause trouble for free will. Van Inwagen (2008) argues against the Boethian solution on the grounds that a timeless deity could still bring about the existence in time of a “Freedom-denying Prophetic Object,” for example, a stone slab on which are inscribed the words, “Peter van Inwagen will answer the phone at 9:00 am on May 27, 2034.” An interesting puzzle for Christian defenders of the Boethian solution is the problem of whether the knowledge of Jesus Christ during his time on earth was infallible. The problem here is that the incarnate Christ was in time even if God is timeless. A particular problem discussed by Timothy Pawl (2014a, 2014b) is whether Christ had infallible foreknowledge of his own future choices, and if so, whether his created will was free. Pawl defends the compatibility of Christ’s infallible foreknowledge and the freedom of his created will.

The next solution is due to the fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham, and was revived in the contemporary literature by Marilyn Adams (1967). This solution rejects premise (2) of the basic argument in its full generality. Following Ockham, Adams argues that premise (2) applies only to the past strictly speaking, or the “hard” past. A “soft” fact about the past is one that is in part about the future. An example of a soft fact about the past would be the fact that it was true yesterday that a certain event would occur a year later, or the fact that you saw Paris for the last time. Adams argues that God’s existence in the past and God’s past beliefs about the future are not strictly past because they are facts that are in part about the future.

Adams’s argument was unsuccessful since, among other things, her criterion for being a hard fact had the consequence that no fact is a hard fact (Fischer 1989, introduction), but it led to a series of attempts to bolster it by giving more refined definitions of a “hard fact” and the type of necessity such facts are said to have—what Ockham called “accidental necessity” (necessity per accidens ). The resulting formulations became so refined and elaborate, in an effort to avoid possible counterexamples, that they risked becoming detached from the simple intuition they were intended to capture. Recent discussions of the hard fact/soft fact distinction may be found in Todd (2013) and Pendergraft and Coates (2014). Plantinga (1986) argued that a successful Ockhamist response to theological fatalism needn’t await the definitive formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for soft facthood, because paradigm examples of soft facts--facts that are surely soft, if any facts are soft--are enough for the job. It’s clear that proposition T , for example--that you will answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am--does not express a hard fact about the past. (It doesn’t express a fact about the past at all.) But if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient, this fact about what you will do tomorrow both entails, and is entailed by, God’s yesterday believing T . Assuming that hard and soft facthood are closed under logical equivalence, it follows that God’s having believed T is not a hard fact about yesterday, a conclusion that doesn’t rely on any particular answer to the general question how the hard fact/soft fact distinction is to be articulated. Responses to this defense of Ockhamism may be found in Brant (1997) and Hunt (2002).

There was considerable debate over Ockhamism in the eighties and nineties. Some of the defenses in this period appear in Freddoso (1983), Kvanvig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Wierenga (1989), and Craig (1990). Some of the criticisms appear in Fischer (1983, 1985a, 1991), Hasker (1989), Widerker (1990), Zagzebski (1991), and Pike (1993). The Ockhamist strategy, relying as it does on the distinction between facts about the past that are really about the past and facts about the past that are really (at least in part) about the future, is intertwined with work on the reality of the past and future. Finch and Rea (2008) have argued that the Ockhamist solution requires the rejection of presentism.

Perhaps the toughest obstacle confronting the Ockhamist solution is that it is very difficult to give an account of the necessity of the past that preserves the intuition that the past has a special kind of necessity in virtue of being past, but which has the consequence that God’s past beliefs do not have that kind of necessity. The problem is that God’s past beliefs seem to be as good a candidate for something that is strictly past as almost anything we can think of, such as an explosion that occurred last week. If God’s past beliefs about the future are soft facts, but the past explosion is a hard fact, that must be because of something special about God’s past beliefs that is intuitively plausible apart from the attempt to avoid theological fatalism. Perhaps God’s doxastic states are best understood in terms of “wide content” or a functionalist account of the mental (Zemach and Widerker 1987); perhaps divine omniscience is dispositional rather than occurrent (Hunt 1995), or doesn’t involve beliefs at all (Alston 1986). If God’s foreknowledge is special in any of these ways, premise (2) is arguably false. But there are theological costs to these conceptions of divine omniscience. The appeal to Putnam’s point that “meanings ain’t in the head” conflicts with the “incompatibilist constraint” in Fischer (1983); see also Hasker (1988) for a response to Alston, and Hughes (1997) for a response to Hunt. Since these accounts of divine foreknowledge aren’t independently plausible, however interesting they might be theoretically, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ockhamist solution is ad hoc .

One of the best-known Ockhamist proposals after Adams was made by Alvin Plantinga (1986), who defined the accidentally necessary in terms of lack of counterfactual power. For someone, Jones, to have counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs, the following must be true:

Plantinga argued that counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs about human free choices is coherent and if it occurs, these beliefs are not accidentally necessary; they do not have the kind of necessity the past is alleged to have in premise (2) of the basic argument.

Notice that counterfactual power over the past is not the same thing as changing the past. Under the assumption that there is only one time line, changing the past is incoherent since it amounts to there being one past prior to t 2 in which God has a certain belief at t 1 , and then Jones does something to make a different past. That requires two pasts prior to t 2 , and that presumably makes no sense. What (CPP) affirms instead is that there is only one actual past, but there would have been a different past if Jones acted differently at t 2 . (CPP) also does not require the assumption that what Jones does at t 2 causes God to have the belief he has at t 1 . There is much debate about the way to analyze the causal relation, but it is generally thought that causation does not reduce to a counterfactual dependency of an effect on its cause. The dependency of God’s belief on Jones’ act need not be a causal dependency. (CPP) is therefore weaker than the claim that Jones’ act at t 2 causes God’s belief at t 1 . A discussion of the counterfactual dependence of God’s past belief on human future acts is given in Zagzebski (1991, chap 4).

The idea that God’s past beliefs depend upon our future free acts has been enlivened by Trenton Merricks (2009), who argues that the idea appears in Molina (see section 2.6). There is some question how distinct Merricks’ approach is from classic Ockhamism: Fischer and Todd (2011, 2013) argue that Merricks’ solution is simply a form of Ockhamism and suffers from the same defects, while Merricks (2011) replies that the dependency relation between God’s past beliefs and human acts is different from the one at work in Ockham’s approach. The idea, in any case, is that the dependence of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents on the foreknown events themselves, including future exercises of human free will, along with the in dependence of human actions from God’s foreknowledge of them, is the key to defending the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This “Dependence Solution” has gained sufficient currency that it deserves a section of its own, regardless of its relationship to the original Ockhamist strategy.

The Ur -text for this approach is the following passage in Origen of Alexandria’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans:

it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by God before it happens.

The because-relationship in question is stronger than counterfactual dependence, because it can be absent even when counterfactual dependence is present, as in the case of divine foreknowledge. (Though you won’t answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am because God foreknew you would do so, your answering it at 9 tomorrow is nevertheless counterfactually dependent on God’s foreknowledge: were God to have believed yesterday that you won’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, you wouldn’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, and were God to have believed that you will answer at 9, you would answer at 9.) What’s needed is the stronger relationship of explanatory dependence.

Fischer and Tognazzini (2014), in a response to Merricks (2009, 2011), McCall (2011), and Westphal (2011), ask how the dependence point alone shows that the hard past isn’t fixed. That would require that the agent upon whose action the past depends really can act otherwise, and this is just asserted rather than argued. After all, this is the very point at issue, so simply assuming it is to beg the question. Cyr and Law (forthcoming) defend the dialectical appropriateness of the assumption that doing and refraining are both open to the agent.

Todd (2013) challenges the courage of dependence theorists’ convictions with a scenario in which, instead of simply foreknowing that you will perform a certain action tomorrow, God prepunished you for it yesterday. The explanatory relations are the same in the two cases, but your undergoing that punishment yesterday is surely a fixed fact about the past, and your performing that action tomorrow is surely unavoidable. We have no less reason to think that God’s foreknowledge belongs to the fixed past and that foreknown actions are unavoidable. Swenson (2016) and Law (2020) dispute the moral Todd draws from his prepunishment case, appealing to time travel scenarios in which some fact about the past depends on what might yet happen in the future, where our intuitions are supposedly more open to the possibility that the past isn’t entirely fixed.

Swenson (2016) argues that what’s fixed isn’t the past in toto , but so much of the past as isn’t dependent on the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past is fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most other defenders of the dependence solution. After reviewing modal, counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, Wasserman (2021) concludes that causal dependence is the best model for understanding how God can foreknow what you will do because you will do it, and in Wasserman (forthcoming) he argues that the defense of libertarian freedom against theological fatalism is best served by emphasizing the independence of future actions from God’s foreknowledge rather than the dependence of God’s foreknowledge on the foreknown actions.

The dependence solution redirects attention from the temporal to the explanatory order, in which divine foreknowledge depends on future events while future events do not depend on divine foreknowledge. It then proposes that what’s relevant to assessing libertarian agency is the explanatory order--the temporal order is relevant only insofar as it follows the explanatory order, and (when it does follow it) because it follows it. Thus a fact about the past, such as God’s believing yesterday that T , is irrelevant to the libertarian status of a future action if that fact does not explain, and is instead explained by, that future action. This much is consistent with the past’s being fixed and necessary in just the way that premise (2) requires, and consistent with the solution we’ll look at in 2.8 . What the dependence solution adds is that openness in the explanatory order overrides the necessity of the past: any facts about the past that aren’t yet explanatorily fixed, aren’t yet temporally fixed either. So (2) isn’t true in its full generality, and divine foreknowledge is one of the exceptions, blocking the inference to (3).

Whether this additional move is plausible depends on the strength of one’s intuitions about the necessity of the past. If the police are already on the way, summoned by the tachyonic alarm system the bank teller is about to activate, not everyone will share the intuition that the teller still has the option not to press the alarm button.

The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses the “transfer” of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4). Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future. Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment: □ p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ q . But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote 1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the argument for theological fatalism, is rule β (van Inwagen 1983). The necessity-operator featured in this principle is N , where N p is to be read, “ p , and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p .” Rule β states that, given N p and N ( p ⊃ q ), it follows that N q . Counterexamples to rule β were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument to rest on N p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ N q , and this principle appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for theological fatalism is □ t p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ t q , where □ t p is to be read, “p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer avoidable, etc., relative to time t .” This principle, too, seems to have no counterexample.

Duns Scotus (Kenny 1979, 56–58) appears to have challenged this principle. Fischer (1985b) responds to the challenge. But the theory of divine omniscience that has been most closely associated with the denial of (5) is the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. This doctrine was vehemently debated in the 16 th century, with the version of Luis de Molina, referred to as “Molinism,” getting the most attention in the contemporary literature. Recently the doctrine has received strong support by Thomas Flint (1998) and Eef Dekker (2000). Unlike the other compatibilist solutions we are considering, which aim only at showing that infallible foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible, Molinism provides an account of how God knows the contingent future, along with a strong doctrine of divine providence. Middle knowledge is called “middle” because it is said to stand between God’s knowledge of necessary truths and his knowledge of his own creative will. The objects of Middle Knowledge are so-called counterfactuals of freedom:

If person S were in circumstances C , S would freely do X .

Middle knowledge requires that there are true counterfactuals of this form corresponding to every possible free creature and every possible circumstance in which that creature can act freely. These propositions are intended to be contingent (a claim that has been disputed by some objectors), but they are prior to God’s creative will. God uses them in deciding what to create. By combining his Middle Knowledge with what he decides to create, God knows the entire history of the world.

There are a number of objections to Middle Knowledge in the contemporary literature. Robert Adams (1991) argues that Molinism is committed to the position that the truth of a counterfactual of freedom is explanatorily prior to God’s decision to create us. But the truth of a counterfactual to the effect that if I were in circumstance C I would do A is strictly inconsistent with my refraining from A in C , and so my refraining from A in C is precluded by something prior in the order of explanation to my act in C . This is inconsistent with my acting freely in C . Climenhaga and Rubio (forthcoming) clarify the nature of explanatory priority and in so doing affirm the essential correctness of Adams’ analysis. There are a number of other objections to Middle Knowledge in the literature, as well as replies by its defenders. William Hasker (1989, 1995, 1997, 2000) has offered a series of objections and replies to William Craig, who defends Middle Knowledge (1994, 1998). Yet other objections have been proposed by Walls (1990) and Gaskin (1993). Recent critical discussions of Molinism appear in Fischer (2008), Guleserian (2008), and Fales (2010). Defenses of Molinism appear in Brüntrup & Schneider (2011) and Kosciuk (2010), and a critique in Shieber (2009). Perszyk (2011) is a collection of essays examining Molinism and its future direction, while Perszyk (2013) provides a survey of the recent literature.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is defensible. How does that avoid the conclusion of the argument for theological fatalism? Middle Knowledge does not entail the falsehood of any premise of the basic argument. Freddoso (1988, 53–60) argues that Molina rejects the closure of accidental necessity under entailment, but for reasons closer to those inspiring the Dependence Solution (though Molina does not dispute the necessity of the past). Flint (1998) rejects some of the steps of the fatalist argument in addition to defending Middle Knowledge, and more recently blends of Ockhamism and Molinism have been defended (Kosciuk 2010), which suggests that even though the theory of Middle Knowledge is a powerful theory of divine knowledge and providence, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid theological fatalism by itself.

Doubts about premises (2) and (5) can be combined into a more radical critique of the argument. We have already discussed the Ockhamist response, which accepts (2) as applied to what is strictly past, but rejects it as applied to that part of the past that is not wholly or strictly past. It is worth asking, however, whether there is any such thing as the necessity of the past at all. What do we mean when we say that the past, the strict past, is necessary? When people say, “There is no use crying over spilled milk,” they presumably mean that there is nothing anybody can do now about the spilled milk; the spilling of the milk is outside the realm of our causal control. But it is not at all clear that pastness per se puts something outside the realm of our causal control. Rather, it is pastness in conjunction with the metaphysical law that causes must precede their effects. If we decided that effects can precede their causes, it’s quite possible that we would no longer speak of the necessity of the past.

So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future. But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are causally necessary. If a future event E is necessary, it is causable, and not E is not causable. But if the necessity of the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an allegedly distinct kind of necessity since some of the future has that same kind of necessity.

This leads to a deeper problem in the idea of the necessity of the past. Zagzebski (2014) argues that the interpretation of the necessity of the past as a purely temporal modality is confused. What people generally mean by the necessity of the past is that the past is causally closed, meaning the past is neither causable nor preventable. Understood that way, the necessity of the past is not a purely temporal modality, and it is not a form of necessity. The categories of causability and non-causability do not correspond to the standard modal categories of the necessary, possible, and impossible. The attempt to assimilate the causal categories to modal categories is a mistake.

Let us see what happens to the argument for theological fatalism if the necessity of the past is understood as the causal closure of the past.

Let us begin with a definition of causal closure :

E is causally closed = df There is nothing now that can cause E , and there is nothing now that can cause not E .

To use this principle in an argument for fatalism, the principle of the necessity of the past will need to be replaced with the following principle:

Principle of the Causal Closure of the Past : If E is an event in the past, E is causally closed.

We will then need to replace the transfer of necessity principle by the following:

Transfer of Causal Closure Principle : If E occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if E occurs then F occurs), then F is causally closed.

To recast the argument for theological fatalism, let us again consider the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am and call it T :

But (6) denies that there are causes of the future. Certainly we believe that something now, whether agents or events, can cause future events, and the fatalist does not deny that. What the fatalist denies is that we can cause something other than what we cause. So the relevant half of the principle of the causal closure of the past is as follows:

Principle of the Unpreventability of the Past : If E is an event in the past, nothing now can cause not E .

To use this principle in a fatalist argument, we need the following:

Transfer of Unpreventability Principle : If E occurs and it is not now causable that E does not occur, and necessarily (if E occurs, then F occurs), then it is not now causable that F does not occur.

This principle is virtually identical to the transfer of unpreventability principle proposed by Hugh Rice (2005), and is similar to a strengthened form of the well-known principle Beta first proposed by Peter van Inwagen (1983).

Using this principle, we get the following argument for theological fatalism:

From the Principle of the unpreventability of the past we get:

From the definition of divine infallibility we get:

From 2, 3, and the transfer of unpreventability principle we get:

From a variation of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, we get:

From (4) and (5), we get:

This argument for theological fatalism is better than the standard argument if a purely temporal necessity is problematic. The second premise of the above argument is only the principle that the past is unpreventable, not a questionable premise that the past has a special kind of necessity distinct from the causal structure of the universe simply in virtue of being past. But since the unpreventability of the past is not a form of necessity in the formal sense, then the transfer principle licensing the crucial inference to (4) is not a transfer of necessity. Unlike the transfer of temporal necessity principle in our original argument, it is not a variation of an axiom of logic, and is far from indisputable. This suggests that the idea of the necessity of the past may be confused. On the one hand, we have inherited from Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of necessity for which we can formulate an analogue of the formal principles of logical necessity. But the intuitions supporting such a form of necessity are largely intuitions about causability, and the modalities of causability/non-causability do not parallel necessity, possibility, and impossibility. If this is correct, then if there is a true transfer of causability or non-causability principle, it is not because it is like logical necessity in its formal structure. The problem, then, is that the fatalist argument needs a kind of necessity that the past has and which is also transferred to the future via a valid transfer of necessity principle. In section 5 we will look at how this is a general problem that extends beyond the issue of fatalism.

2.8 The rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

Compatibilists who hold that it’s possible for an agent to do otherwise, in the sense required for free will, even if her action is causally determined, will probably be untroubled by an argument purporting to show that no one can do otherwise, given divine foreknowledge. The relevant interlocutors for the argument for theological fatalism are those who endorse a libertarian conception of free will (Alston 1985).

With that in mind, let us now look at premise (9). This is a form of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a principle that has become well-known in the literature on free will ever since it was attacked by Harry Frankfurt (1969) in some interesting thought experiments. The point of Frankfurt’s paper was to drive a wedge between responsibility and alternate possibilities, and to thereby drive a wedge between responsibility and libertarian freedom. In general, those defending libertarian freedom also defend PAP, and those attacking PAP, like Frankfurt, defend determinism, but some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of an incompatibilist about free will and determinism can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Hunt (1999b), Zagzebski (1991, 2000), Pereboom (2000), and Shabo (2010). This view was originally called hyper-incompatibilism by John Martin Fischer, but has recently been called source incompatibilism. For a recent critique of this version of incompatibilism for solving the foreknowledge problem, see Werther (2005) and Talsma (2013).

Here is an example of a typical Frankfurt case intended to show that an agent can act freely even when she lacks alternate possibilities:

Black, an evil neurosurgeon , wishes to see Smith dead but is unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also despises Smith and will have a single good opportunity to kill him, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain that enables Black to monitor and to control Jones’s neurological activity. If the activity in Jones’s brain suggests that she is on the verge of deciding not to kill Smith when the opportunity arises, Black’s mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder Smith on her own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the occasion arises, Jones decides to kill Smith without any “help” from Black’s mechanism. In the judgment of Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act. Nonetheless, it appears that she is unable to do otherwise since if she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by Black’s device.

Most commentators on examples like this agree that the agent is both morally responsible for her act and acts freely in whatever sense of freedom they endorse. They differ on whether she can do otherwise at the time of her act. Determinists generally interpret the case as one in which she exercises compatibilist free will and has no alternate possibilities. Most libertarians interpret it as one in which she exercises libertarian free will and has alternate possibilities, contrary to appearances. As mentioned above, some philosophers have interpreted it as a case in which she exercises libertarian free will but does not have alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt cases can be successfully interpreted in this third way, then they can be used to show the compatibility of infallible foreknowledge and libertarian freedom. Hunt (1999a) argues that this is essentially the solution put forward by Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will III.1–4, though Augustine’s own considered position on free will was not libertarian.

But there is another way Frankfurt cases can be used to argue for the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. There is an important disanalogy between a Frankfurt case and infallible foreknowledge that might lead one to doubt whether an agent really lacks alternate possibilities when her act is infallibly foreknown. A crucial component of the standard Frankfurt case is that the agent is prevented from acting freely in close possible worlds. That aspect of the case is not in dispute. Black’s device is counterfactually manipulative even if it is not actually manipulative. In contrast, infallible foreknowledge is not even counterfactually manipulative. There is no close possible world in which foreknowledge prevents the agent from acting freely. Of course, if theological fatalism is true, nobody ever acts freely, but the point is that there is no manipulation going on in other possible worlds in the foreknowledge scenario. The relation between foreknowledge and human acts is no different in one world than in any other. But it is precisely the fact that the relation between the Frankfurt machine and Mary’s act differs in the actual world from what it is in other close worlds that is supposed to make the Frankfurt example work in showing the falsity of PAP.

To make this point clear, let us look at how the standard Frankfurt case would have to be amended to make it a close analogy to the situation of infallible foreknowledge. As Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 6, sec. 2.1), the device implanted in Mary’s brain would have to be set in such a way that no matter what Mary did, it never intervened. It is not even true that it might have intervened. Any world in which Mary decides to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to make her commit the murder should she not decide to do it, and any world in which she does not decide to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to prevent her from deciding to do it if she is about to decide to do it. Now of course this might be an impossible device, but it would have to be as described to be a close analogy to the foreknowledge scenario. And our reactions to this amended Frankfurt case are very different from typical reactions to the standard Frankfurt case. In the standard case it at least appears to be true that the agent cannot do otherwise, whereas in the case amended to be parallel to the foreknowledge case there is a very straightforward sense in which the agent can do otherwise because her will is not thwarted by Black in any reasonably close possible world. The machine is ready to manipulate her, but it does not manipulate her, nor might it have manipulated her since it does not even manipulate her in counterfactual circumstances. We might think of the machine as a metaphysical accident—an extraneous addition to the story that plays no part in the sequence of events in any possible world. Possibly it is not clear in the amended story whether or not Mary has alternate possibilities. What the story shows, then, is that alternate possibilities are not always relevant to the possession of libertarian freedom.

Disanalogies between the cases are relevant, however, only if the prospects for exempting divine foreknowledge from PAP depend on how closely it mimics Frankfurt-type counterexamples. That assumption may be unwarranted. Augustine’s counterexample to PAP was divine foreknowledge itself, not a proto-Frankfurtian thought experiment featuring a counterfactual intervener. Since God infallibly believed yesterday that you will answer the phone at 9:00 am tomorrow, there is no alternative possibility on which you fail to answer the phone at 9:00 tomorrow morning; but since “a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin” ( CG V.10) and, more generally, “God’s foreknowledge does not force the future to happen” ( FCW III.4), we can still regard your action as free, even in the libertarian sense. So PAP is false, for the same reasons Frankfurt pronounced it false in his story about Black, Smith and Jones: God’s foreknowledge, no less than Black’s mechanism, played no role at all in leading the agent to perform the action, could have been subtracted from the situation without making any difference to what happened or why it happened, and is completely irrelevant to understanding why the agent acted as she did (Frankfurt 1969, 836–7). Divine foreknowledge constitutes its own counterexample to PAP (Hunt 2003).

If this is correct, the following dilemma critique of theological fatalism becomes available (Hunt 2017a). Either the argument fails somewhere along the way to (8), or it succeeds up through (8). If it fails at one of these earlier steps, it fails full stop. That’s the obvious horn of the dilemma. But if it reaches step (8) successfully, and reaches it for those reasons , we have a case in which you cannot do otherwise than answer the phone tomorrow morning, but you are presumptively free in doing so, since you are acting on your own, and the circumstances that deprive you of alternatives do not in any way explain your action. So (9) is false, and it’s falsified by (8). Whether (1)-(8) succeeds or fails, then, the fatalistic inference to (10) is blocked.

Note that this solution shares an intuition with the dependence response surveyed in 2.5, namely, that God’s foreknowledge is explanatorily dependent on future events, and not the other way around. The difference is that the Dependence Solution retains PAP by denying the general necessity of the past, while the Augustinian/Frankfurtian approach is to abandon PAP and stick with the necessity of the past.

Ever since the dilemma of this article was identified, there have been philosophers who thought that something like our basic argument succeeds in demonstrating that infallible foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. If they are incompatible, one of them must be given up. It’s possible to give up both, of course, but that’s more than the argument requires, and one reason the dilemma has attracted so much attention in the history of philosophy is that both the belief in a being with infallible foreknowledge and belief in the existence of libertarian free will are strongly entrenched in the world view of many philosophers. To give up either of these beliefs is difficult and often has many ramifications for one’s other beliefs.

The denial of libertarian freedom has always had many supporters. The idea of making causal determinism the focal point of discussions of free will is modern in origin, and some philosophers think that the modern framing of the issue is confused. Philosophers who deny libertarian freedom may affirm a type of free will compatible with determinism, or they may instead simply accept the consequence that human beings lack free will. It is worth noting, however, that theists who deny libertarian freedom are typically theological determinists rather than fatalists; it’s primarily considerations of divine omnipotence or sovereignty, rather than foreknowledge, that motivate them. When Augustine, for example, rejected human freedom apart from divine control—“I tried hard to maintain the free decision of the human will, but the grace of God was victorious” ( Retractationes 2.1)—it wasn’t because of the fatalist argument from divine foreknowedge, which (as we’ve seen) he regarded as a complete failure. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, based his Calvinist denial of libertarian freedom, in part, on a sophisticated version of the argument for theological fatalism ( FW II.12).

The other incompatibilist position is to affirm libertarian free will along with the principle of alternate possibilities (premise 9), and to deny the possibility of infallible foreknowledge. This position has recently come into prominence through its association with “open theism” (Pinnock et al . 1994). Open theists reject divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible foreknowledge, arguing that not only should foreknowledge be rejected because of its fatalist consequences, but the view of a God who takes risks, and can be surprised and even disappointed at how things turn out, is more faithful to Scripture than the classical notion of an essentially omniscient and foreknowing deity (Sanders 1998, Boyd et al 2001, 13–47). See Rhoda et al (2006) for an argument that the key issue in the open theism debate is the nature of the future, and Tuggy (2007) for an overview of the different positions open theists can take on this question. A reply to both Rhoda et al. and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Fischer, Todd and Tognazzini (2009) offers a wide-ranging appraisal of responses to Pike's argument, paying special attention to open theism and issues in the philosophy of time. For an argument that open theism necessitates the view that propositions about the future lack truth value, see Arbour (2013). Todd disagrees on behalf of the open theist, defending (but without endorsing) the mutability of the future (2016a), and arguing that future contingents are all false rather than truth-valueless (2016b). Boyd (2015) attempts to turn the tables against critics on the grounds that the openist God’s knowledge of all the ways the future might go represents more knowledge than the classical theistic God’s knowledge of the way the future will go. Arbour (2019) is a recent collection of commisioned essays criticizing open theism on philosophical grounds.

One influential argument that open theists use against defenders of foreknowledge who do not also accept Molinism is that foreknowledge without middle knowledge is useless for divine providence. In a number of papers (1993, 1997, 2009), David Hunt has defended the providential utility of foreknowledge without middle knowledge, describing cases in which foreknowledge enhances God’s providential prospects without generating the “metaphysical problem” of explanatory circles, and arguing that the “doxastic problem” of agential impotence when one already knows what one is going to do rests on a principle that is in fact false. Responses to Hunt include Kapitan (1993), Basinger (1993), Robinson (2004a, 2004b), and Hasker (2009). Zimmerman (2012) is friendlier to Hunt’s position.

A related objection to foreknowledge without middle knowledge is that prophecy requires middle knowledge. See Pruss (2007) for a defense of a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. Another issue related to divine providence is the efficacy of past-directed prayers. Kevin Timpe (2005) argues that adherents of simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge and Molinists have the resources to explain the efficacy of prayers about the past, but open theism does not.

A form of fatalism that is even older than theological fatalism is logical fatalism, the thesis that the past truth of a proposition about the future entails fatalism. Aristotle discusses this form of fatalism in his famous Sea Battle Argument, mentioned in section 2.1 above. A clearer and more sophisticated form of the argument was proposed by Diodorus Cronus, whose argument is remarkably similar in form to our basic argument for theological fatalism. The logical fatalist argument parallels our basic argument as follows:

Argument for logical fatalism

Let S = the proposition that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Unlike the argument for theological fatalism, the argument for logical fatalism has few defenders. One reason is that (2L) is less plausible than (2). (3L) is a soft fact about the past, if anything is. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Susan Haack (1974) and William Lane Craig (1987), have maintained that theological fatalism is just a gussied up version of logical fatalism, and that the former is no more impressive than the latter once one looks past the theological window-dressing. This seems to be Merricks’ (2009) position as well, since he holds that theological fatalism fails for essentially the same reason as logical fatalism. Warfield (1997) has argued for the equivalence of the two forms of fatalism if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient. Responses have been given by Hasker (1998) and Brueckner (2000), and Warfield (2000) offers a rejoinder to both. Hunt (2002) links Warfield’s argument with Plantinga’s (1986), discussed in 2.4 , inasmuch as both exploit the logical equivalence of propositions about the contingent future with God’s believing those propositions, and argues that they both fall prey to the same reductio: the closure principles they invoke (closure of consistency under logical equivalence for Warfield, closure of hard/soft facthood under logical equivalence for Plantinga) would equally support the compatibility of free will with divine determinism, an unacceptable result for a libertarian. Peter Graham (2008) argues that the consensus about consistency to which Warfield appeals emerged against the backdrop of an assumption that there is no necessarily existent being, and is therefore question-begging.

5. Beyond theological fatalism

There’s more at stake here than the coherence of libertarian theism, as evidenced by the many non-libertarians and non-theists who have contributed to the debate. A comparison might be helpful. There’s more at stake in Zeno’s Achilles paradox than the fleetness of Achilles and the torpidity of tortoises. If that’s all there was to it, the discovery that Achilles was actually a quadraplegic, or that the tortoises of ancient Greece were as fast as jack rabbits, would resolve the puzzle. But that would simply exempt Achilles and/or the tortoise from complicity in the problem; it would do nothing to address the real issues presented by Zeno’s argument. The situation is arguably the same when it comes to the argument for theological fatalism (Hunt 2017a). If the argument gets God wrong by assuming that he’s in time when he isn’t, the problem possibly goes away for God, once the mistake is corrected, but it’s easily reinstated by replacing God with Gud, an infallibly omniscient being who exists in time. If the argument gets human beings wrong by assuming that they have (libertarian) free will when they don’t, the problem can be reformulated in terms of Gud’s infallible beliefs about the future actions of Eleutherians, a race of extraterrestrials stipulated to possess libertarian freedom. This is to understand the argument for theological fatalism as a thought experiment. Whether or not divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are real, we’re being asked, what if? Could libertarian freedom really be incompatible with divine foreknowledge for the reasons given in the argument ? The answer to this question may involve rethinking more than God and free will.

Zagzebski has argued that the dilemma of theological fatalism is broader than a problem about free will. The modal or causal asymmetry of time, a transfer of necessity principle, and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge are mutually inconsistent. (1991, appendix). If there is a distinct kind of necessity that the past has qua past, and which is not an implicit reference to the lack of causability of the past, then it is temporally asymmetrical. The past has it and the future does not. The necessity of the past and the contingency of the future are two sides of the same coin. To say that the future is contingent in the sense of temporal modality does not imply that we have causal control over the entire future, of course. We lack control over part of the future because part (or even all) of it is causally necessary. But if the necessity of the past is distinct from the lack of causability, and is a type of necessity the past has just because it is past, the future must lack that particular kind of necessity.

The idea that there is temporally asymmetrical modality is inconsistent with the transfer of necessity principle and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge of an essentially omniscient deity. The inconsistency can be demonstrated as follows:

Dilemma of Foreknowledge and Modal Temporal Asymmetry

Again, let T = the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am.

(1f) and the Principle of the Necessity of the Past tells us that

From (1f) and the definition of an EOF it follows that

By the Transfer of Necessity Principle (TNP), (2f) and (3f) entail

(4f) is logically equivalent to

From the Principle of the Contingency of the Future we get

But (6f) contradicts (5f).

The inconsistency shown in this argument has nothing to do with free will or fatalism. In fact, the problem is even more general than this argument illustrates. The reason essential omniscience conflicts with temporal modality and the transfer principle is that the existence of an EOF requires that a proposition about the past entails a proposition about the future. But it straightforwardly follows from TNP that a proposition that is now-necessary cannot entail a proposition that is not now-necessary. So if the past is now-necessary and the future is not, a proposition about the past cannot entail a proposition about the future. The conclusion is that if asymmetrical temporal modality is coherent, it can obey TNP, or it can permit a proposition about the past to entail a proposition about the future, but not both.

The root of the problem, then, is that it is impossible for there to be a type of modality that has the following features:

So the problem of the alleged incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and free will is a special case of a more general problem about time and necessity. It was suggested in section 2.6 that the problem may be (a) above. There is no temporally asymmetrical necessity. But regardless of what one thinks of fatalist arguments, the general problem in the logic of time and causation needs to be addressed. Both the alleged modal asymmetry of time and the causal asymmetry should be examined in more detail.

The problem of foreknowledge and fatalism has been around for a long time, but the amount of philosophical attention it has attracted since 1965 is truly remarkable. The literature on this problem is enormous, and it continues to grow.

• Adams, Marilyn, 1967, “Is the Existence of God a ‘Hard’ Fact?” Philosophical Review , 76(4): 492–503.
• Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1991, “An Anti-Molinist Argument,” Philosophical Perspectives (Volume 5: Philosophy of Religion), James Tomberlin (ed)., Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, pp. 343–354.
• Alston, William P., 1985, “Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 18(1): 19–32.
• –––, 1986, “Does God Have Beliefs?” Religious Studies , 22 (Sept/Dec): 287–306.
• Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologica , Ia, q. 14, art 13.
• –––, Summa Contra Gentiles I, chap. 66.
• Arbour, Benjamin H., 2013, “Future Freedom and the Fixity of Truth: Closing the Road to Limited Foreknowledge Open Theism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 73(3): 189–207.
• ––– (ed.), 2019, Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism , London: Routledge.
• Augustine, The City of God , trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G.R. Evans, Penguin, 2003.
• –––, On Free Choice of the Will , trans., with introduction and notes, by Thomas Williams, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993.
• Basinger, David, 1986, “Middle Knowledge and Classical Christian Thought,” Religious Studies , 22(3/4): 407–22.
• Baker, D., 2005, “Divine Foreknowledge—So What?” Heythrop Journal , 46(1): 60–65.
• –––, 1993, “Simple Foreknowledge and Providential Control,” Faith and Philosophy , 10(3): 421–427.
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , Book V, Prose vi.
• Boyd, Gregory, 2010, “Two Ancient (and Modern) Motivations for Ascribing Exhaustively Definite Foreknowledge to God: A Historic Overview and Critical Assessment,” Religious Studies , 46(1): 41–59.
• –––, 2015, “The Open Future, Free Will and Divine Assurance: Responding to Three Common Objections to the Open View,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 7(3): 207–22.
• Boyd, Gregory A., David Hunt, William Lane Craig, and Paul Helm, 2001, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views , James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (eds.), Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
• Brant, Dale Eric, 1997, “On Plantinga’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy , 14(3): 378–387.
• Brown, Robert F., 1991, “Divine Omniscience, Immutability, Aseity and Human Free Will,” Religious Studies , 27(3): 285–295.
• Brueckner, Anthony, 2000, “On an Attempt to Demonstrate the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” Faith and Philosophy , 17(1): 132–134.
• Brüntrup, Godehard and Ruben Schneider, 2011, “How Molinists Can Have Their Cake and Eat It Too,” in The Ways Things Are: Studies in Ontology , Christian Kanzian, Winfried Löffler, and Josef Quitterer (eds.), Frankfurt, Paris, Lancaster, and New Brunswick: Ontos Verlag, pp. 221–40.
• Byerly, T. Ryan, 2014, The Mechanics of Divine Foreknowledge and Providence: A Time-Ordering Account , New York & London: Bloomsbury Press.
• Climenhaga, Nevin, and Daniel Rubio, forthcoming, “Molinism: Explaining Our Freedom Away,” Mind , doi:10.1093/mind/fzab042
• Craig, William Lane, 1987, The Only Wise God , Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.
• –––, 1990, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 19), Leiden: E.J. Brill.
• –––, 1994, “Robert Adams’s New Anti-Molinist Argument,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 54(4): 857–861.
• –––, 1998, “On Hasker’s Defense of Anti-Molinism,” Faith and Philosophy , 15(2): 236–240.
• –––, 2005, “Divine Eternity and the General Theory of Relativity,” Faith and Philosophy , 22(5): 543–57.
• Craig, William Lane, and David P. Hunt, 2013, “Perils of the Open Road,” Faith and Philosophy , 30(1): 49–71.
• Cyr, Taylor W., 2020, “Atemporalism and Dependence,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 87(2): 149–64.
• Cyr, Taylor W., and Andrew Law, forthcoming, “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Dependence: A Dialectical Intervention,” American Philosophical Quarterly .
• Davenport, John, 2007, “Augustine on Liberty of the Higher-Order Will: Answers to Hunt and Stump,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , 81: 67–89.
• De Florio, Ciro, and Aldo Frigerio, 2015, “In Defense of the Timeless Solution to the Problem of Human Free Will and Divine Foreknowledge,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 78(1): 5–28.
• –––, 2019, Divine Omniscience and Human Free Will: A Logical and Metaphysical Analysis , London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Dekker, Eef, 2000, Middle Knowledge , Leuven: Peeters.
• Diekemper, Joseph., 2013, “Eternity, Knowledge, and Freedom,” Religious Studies , 49(1): 45–64.
• Dummett, Michael, 1964, “Bringing About the Past,” Philosophical Review , 73: 338–359; reprinted in his Truth and Other Enigmas , London: Duckworth, 1978.
• Edwards, Jonathan, Freedom of the Will , ed. Paul Ramsey, Yale University Press, 2009.
• Fales, E., 2010, “Is Middle Knowledge Possible? Almost,” Sophia , 50(1): 1–9.
• Finch, Alicia, and Michael Rea, 2008, “Presentism and Ockham’s Way Out,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Volume 1), Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–17.
• Finch, Alicia and Ted Warfield, 1999, “Fatalism: Logical and Theological,” Faith and Philosophy , 16(2): 233–238.
• Fischer, John Martin, 1983, “Freedom and Foreknowledge,” Philosophical Review , 92 (January): 67–79.
• –––, 1985a, “Ockhamism,” Philosophical Review , 94 (January): 81–100.
• –––, 1985b, “Scotism,” Mind , 94 (April): 231–43.
• ––– (ed.), 1989, God, Freedom, and Foreknowledge , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 1991, “Snapshot Ockhamism,” Philosophical Perspectives (Volume 5: Philosophy of Religion), Atascadero: Ridgeview, 355–372.
• –––, 1992, “Recent Work on God and Freedom,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 29(2): 91–109.
• –––, 1994, The Metaphysics of Free Will , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2008, “Molinism,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Volume 1), Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 18–43.
• –––, 2016, Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2017, “Book Symposium on Our Fate: Replies to My Critics,” Science, Religion, and Culture , 4: 79–101.
• –––, forthcoming, “The Frankfurt-style Cases: Extinguishing the Flickers of Freedom,” Inquiry , doi:10.1080/0020174X.2021.1904640
• Fischer, John Martin, and Patrick Todd, 2011, “The Truth about Freedom: A Reply to Merricks,” Philosophical Review , 120(1): 97–115.
• –––, 2013, “The Truth about Foreknowledge,” Faith and Philosophy , 30(3): 286–301.
• –––, 2015, “Introduction,” Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge , John Martin Fischer and Patrick Todd (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–38.
• Fischer, John Martin, and Neal A. Tognazzini, 2014, “Omniscience, Freedom, and Dependence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 88(2): 346–67.
• Fischer, John Martin, Patrick Todd, and Neal A. Tognazzini, 2009, “Engaging with Pike: God, Freedom, and Time,” Philosophical Papers , 38(2): 247–70.
• Fitzgerald, J., 2008, “Timeless Troubles: The Challenge of Prophecy to the Eternity Solution to the Foreknowledge/Freedom Dilemma,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , 82: 203–15.
• Flint, Thomas, 1990, “Hasker’s God, Time, and Knowledge ,” Philosophical Studies , 60: 103–115.
• –––, 1991, “In Defense of Theological Compatibilism,” Faith and Philosophy , 8: 237–243.
• –––, 1997, “Praying for Things to Have Happened,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Volume XXI), Peter French, et al ., (eds.), pp. 61–82.
• –––, 1998, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Forrest, Peter, 1985, “Backwards Causation in Defence of Free Will,” Mind , 94 (April): 210–217.
• Frankfurt, Harry, 1969, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy , 46 (December): 829–839.
• Freddoso, Alfred, 1982, “Accidental Necessity and Power Over the Past,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 63: 54–68.
• –––, 1983, “Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism,” Journal of Philosophy , 80: 257–78.
• –––, 1988, Trans. and introduction to Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of Concordia ), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Gaskin, R., 1993, “Conditionals of Freedom and Middle Knowledge,” The Philosophical Quarterly , 43(173): 412–430.
• –––, 1994, “Molina on Divine Foreknowledge and the Principle of Bivalence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 32(4): 551–571.
• Goris, Harm J.M.J., 1996, Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will , Utrecht/Louvain: Thomas Instituut/Peeters.
• Graham, P.A., 2008, “Warfield on Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” Faith and Philosophy , 25(1): 75–8.
• Griffin, David, and John B. Cobb, 1976, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition , Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
• Grössl, Johannes, and Leigh Vicens, 2014, “Closing the Door on Limited-Risk Open Theism,” Faith and Philosophy , 31(4): 475–85.
• Guleserian, T., 2008, “Ontological Determination and the Grounding Objection to Counterfactuals of Freedom,” Faith and Philosophy , 25(4): 394–415.
• Haack, Susan, 1974, “On a Theological Argument for Fatalism,” Philosophical Quarterly , 24 (April): 156–59.
• Hartshorne, Charles, 1941, Man’s Vision of God , New York: Harper and Bros.
• –––, 1967, A Natural Theology for Our Time , Lasalle: Open Court Pub.
• Hasker, William, 1988, “Yes, God Has Beliefs!” Religious Studies , 24(3): 385–94.
• –––, 1989, God, Time, and Knowledge , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1993, “Zagzebski on Power Entailment,” Faith and Philosophy , 10(2): 250–255.
• –––, 1995, “Middle Knowledge: A Refutation Revisited,” Faith and Philosophy , 12(2): 223–236.
• –––, 1997, “Explanatory Priority: Transitive and Unequivocal, a Reply to William Craig,” Philosophy and Phenomological Research , 57(2): 389–393.
• –––, 1998, “No Easy Way Out – A Response to Warfield,” Noûs , 32: 361–363.
• –––, 2000, “Anti-Molinism is Undefeated!”, Faith and Philosophy , 17(1): 126–131.
• –––, 2009. “Why Simple Foreknowledge Is Still Useless (In Spite of David Hunt and Alex Pruss),” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52(3): 537–44.
• Hawking, Stephen, 1988, A Brief History of Time , New York: Bantam Books.
• Hess, Elijah, 2020, “Contra Tooley: Divine Foreknowledge Is Possible,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 87(2): 165–72.
• Hoffman, Joshua and Gary Rosenkrantz, 1984, “Hard and Soft Facts,” Philosophical Review , 93 (July): 419–34.
• Hughes, Charles T., 1997, “Belief, Foreknowledge, and Theological Fatalism,” Faith and Philosophy , 14(3): 378–87.
• Hunt, David P., 1993, “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge,” Faith and Philosophy , 10(3): 394–414.
• –––, 1995, “Dispositional Omniscience,” Philosophical Studies , 80 (December): 243–78.
• –––, 1997, “Two Problems with Knowing the Future,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 34 (April): 273–85.
• –––, 1999a, “On Augustine’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy , 16(1): 3–26.
• –––, 1999b, “Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action,” Philosophical Studies , 97(2): 195–227.
• –––, 2002, “The Compatibility of Divine Determinism and Human Freedom: A Modest Proposal,” Faith and Philosophy , 19 (October): 485–502.
• –––, 2003, “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt,” in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities , David Widerker and Michael McKenna (eds.), Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., pp. 159–83.
• –––, 2009, “The Providential Advantage of Divine Foreknowledge,” in Arguing about Religion , Kevin Timpe (ed.), New York: Routledge, pp. 374–85.
• –––, 2017a, “Theological Fatalism as an Aporetic Problem,” in Free Will and Classical Theism: The Significance of Freedome in Perfect Being Theology , Hugh McCann (ed.), pp. 23–41.
• –––, 2017b, “John Martin Fischer on the Puzzle of Theological Fatalism,” Science, Religion and Culture , 4: 15–26.
• –––, 2020, “Fatalism for Presentists,” in The Metaphysics of Time: Themes on Prior , Per Hasle, David Jakobsen, and Peter Øhrstrøm (eds.), Aalborg University Press, pp. 299–316.
• Ishtiyaque, H., 2005, “Foreknowledge, Freedom, and Obligation,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 86(3): 321–39.
• Johnson, David Kyle, 2009, “God, Fatalism, and Temporal Ontology,” Religious Studies , 45(4): 435–54.
• Kane, Robert, 1996, The Significance of Free Will , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kapitan, Tomis, 1993, “Providence, Foreknowledge, and Decision Procedure,” Faith and Philosophy , 10(3): 415–420.
• Kenny, Anthony, 1969, “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” in Kenny, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• –––, 1979, The God of the Philosophers , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kosciuk, Christopher J., 2010, Human Freedom in a World Full of Providence: An Ockhamist-Molinist Account of the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Creaturely Free Will , University of Massachusetts Amherst, Open Access Dissertations.
• Kvanvig, Jonathan, 1986, The Possibility of an All-Knowing God , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Law, Andrew, 2020, “The Dependence Response and Explanatory Loops,” Faith and Philosophy , 37(3): 294–307.
• –––, 2021, “From the Fixity of the Past to the Fixity of the Independent,” Philosophical Studies , 178(4): 1301–14.
• Leftow, Brian, 1991a, Time and Eternity , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1991b, “Timelessness and Foreknowledge,” Philosophical Studies , 63: 309–325.
• Lewis, David, 1979, “Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow,” Noûs , 13 (November): 455–476.
• Linville, Mark D., 1993, “Divine Foreknowledge and the Libertarian Conception of Freedom,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 33(3): 165–186.
• Lucas, J.R., 1989, The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth , London: Blackwell.
• Malpass, Alex, and Jacek Wawer, 2012, “A Future for the Thin Red Line,” Synthese , 188(1): 117–42.
• Markosian, Ned, 2004, “A Defense of Presentism,” in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Volume 1), Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47–82.
• Massie, P., 2006, “Time and Contingency in Duns Scotus,” The Saint Anselm Journal , 3(2): 17–31.
• Mavrodes, George, 1984, “Is the Past Preventable?” Faith and Philosophy , I (April): 131–146.
• McCall, Storrs, 2011, “The Supervenience of Truth: Freewill and Omniscience,” Analysis , 71(3): 501–6.
• McCann, Hugh, 1995, “Divine Sovereignty and the Freedom of the Will,” Faith and Philosophy , 12(4): 582–598.
• McKay, Thomas J., and David Johnson, 1996, “A Reconsideration of an Argument against Compatibilism,” Philosophical Topics , 24(2): 113–22.
• McKenna, Michael, 1997, “Alternate Possibilities and the Failure of the Counterexample Strategy,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 28(3): 71–85.
• Mele, Alfred, and David Robb, 1998, “Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases,” Philosophical Review , 107(1): 97–112.
• Merricks, Trenton., 2009, “Truth and Freedom,” Philosophical Review , 118(1): 29–57.
• –––, 2011, “Foreknowledge and Freedom,” Philosophical Review , 120(4): 567–86.
• Molina, Luis de. [See Freddoso 1988.]
• Mongkin, Charles, and Menachem Kellner (eds.), 2000, Free Will and Moral Responsibility: General and Jewish Perspectives , College Park, MD: University of Maryland Press.
• Mooney, Justin, 2018, “Does Molinism Reconcile Freedom and Foreknowledge?” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 10(2): 131–48.
• Murray, Michael J., 1995, “Leibniz on Divine Foreknowledge of Future Contingents and Human Freedom,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 55(1): 75–108.
• O’Connor, Timothy, 2000, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ockham, William, 1983, Predestination, Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents , 2nd ed & trans. by Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Otsuka, Michael, 1998, “Incompatibilism and the Avoidability of Blame,” Ethics , 108 (July): 685–701.
• Øhrstrøm, Peter, 2009, “In Defence of the Thin Red Line: A Case for Ockhamism,” Humana Mente , 8: 17–32.
• Padgett, Alan, 1992, Eternity and the Nature of Time , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Padgett, Alan. 2002. “Divine Foreknowledge and the Arrow of Time: On the Impossibility of Retrocausation,” in God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature , Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–74.
• Pendergraft, Garrett, and D. Justin Coates., 2014, “No (New) Troubles with Ockhamism,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion , 5: 185–208.
• Pawl, Timothy, 2014a, “The Freedom of Christ and Explanatory Priority,” Religious Studies , 50: (2): 157–73.
• –––, 2014b, “The Freedom of Christ and the Problem of Deliberation,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 75(3): 233–47.
• Pereboom, Derk, 2000, “Alternate Possibilities and Causal Histories,” Philosophical Perspectives (Volume 20), James Tomberlin (ed.), Atascadero: Ridgeview.
• Perszyk, Ken., 2011, Molinism: The Contemporary Debate , Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Recent Work on Molinism,” Philosophy Compass , 8: 755–70.
• Pike, Nelson, 1965, “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action,” The Philosophical Review , 74(1): 27–46.
• –––, 1970, God and Timelessness , New York: Schocken.
• –––, 1993, “A Latter-Day Look at the Foreknowledge Problem,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 33 (June): 129–164.
• Pinnock, Clark, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, 1994, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God , Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
• Plantinga, Alvin, 1973, The Nature of Necessity , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1977, God, Freedom, and Evil , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans
• –––, 1986, “On Ockham’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy , 3(3): 235–269.
• Prior, Arthur N., 1962, “The Formalities of Omniscience,” Philosophy , 37 (April): 114–29.
• –––, 1967, Past, Present, and Future , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Purtill, Richard, 1988, “Fatalism and the Omnitemporality of Truth,” Faith and Philosophy , 5(2): 185–192.
• Pruss, A., 2007, “Prophecy Without Middle Knowledge,” Faith and Philosophy , 24(4): 433–57.
• –––, 2011, “From Restricted to Full Omniscience,” Religious Studies , 47(2): 257–64.
• Rauf, M.A., 1970, “The Qur’an and Free Will,” The Muslim World , 60(4): 289–299.
• Rea, Michael, 2006, “Presentism and Fatalism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 84(4): 511–24.
• Reichenbach, Bruce, 1987, “Hasker on Omniscience,” Faith and Philosophy , 4 (January): 86–92.
• –––, 1988, “Fatalism and Freedom,” International Philosophical Quarterly , 28 (September): 271–85.
• Rhoda, Alan R., 2009, “Presentism, Truthmakers, and God,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 90: 41–62.
• Rhoda, A.R., G.A. Boyd, and T.G. Belt, 2006, “Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future,” Faith and Philosophy , 23(4): 432–59.
• Rice, Hugh, 2005, “Zagzebski on the Arrow of Time,” Faith and Philosophy , 22(3): 363–369.
• Robinson, Michael D., 1995, Eternity and Freedom: A Critical Analysis of Divine Timelessness as a Solution to the Foreknowledge/Free Will Debate , Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
• –––, 2004a, “Divine Providence, Simple Foreknowledge, and the ‘Metaphysical Principle’,” Religious Studies , 40(4): 471–83.
• –––, 2004b, “Divine Guidance and an Accidentally Necessary Future: A Response to Hunt,” Religious Studies , 40(4): 493–98.
• Rogers, Katherin A., 2007a, “Anselmian Eternalism,” Faith and Philosophy , 24(1): 3–27.
• –––, 2007b, “The Necessity of the Present and Anselm’s Eternalist Response to the Problem of Theological Fatalism,” Religious Studies , 43(1): 25–47.
• –––, 2006, “Anselm on Eternity as the Fifth Dimension,” The Saint Anselm Journal , 3(2): 1–8.
• Rota, Michael, 2010, “The Eternity Solution to the Problem of Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 2(1): 165–186.
• Rowe, William L., 1999, “Problem of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom,” Faith and Philosophy , 16(1): 98–101.
• Runzo, Joseph, 1981, “Omniscience and Freedom for Evil,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 12: 131–147.
• Sanders, John, 1997, “Why Simple Foreknowledge Offers No More Providential Control Than the Openness of God,” Faith and Philosophy , 14(1): 26–40.
• –––, 1998, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence , Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
• Sansbury, T., 2007, “The False Promise of Quantum Mechanics,” Zygon , 42(1): 111–22.
• Sartorio, Carolina, 2016, “PAP-Style Cases,” Journal of Philosophy , 113(11): 533–49.
• Shabo, Seth, 2010, “Uncompromising Source Incompatibilism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 80(2): 349–83.
• Shanley, B., 1997, “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly , 71: 197–224.
• –––, 1998, “Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly , 72: 99–122.
• Shieber, Joseph., 2009, “Personal Responsibility and Middle Knowledge: A Challenge for the Molinist,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 66(2): 61–70.
• Sider, Ted, 1999, “Presentism and Ontological Commitment,” Journal of Philosophy , 96(7): 325–47.
• Sleigh, Robert, 1994, “Leibniz and Divine Foreknowledge,” Faith and Philosophy , 11(4): 547–571.
• Slote, Michael, 1982, “Selective Necessity and the Free-Will Problem,” Journal of Philosophy , 79(1): 5–24.
• Stump, Eleonore, 1990, “Intellect, Will, and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy , Michael D. Beaty (ed.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 254–85.
• –––, 1996, “Libertarian Freedom and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” in Faith, Freedom, and Rationality , Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 73–88.
• Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy , 78 (August): 429–58.
• –––, 1991, “Prophecy, Past Truth, and Eternity,” Philosophical Perspectives (Volume 5: Philosophy of Religion), James Tomberlin (ed.), Atascadero: Ridgeview Press, pp. 395–424.
• –––, 1992, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” Faith and Philosophy , 9: 463–82.
• Swenson, Philip, 2016, “Ability, Foreknowledge, and Explanatory Dependence,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 94(4): 658–71.
• Swinburne, Richard, 1977, The Coherence of Theism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006, Providence and the Problem of Evil , Oxford University Press.
• Talbott, Thomas, 1986, “On Divine Foreknowledge and Bringing About the Past,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 46: 455–469.
• –––, 1993, “Theological Fatalism and Modal Confusion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 33 (April): 65–88.
• Talsma, Tina., 2013, “Source Incompatibilism and the Foreknowledge Dilemma,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 73(3): 209–19.
• Tanis, J., 2004, “Free Will and Foreknowledge,” Dialogue , 46(2–3): 95–103.
• Timpe, Kevin, 2005. “Prayers for the Past,” Religious Studies , 41(3): 305–322.
• –––, 2007. “Truth-making and Divine Eternity,” Religious Studies , 43(3): 299–315.
• Todd, Patrick, 2011, “Geachianism,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion , 3: 222–51.
• –––, 2013a, “Soft Facts and Ontological Dependence,” Philosophical Studies , 164(3): 829–44.
• –––, 2013b, “Prepunishment and Explanatory Dependence: A New Argument for Incompatibilism about Foreknowledge and Freedom,” Philosophical Review , 122(4): 619–39.
• –––, 2014a, “Against Limited Foreknowledge,” Philosophia , 42(2): 523–38.
• –––, 2014b, “Fatalism,” Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy , Duncan Pritchard (ed.), available online .
• –––, 2016a, “Future Contingents Are All False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future,” Mind , 125(499): 775–98.
• –––, 2016b, “On Behalf of a Mutable Future,” Synthese , 193(7): 2077–95.
• –––, 2021, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False , Oxford University Press.
• Tooley, Michael, 2000, “Freedom and Foreknowledge,” Faith and Philosophy , 17 (April): 212–224.
• –––, 2010, “Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation: On the Impossibility of Divine Foreknowledge,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 2(1): 143–163.
• Tuggy, Dale, 2007, “Three Roads to Open Theism,” Faith and Philosophy , 24(1): 28–51.
• Van Inwagen, Peter, 1983, An Essay on Free Will , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2008, “What Does an Omniscient Being Know About the Future?” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Volume 1), Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 216–30.
• Vicens, Leigh C., and Simon Kittle, 2019, God and Human Freedom , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Walls, Jerry L., 1990, “Is Molinism as Bad as Calvinism?” Faith and Philosophy , 7(1): 85–98.
• Warfield, Ted, 1997, “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom Are Compatible,” Noûs , 31(1): 80–86.
• –––, 2000, “On Freedom and Foreknowledge: A Reply to Two Critics,” Faith and Philosophy , 17 (April): 255–259.
• Wasserman, Ryan, 2021, “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Dependence,” Noûs 55: 603–622.
• –––, forthcoming, “The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , doi:10.1111/phpr.12743
• Werther, D., 2005, “Divine Foreknowledge, Harry Frankfurt, and ‘Hyper-Incompatibilism’,” Ars Disputandi , 5: 1–7.
• Westphal, P., 2011, “The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Freewill,” Analysis , 71(2): 246–52.
• –––, 2012, “The Logic of the Compatibility of God’s Foreknowledge and Human Freewill,” Analysis , 72(2): 746–8.
• Whitehead, A. N., 1978, Process and Reality , D. R. Griffin and D. Sherburne (eds.), New York: Macmillan Press.
• Widerker, David, 1990, “Troubles with Ockhamism,” Journal of Philosophy , 87(9): 462–80.
• –––, 1991, “A Problem for the Eternity Solution,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 29: 87–95.
• –––, 1995a, “Libertarian Freedom and the Avoidability of Decisions,” Faith and Philosophy , 12: 112–118.
• –––, 1995b, “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” Philosophical Review , 104 (April): 247–261.
• –––, 1996, “Contra Snapshot Ockhamism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , 39(2): 95–102.
• –––, 2000, “Theological Fatalism and Frankfurt Counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,” Faith and Philosophy , 17 (April): 249–254.
• Wierenga, Edward, 1989, The Nature of God , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1991, “Prophecy, Freedom, and the Necessity of the Past,” Philosophical Perspectives (Volume 5: Philosophy of Religion), James Tomberlin (ed.), Atascadero: Ridgeview, pp. 425–446.
• Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1975, “God Everlasting,” God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob , C. Orlebeke and L. Smedes (eds.), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
• Wyckoff, J., 2010, “On the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,” Sophia , 49(3): 333–41.
• Zagzebski, Linda, 1991, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1993, “Rejoinder to Hasker,” Faith and Philosophy , 10(2): 256–260.
• –––, 1997, “Foreknowledge and Freedom,” Companion to Philosophy of Religion , Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), Oxford and New York: Blackwell.
• –––, 2000, “Does Libertarian Freedom Require Alternate Possibilities?” Noûs Vol. 34, Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives , 14 (Action and Freedom): 231–248.
• –––, 2002a, “Recent Work on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will,” The Oxford Handbook of Free Will , Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–64.
• –––, 2002b, “Omniscience and the Arrow of Time,” Faith and Philosophy , 19(4): 503–519.
• –––, 2004, “Omniscience, Time, and Freedom,” Guide to Philosophy of Religion , William Mann (ed.), Oxford and New York: Blackwell.
• –––, 2011, “Eternity and Fatalism,” in God, Eternity, and Time , Christian Tapp (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
• –––, 2014, “Divine Foreknowledge and the Metaphysics of Time,” in God: Reason, and Reality (Philosophia Series: Basic Philosophical Concepts), A Ramelow (ed.), Munich: Philosophia Verlag.
• Zemach, Eddy M., and David Widerker, 1987, “Facts, Freedom, and Foreknowledge,” Religious Studies , 23 (March): 19–28.
• Zimmerman, Dean, 2008, “The Privileged Present: Defending an ‘A-Theory’ of Time,” in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics , Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 211–25.
• –––, 2010, “The A-Theory of Time, Presentism, and Open Theism,” in Science and Religion in Dialogue , vol. 2, Melville Y. Stewart (ed.), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• –––, 2012, “The Providential Usefulness of ‘Simple Foreknowledge’,” in Reason, Metaphysics, and Mind: New Essays on the Philosophy of Alvin Plantinga , Kelly James Clark and Michael Rea (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Aristotle | Augustine, Saint | Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus | fatalism | freedom: divine | free will | God: and other ultimates | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | Ockham [Occam], William | voluntarism, theological

Copyright © 2021 by David Hunt < dhunt @ whittier . edu > Linda Zagzebski

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Chapter 5: The problem of free will and determinism

The problem of free will and determinism

Matthew Van Cleave

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”

-Leo Tolstoy

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

-Arthur Shopenhauer

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The term “freedom” is used in many contexts, from legal, to moral, to psychological, to social, to political, to theological. The founders of the United States often extolled the virtues of “liberty” and “freedom,” as well as cautioned us about how difficult they were to maintain. But what do these terms mean, exactly? What does it mean to claim that humans are (or are not) free? Almost anyone living in a liberal democracy today would affirm that freedom is a good thing, but they almost certainly do not all agree on what freedom is. With a concept as slippery as that of free will, it is not surprising that there is often disagreement. Thus, it will be important to be very clear on what precisely we are talking about when we are either affirming or denying that humans have free will. There is an important general point here that extends beyond the issue of free will: when debating whether or not x exists, we must first be clear on defining x, otherwise we will end up simply talking past each other . The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of whether or not free will exists in light of determinism. Thus, it is crucial to be clear in defining what we mean by “free will” and “determinism.” As we will see, these turn out to be difficult and contested philosophical questions. In this chapter we will consider these different positions and some of the arguments for, as well as objections to, them.

Let’s begin with an example. Consider the 1998 movie, The Truman Show . In that movie the main character, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), is the star of a reality television show. However, he doesn’t know that he is. He believes he is just an ordinary person living in an ordinary neighborhood, but in fact this neighborhood is an elaborate set of a television show in which all of his friends and acquaintances are just actors. His every moment is being filmed and broadcast to a whole world of fans that he doesn’t know exists and almost every detail of his life has been carefully orchestrated and controlled by the producers of the show. For example, Truman’s little town is surrounded by a lake, but since he has been conditioned to believe (falsely) that he had a traumatic boating accident in which his father died, he never has the desire to leave the small little town and venture out into the larger world (at least at first). So consider the life of Truman as described above. Is he free or not? On the one hand, he gets to do pretty much everything he wants to do and he is pretty happy. Truman doesn’t look like he’s being coerced in any explicit way and if you asked him if he was, he would almost certain reply that he wasn’t being coerced and that he was in charge of his life. That is, he would say that he was free (at least to the same extent that the rest of us would). These points all seem to suggest that he is free. For example, when Truman decides that he would rather not take a boat ride out to explore the wider world (which initially is his decision), he is doing what he wants to do. His action isn’t coerced and does not feel coerced to him. In contrast, if someone holds a gun to my head and tells me “your wallet or your life!” then my action of giving him my wallet is definitely coerced and feels so.

On the other hand, it seems clear the Truman’s life is being manipulated and controlled in a way that undermines his agency and thus his freedom. It seems clear that Truman is not the master of his fate in the way that he thinks he is. As Goethe says in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, there’s a sense in which people like Truman are those who are most helplessly enslaved, since Truman is subject to a massive illusion that he has no reason to suspect. In contrast, someone who knows she is a slave (such as slaves in the antebellum South in the United States) at least retains the autonomy of knowing that she is being controlled. Truman seems to be in the situation of being enslaved and not knowing it and it seems harder for such a person to escape that reality because they do not have any desire to (since they don’t know they are being manipulated and controlled).

As the Truman Show example illustrates, it seems there can be reasonable disagreement about whether or not Truman is free. On the one hand, there’s a sense in which he is free because he does what he wants and doesn’t feel manipulated. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which he isn’t free because what he wants to do is being manipulated by forces outside of his control (namely, the producers of the show). An even better example of this kind of thing comes from Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopia, Brave New World . In the society that Huxley envisions, everyone does what they want and no one is ever unhappy. So far this sounds utopic rather than dystopic. What makes it dystopic is the fact that this state of affairs is achieved by genetic and behavioral conditioning in a way that seems to remove any choice. The citizens of the Brave New World do what they want, yes, but they seems to have absolutely no control over what they want in the first place. Rather, their desires are essentially implanted in them by a process of conditioning long before they are old enough to understand what is going on. The citizens of Brave New World do what they want, but they have no control over what the want in the first place. In that sense, they are like robots: they only have the desires that are chosen for them by the architects of the society.

So are people free as long as they are doing what they want to—that is, choosing the act according to their strongest desires? If so, then notice that the citizens of Brave New World would count as free, as would Truman from The Truman Show , since these are both cases of individuals who are acting on their strongest desires. The problem is that those desires are not desires those individuals have chosen. It feels like the individuals in those scenarios are being manipulated in a way that we believe we aren’t. Perhaps true freedom requires more than just that one does what one most wants to do. Perhaps true freedom requires a genuine choice. But what is a genuine choice beyond doing what one most wants to do?

Philosophers are generally of two main camps concerning the question of what free will is. Compatibilists believe that free will requires only that we are doing what we want to do in a way that isn’t coerced—in short, free actions are voluntary actions. Incompatibilists , motivated by examples like the above where our desires are themselves manipulated, believe that free will requires a genuine choice and they claim that a choice is genuine if and only if, were we given the choice to make again, we could have chosen otherwise . I can perhaps best crystalize the difference between these two positions by moving to a theological example. Suppose that there is a god who created the universe, including humans, and who controls everything that goes on in the universe, including what humans do. But suppose that god does this not my directly coercing us to do things that we don’t want to do but, rather, by implanting the desire in us to do what god wants us to do. Thus human beings, by doing what the want to do, would actually be doing what god wanted them to do. According to the compatibilist, humans in this scenario would be free since they would be doing what they want to do. According to the incompatibilist, however, humans in this scenario would not be free because given the desire that god had implanted in them, they would always end up doing the same thing if given the decision to make (assuming that desires deterministically cause behaviors). If you don’t like the theological example, consider a sci-fi example which has the same exact structure. Suppose there is an eccentric neuroscientist who has figured out how to wire your brain with a mechanism by which he can implant desire into you.

Suppose that the neuroscientist implants in you the desire to start collecting stamps and you do so. However, you know none of this (the surgery to implant the device was done while you were sleeping and you are none the wiser).

From your perspective, one day you find yourself with the desire to start collecting stamps. It feels to you as though this was something you chose and were not coerced to do. However, the reality is that given this desire that the neuroscientist implanted in you, you could not have chosen not to have started collecting stamps (that is, you were necessitated to start collecting stamps, given the desire). Again, in this scenario the compatibilist would say that your choice to start collecting stamps was free (since it was something you wanted to do and did not feel coerced to you), but the incompatibilist would say that your choice was not free since given the implantation of the desire, you could not have chosen otherwise.

We have not quite yet gotten to the nub of the philosophical problem of free will and determinism because we have not yet talked about determinism and the problem it is supposed to present for free will. What is determinism?

Determinism is the doctrine that every cause is itself the effect of a prior cause. More precisely, if an event (E) is determined, then there are prior conditions (C) which are sufficient for the occurrence of E. That means that if C occurs, then E has to occur. Determinism is simply the claim that every event in the universe is determined. Determinism is assumed in the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology (with the exception of quantum physics for reasons I won’t explain here). Science always assumes that any particular event has some law-like explanation—that is, underlying any particular cause is some set of law- like regularities. We might not know what the laws are, but the whole assumption of the natural sciences is that there are such laws, even if we don’t currently know what they are. It is this assumption that leads scientists to search for causes and patterns in the world, as opposed to just saying that everything is random. Where determinism starts to become contentious is when we move into the human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and economics. To illustrate why this is contentious, consider the famous example of Laplace’s demon that comes from Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Laplace’s point is that if determinism were true, then everything that every happened in the universe, including every human action ever undertaken, had to have happened. Of course humans, being limited in knowledge, could never predict everything that would happen from here out, but some being that was unlimited in intelligence could do exactly that. Pause for a moment to consider what this means. If determinism is true, then Laplace’s demon would have been able to predict from the point of the big bang, that you would be reading these words on this page at this exact point of time. Or that you had what you had for breakfast this morning. Or any other fact in the universe. This seems hard to believe, since it seems like some things that happen in the universe didn’t have to happen. Certain human actions seem to be the paradigm case of such events. If I ate an omelet for breakfast this morning, that may be a fact but it seems strange to think that this fact was necessitated as soon as the big bang occurred. Human actions seem to have a kind of independence from web of deterministic web of causes and effects in a way that, say, billiard balls don’t.

Given that the cue ball his the 8 ball with a specific velocity, at a certain angle, and taking into effect the coefficient of friction of the felt on the pool table, the exact location of the 8 ball is, so to speak, already determined before it ends up there. But human behavior doesn’t seem to be like the behavior of the 8 ball in this way, which is why some people think that the human sciences are importantly different than the natural sciences. Whether or not the human sciences are also deterministic is an issue that helps distinguish the different philosophical positions one can take on free will, as we will see presently. But the important point to see right now is that determinism is a doctrine that applies to all causes, including human actions. Thus, if some particular brain state is what ultimately caused my action and that brain state itself was caused by a prior brain state, and so on, then my action had to occur given those earlier prior events. And that entails that I couldn’t have chosen to act otherwise, given that those earlier events took place . That means that the incompatibilist position on free will cannot be correct if determinism is true. Recall that incompatibilism requires that a choice is free only if one could have chosen differently, given all the same initial conditions. But if determinism is true, then human actions are no different than the 8 ball: given what has come before, the current event had to happen. Thus, if this morning I cooked an omelet, then my “choice” to make that omelet could not have been otherwise. Given the complex web of prior influences on my behavior, my making that omelet was determined. It had to occur.

Of course, it feels to us, when contemplating our own futures, that there are many different possible ways our lives might go—many possible choices to be made. But if determinism is true, then this is an illusion. In reality, there is only one way that things could go, it’s just that we can’t see what that is because of our limited knowledge. Consider the figure below. Each junction in the figure below represents a decision I make and let’s suppose that some (much larger) decision tree like this could represent all of the possible ways my life could go. At any point in time, when contemplating what to do, it seems that I can conceive of my life going many different possible ways. Suppose that A represents one series of choices and B another. Suppose, further, that A represents what I actually do (looking backwards over my life from the future). Although from this point in time it seems that I could also have made the series of choices represented in B, if determinism is true then this is false. That is, if A is what ends up happening, then A is the only thing that ever could have happened . If it hasn’t yet hit you how determinism conflicts with our sense of our own possibilities in life, think about that for a second.

As the foregoing I hope makes clear, the incompatibilist definition of free will is incompatibile with determinism (that’s why it’s called “incompatibilist”). But that leaves open the question of which one is true. To say that free will and determinism are logically incompatible is just to say that they cannot both be true, meaning that one or the other must be false. But which one? Some will claim that it is determinism which is false. This position is called libertarianism (not to be confused with political libertarianism, which is a totally different idea). Others claim that determinism is true and that, therefore, there is no free will. This position is called hard determinism. A third type of position, compatibilism , rejects the incompatibilist definition of freedom and claims that free will and determinism are compatible (hence the name). The table below compares these different positions. But which one is correct? In the remainder of the chapter we will consider some arguments for and against these three positions on free will and determinism.

Libertarianism

Both libertarianism and hard determinism accept the following proposition: If determinism is true, then there is no free will. What distinguishes libertarianism from hard determinism is the libertarian’s claim that there is free will. But why should we think this? This question is especially pressing when we recognize that we assume a deterministic view in many other domains in life. When you have a toothache, we know that something must have caused that toothache and whatever cause that was, something else must have caused that cause. It would be a strange dentist who told you that your toothache didn’t have a cause but just randomly occurred. When the weather doesn’t go as the meteorologist predicts, we assume there must be a cause for why the weather did what it did. We might not ever know the cause in all its specific details, but assume there must be one. In cases like meteorology, when our scientific predictions are wrong, we don’t always go back and try to figure out what the actual causes were—why our predictions were wrong. But in other cases we do. Consider the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Years later it was finally determined what led to that explosion (“O-ring” seals that were not designed for the colder condition of the launch). There’s a detailed deterministic physical explanation that one could give of how the failure of those O-rings led to the explosion of the Challenger. In all of these cases, determinism is the fundamental assumption and it seems almost nothing could overturn it.

But the libertarian thinks that the domain of human action is different than every other domain. Humans are somehow able to rise above all of the influences on them and make decisions that are not themselves determined by anything that precedes them. The philosopher Roderick Chisholm accurately captured the libertarian position when he claimed that “we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964). But why should we think that we have such a godlike ability? We will consider two arguments the libertarian makes in support of her position: the argument from intuitions and the argument from moral responsibility.

The argument from intuitions is based on the very strong intuition that there are some things that we have control over and that nothing causes us to do those things except for our own willing them. The strongest case for this concerns very simple actions, such as moving one’s finger. Suppose that I hold up my index finger and say that I am going to move it to the right or the to the left, but that I have not yet decided which way to move it. At the moment before I move my finger one way or the other, it truly seems to me that my future is open.

Nothing in my past and nothing in my present seems to be determining me to move my finger to the right or to the left. Rather, it seems to me that I have total control over what happens next. Whichever way I move my finger, it seems that I could have moved it the other way. So if, as a matter of fact, I move my finger to the right, it seems unquestionably true that I could have moved it to the left (and vice versa, mutatis mutandis ). Thus, in cases of simple actions like moving my finger to the right or left, it seems that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is met: we have a very strong intuition that no matter what I actually did, I could have chosen otherwise, were I to be given that exact choice again . The libertarian does not claim that all human actions are like this. Indeed, many of our actions (perhaps even ones that we think are free) are determined by prior causes. The libertarian’s claim is just that at least some of our actions do meet the incompatibilist’s definition of free and, thus, that determinism is not universally true.

The argument from moral responsibility is a good example of what philosophers call a transcendental argument . Transcendental arguments attempt to establish the truth of something by showing that that thing is necessary in order for something else, which we strongly believe to be true, to be true. So consider the idea that normally developed adult human beings are morally responsible for their actions. For example, if Bob embezzles money from his charity in order to help pay for a new sports car, we would rightly hold Bob accountable for this action. That is, we would punish Bob and would see punishment as appropriate. But a necessary condition of holding Bob responsible is that Bob’s action was one that he chose, one that he was in control of, one that he could have chosen not to do. Philosophers call this principle ought implies can : if we say that someone ought (or ought not) do something, this implies that they can do it (that is, they are capable of doing it). The ought implies can principle is consistent with our legal practices. For example, in cases where we believe that a person was not capable of doing the right thing, we no longer hold them morally or criminally liable. A good example of this within our legal system is the insanity defense: if someone was determined to be incapable of appreciating the difference between right and wrong, we do not find them guilty of a crime. But notice what determinism would do to the ought implies can principle. If everything we ever do had to happen (think Laplace’s demon), that means that Bob had to embezzle those funds and buy that sports car. The universe demanded it. That means he couldn’t not have done those things. But if that is so, then, by the ought implies can principle, we cannot say that he ought not to have done those things. That is, we cannot hold Bob morally responsible for those things. But this seems absurd, the libertarian will say.

Surely Bob was responsible for those things and we are right to hold him responsible. But the only we way can reasonably do this is if we assume that his actions were chosen—that he could have chosen to do otherwise than he in fact chose. Thus, determinism is incompatible with the idea that human beings are morally responsible agents. The practice of holding each other to be morally responsible agents doesn’t make sense unless humans have incompatibilist free will—unless they could have chosen to do otherwise than they in fact did. That is the libertarian’s transcendental argument from moral responsibility.

Hard determinism

Hard determinism denies that there is free will. The hard determinist is a “tough-minded” individual who bravely accepts the implication of a scientific view of the world. Since we don’t in general accept that there are causes that are not themselves the result of prior causes, we should apply this to human actions too. And this means that humans, contrary to what they might believe (or wish to believe) about themselves, do not have free will. As noted above, hard determininsm follows from accepting the incompatibilist definition of free will as well as the claim that determinism is universally true. One of the strongest arguments in favor of hard determinism is based on the weakness of the libertarian position. In particular, the hard determinist argues that accepting the existence of free will leaves us with an inexplicable mystery: how can a physical system initiate causes that are not themselves caused?

If the libertarian is right, then when an action is free it is such that given exactly the same events leading up to one’s action, one still could have acted otherwise than they did. But this seems to require that the action/choice was not determined by any prior event or set of events. Consider my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast this morning. The libertarian will say that my decision to make the cheese omelet was not free unless I could have chosen to do otherwise (given all the same initial conditions). But that means that nothing was determining my decision. But what kind of thing is a decision such that it causes my actions but is not itself caused by anything? We do not know of any other kind of thing like this in the universe. Rather, we think that any event or thing must have been caused by some (typically complex) set of conditions or events. Things don’t just pop into existence without being caused . That is as fundamental a principle as any we can think of. Philosophers have for centuries upheld the principle that “nothing comes from nothing.” They even have a fancy Latin phrase for it: ex nihilo nihil fir [1] . The problem is that my decision to make a cheese omelet seems to be just that: something that causes but is not itself caused. Indeed, as noted earlier, the libertarian Roderick Chisholm embraces this consequence of the libertarian position very clearly when he claimed that when we exercise our free will,

“we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1964).

How could something like this exist? At this point the libertarian might respond something like this:

I am not claiming that something comes from nothing; I am just claiming that our decisions are not themselves determined by any prior thing. Rather, we ourselves, as agents, cause our decisions and nothing else causes us to cause those decisions (at least in cases where we have acted freely).

However, it seems that the libertarian in this case has simply pushed the mystery back one step: we cause our decisions, granted, but what causes us to make those decisions? The libertarian’s answer here is that nothing causes us. But now we have the same problem again: the agent is responsible for causing the decision but nothing causes the agent to make that decision. Thus we seem to have something coming from nothing. Let’s call this argument the argument from mysterious causes. Here’s the argument in standard form:

• The existence of free will implies that when an agent freely decides to do something, the agent’s choice is not caused (determined) by anything.
• To say that something has no cause is to violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• But nothing can violate the ex nihilo nihil fit principle.
• Therefore, there is no free will (from 1-3)

The hard determinist will make a strong case for premise 3 in the above argument by invoking basic scientific principles such as the law of conservation of energy, which says that the amount of energy within a closed system stays that same. That is, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Consider a billiard ball. If it is to move then it must get the required energy to do so from someplace else (typically another billiard ball knocking into it, the cue stick hitting it or someone tilting the pool table). To allow that something could occur without any cause—in this case, the agent’s decision—would be a violation of the conservation of energy principle, which is as basic a scientific principle as we know. When forced to choose between uphold such a basic scientific principle as this and believing in free will, the hard determinist opts for the former. The hard determinist will put the ball in the libertarian’s court to explain how something could come from nothing.

I will close this section by indicating how these problems in philosophy often ramify into other areas of philosophy. In the first place, there is a fairly common way that libertarians respond to the charge that their view violates basic principles such as ex nihilo nihil fit and, more specifically, the physical law of conservation of energy. Libertarians could claim that the mind is not physical—a position known in the philosophy of mind as “substance dualism” (see philosophy of mind chapter in this textbook for more on substance dualism). If the mind isn’t physical, then neither are our mental events, such our decisions.

Rather, all of these things are nonphysical entities. If decisions are nonphysical entities, there is at least no violation of the physical laws such as the law of conservation of energy. [2] Of course, if the libertarian were to take this route of defending her position, she would then need to defend this further assumption (no small task). In any case, my main point here is to see the way that responses to the problem of free well and determinism may connect with other issue within philosophy. In this case, the libertarian’s defense of free will may turn out to depend on the defensibility of other assumptions they make about the nature of the mind. But the libertarian is not the only one who will need to ultimately connect her account of free will up with other issues in philosophy. Since hard determinists deny that free will exists, it seems that they will owe us some account of moral responsibility. If, moral responsibility requires that humans have free will (see previous section), then in denying free will we seem to also be denying that humans have moral responsibility. Thus, hard determinists will face the objection that in rejecting free will they also destroy moral responsibility.

But since it seems we must hold individuals morally to account for certain actions (such as the embezzler from the previous section), the hard determinist

needs some account of how it makes sense to do this given that human being don’t have free will. My point here is not to broach the issue of how the hard determinist might answer this, but simply to show how hard determinist’s position on the problem of free will and determinism must ultimately connect with other issues in philosophy, such issues in metaethics [3] . This is a common thing that happens in philosophy. We may try to consider an issue or problem in isolation, but sooner or later that problem will connect up with other issues in philosophy.

Compatibilism

The best argument for compatibilism builds on a consideration of the difficulties with the incompatibilist definition of free will (which both the libertarian and the hard determinist accept). As defined above, compatibilists agree with the hard determinists that determinism is true, but reject the incompatibilist definition of free will that hard determinists accept. This allows compatbilists to claim that free will is compatible with determinism. Both libertarians and hard compatibilists tend to feel that this is somehow cheating, but the compatibilist attempts to convince us arguing that the strong incompatibilist definition of freedom is problematic and that only the weaker compatibilist definition of freedom—free actions are voluntary actions—will work. We will consider two objections that the compatibilist raises for the incompatibilist definition of freedom: the epistemic objection and the arbitrariness objection . Then we will consider the compatibilist’s own definition of free will and show how that definition fits better with some of our common sense intuitions about the nature of free actions.

The epistemic objection is that there is no way for us to ever know whether any one of our actions was free or not. Recall that the incompatibilist definition of freedom says that a decision is free if and only if I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose, given exactly all the same conditions. This means that if we were, so to speak, rewind the tape of time and be given that decision to make over again, we could have chosen differently. So suppose the question is whether my decision to make a cheese omelet for breakfast was free. To answer this question, we would have to know when I could have chosen differently. But how am I supposed to know that ? It seems that I would have to answer a question about a strange counterfactual : if given that decision to make over again, would I choose the same way every time or not? How on earth am I supposed to know how to answer that question? I could say that it seems to me that I could make a different decision regarding making the cheese omelet (for example, I could have decided to eat cereal instead), but why should I think that that is the right answer? After all, how things seem regularly turn out to be not the case—especially in science. The problem is that I don’t seem to have any good way of answering this counterfactual question of what I would choose if given the same decision to make over again. Thus the epistemic objection [4] is that since I have no way of knowing whether I would/wouldn’t make the same decision again, I can never know whether any of my actions are free.

The arbitrariness objection is that it turns our free actions into arbitrary actions. And arbitrary actions are not free actions. To see why, consider that if the incompatibilist definition is true, then nothing determines our free choices, not even our own desires . For if our desires were determining our choices then if we were to rewind the tape of time and, so to speak, reset everything— including our desires —the same way, then given those same desires we would choose the same way every time. And that would mean our choice was not free, according to the incompatbilist. It is imperative to remember that incompatibilism says that if an action is not free if it is determined ( including if it is determined by our own desires ). But now the question is: if my desires are not causing my decision, what is? When I make a decision, where does that decision come from, if not from my desires and beliefs? Presumably it cannot come from nothing ( ex nihilo nihil fit ). The problem is that if the incompatibilist rejects that anything is causing my decisions, then how can my decisions be anything but arbitrary?

Presumably an arbitrary decision—a decision not driven by any reason at all—is not an exercise of my freedom. Freedom seems to require that we are exercising some kind of control over my actions and decisions. If my action or decision is arbitrary that means that no reason or explanation of the action/decision can be given. Here’s the arbitrariness objection cast as a reductio ad absurdum argument:

• A free choice is one that isn’t determined by anything, including our desires. [incompatibilist definition of freedom]
• If our own desires are not determining our choices, then those choices are arbitrary.
• If a choice is arbitrary then it is not something over which we have control
• If a choice isn’t something over which we have control, then it isn’t a free choice
• Therefore, a free choice is not a free choice (from 1-4)

A reductio ad absurdum argument is one that starts with a certain assumption and then derives a contradiction from that assumption, thereby showing that assumption must be false. In this case, the incompatibilist’s definition of a free choice leads to the contradiction that something that is a free choice isn’t a free choice.

What has gone wrong here? The compatibilist will claim that what has gone wrong is incompatibilist’s idea that a free action must be one that isn’t caused/determined by anything. The compatibilist claims that free actions can still be determined, as long as what is determining them is our own internal reasons, over which we have some control, rather than external things over which we have no control. Free choices, according to the compatibilist, are just choices that are caused by our own best reasons . The fact that, given the exact same choices, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise doesn’t undermine what freedom is (as the incompatibilist claims) but defines what it is. Consider an example. Suppose that my goal is to spend the shortest amount of time on my commute home from work so that I can be on time for a dinner date. Also suppose, for simplicity, that there are only three possible routes that I can take: route 1 is the shortest, whereas route 2 is longer but scenic and 3 is more direct but has potentially more traffic, especially during rush hour. I am leaving early from work today so that I can make my dinner date but before I leave, I check the traffic and learn that there has been a wreck on route 1. Thus, I must choose between routes 2 and 3. I reason that since I am leaving earlier, route 3 will be the quickest since there won’t be much traffic while I’m on my early commute home. So I take route 3 and arrive home in a timely manner: mission accomplished. The compatibilist would say that this is a paradigm case of a free action (or a series of free actions). The decisions I made about how to get home were drive both by my desire to get home quickly and also by the information I was operating with. Assuming that that information was good and I reasoned well with it and was thereby able to accomplish my goal (that is, get home in a timely manner), then my action is free. My action is free not because my choices were undetermined, but rather because my choices were determined (caused) by my own best reasons—that is, by my desires and informed beliefs. The incompatibilist, in contrast, would say that an action is free only if I could have chosen otherwise, given all the same conditions again. But think of what that would mean in the case above! Why on earth would I choose routes 1 or 2 in the above scenario, given that my most pressing goal is to be able to get to my dinner date on time? Why would anyone knowingly choose to do something that thwarts their primary goals? It doesn’t seem that, given the set of beliefs and desires that I actually had at the time, I could have chosen otherwise in that situation. Of course, if you change the information I had (my beliefs) or you change what I wanted to accomplish (my desires), then of course I could have acted otherwise than I did. If I didn’t have anything pressing to do when I left work and wanted a scenic and leisurely drive home in my new convertible, then I probably would have taken route 2! But that isn’t what the incompatibilist requires for free will. As we’ve seen, they require the much stronger condition that one’s action be such that it could have been different even if they faced exactly the same condition over again. But in this scenario that would be an irrational thing to do. Of course, if one’s goal were to be irrational and to thwart one’s own desires, I suppose they could do that. But that would still seem to be acting in accordance with one’s desires.

Many times free will is treated as an all or nothing thing, either humans have it or they don’t. This seems to be exactly how the libertarian and hard determinist see the matter. And that makes sense given that they are both incompatibilists and view free will and determinism like oil and water—they don’t mix. But it is interesting to note that it is common for us to talk about decisions, action, or even whole lives (or periods of a life) as being more or less free . Consider the Goethe quotation at the beginning of this chapter: “none are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Here Goethe is conceiving of freedom as coming in degrees and claiming that those who think they are free but aren’t as less free than those who aren’t free and know it. But this way of speaking implies that free will and determinism are actually on a continuum rather than a black and white either or. The compatibilist can build this fact about our ordinary ways of speaking about freedom into an argument for their position. Call this the argument from ordinary language . The argument from ordinary language is that only compatibilism is able to accommodate our common way of speaking about freedom coming in degrees—that is, as actions or decisions being more or less free. The libertarian can’t account for this since the libertarian sees freedom as an all or nothing matter: if you couldn’t have done otherwise then your action was not truly free; if you could have done otherwise, then it was. In contrast, the compatibilist is able to explain the difference between more/less free action on the continuum. For the compatibilist, the freest actions are those in which one reasons well with the best information, thus acting for one’s own best reasons, thus furthering one’s interests. The least free actions are those in which one lacks information and reason poorly, thus not acting for one’s own best reasons, thus not furthering one’s interests. Since reasoning well, being informed, and being reflective are all things that come in degrees (since one can possess these traits to a greater or lesser extent) and since these attribute define what free will is for the compatibilist, it follows that free will comes in degrees. And that means that the compatibilist is able to make sense or a very common way that we talk about freedom (as coming in degrees) and thus make sense of ourselves, whereas the libertarian isn’t.

There’s one further advantage that compatibilists can claim over libertarians. Libertarians defend the claim that there are at least some cases where one exercises one’s free will and that this entails that determinism is false. However, this leaves totally open the extent of human free will. Even if it were true that there are at least some cases where humans exercise free will, there might not be very many instances and/or those decisions in which we exercise free will might be fairly trivial (for example, moving one’s finger to the left or right). But if it were to turn out that free will was relatively rare, then even if the libertarian were correct that there are at least some instances where we exercise free will, it would be cold comfort to those who believe in free will. Imagine: if there were only a handful of cases in your life where your decision was an exercise of your free will, then it doesn’t seem like you have lived a life which was very free. In other words, in such a case, for all practical purposes, determinism would be true.

Thus, it seems like the question of how widespread free will is is an important one. However, the libertarian seems unable to answer it for reasons that we’ve already seen. Answering the question requires knowing whether or not one could have acted otherwise than one in fact did. But in order to know this, we’d have to know how to answer a strange counterfactual—whether I could have acted differently given all the same conditions. As noted earlier (“the epistemic objection”), this raises a tough epistemological question for the libertarian: how could he ever know how to answer this question? And so how could he ever know whether a particular action was free or not? In contrast, the compatibilist can easily answer the question of how widespread free will is: how “free” one’s life is depends on the extent to which one’s actions are driven by their own best reasons. And this, in turn, depends on factors such as how well-informed, reflective, and reasonable a person is. This might not always be easy to determine, but it seems more tractable than trying to figure out the truth conditions of the libertarian’s counterfactual.

In short, it seems that compatibilism has significant advantages over both libertarianism and hard determinism. As compared to the libertarian, compatibilism gives a better answer to how free will can come in degrees as well as how widespread free will is. It also doesn’t face the arbitrariness objection or the epistemic objection. As compared to the hard determinist, the compatibilist is able to give a more satisfying answer to the moral responsibility issue. Unlike the hard determinist, who sees all action as equally determined (and so not under our control), the compatibilist thinks there is an important distinction within the class of human actions: those that are under our control versus those that aren’t. As we’ve seen above, the compatibilist doesn’t see this distinction as black and white, but, rather, as existing on a continuum. However, a vague boundary is still a boundary. That is, for the compatibilist there are still paradigm cases in which a person has acted freely and thus should be held morally responsible for that action (for example, the person who embezzles money from a charity and then covers it up) and clear cases in which a person hasn’t acted freely (for example, the person who was told to do something by their boss but didn’t know that it was actually something illegal). The compatibilist’s point is that this distinction between free and unfree actions matters, both morally and legally, and that we would be unwise to simply jettison this distinction, as the hard determinist does. We do need some distinction within the class of human actions between those for which we hold people responsible and those for which we don’t. The compatibilist’s claim is that they are able to do with while the hard determinist isn’t. And they’re able to do it without inheriting any of the problems of the libertarian position.

Study questions

• True or false: Compatibilists and libertarians agree on what free will is (on the concept of free will).
• True or false: Hard determinists and libertarians agree that an action is free only when I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact chose.
• True or false: the libertarian gives a transcendental argument for why we must have free will.
• True or false: both compatibilists and hard determinists believe that all human actions are determined.
• True or false: compatibilists see free will as an all or nothing matter: either an action is free or it isn’t; there’s no middle ground.
• True or false: compatibilists think that in the case of a truly free action, I could have chosen otherwise than I in fact did choose.
• True or false: One objection to libertarianism is that on that view it is difficult to know when a particular action was free.
• True or false: determinism is a fundamental assumption of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and so on).
• True or false: the best that support the libertarian’s position are cases of very simple or arbitrary actions, such as choosing to move my finger to the left or to the right.
• True or false: libertarians thinks that as long as my choices are caused by my desires, I have chosen freely.

For deeper thought

• Consider the Shopenhauer quotation at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views do you think this supports and why?
• Consider the movie The Truman Show . How would the libertarian and compatibilist disagree regarding whether or not Truman has free will?
• Consider the Tolstoy quote at the beginning of the chapter. Which of the three views does this support and why?
• Consider a child being raised by white supremacist parents who grows up to have white supremacist views and to act on those views. As a child, does this individual have free will? As an adult, do they have free will? Defend your answer with reference to one of the three views.
• Consider the eccentric neuroscientist example (above). How might a compatibilist try to show that this isn’t really an objection to her view? That is, how might the compatibilist show that this is not a case in which the individual’s action is the result of a well-informed, reflective choice?
• Actually, the phrase was originally a Latin phrase, not an English one because at the time in Medieval Europe philosophers wrote in Latin. ↵
• On the other hand, if these nonphysical decisions are supposed to have physical effects in the world (such as causing our behaviors) then although there is no problem with the agent’s decision itself being uncaused, there would still be a problem with how that decision can be translated into the physical world without violating the law of conservation of energy. ↵
• One well-known and influential attempt to reconcile moral responsibility with determinism is P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962). ↵
• The term “epistemic” just denotes something relating to knowledge. It comes from the Greek work episteme, which means knowledge or belief. ↵

Introduction to Philosophy Copyright © by Matthew Van Cleave is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for arguments for your paper on ethics or freedom? Our experts have gathered free will essay examples and topics that will help you find ideas and evidence.

🏆 Best Free Will Essay Examples & Topics

💡 interesting topics to write about free will, 📌 simple & easy free will essay topics, 👍 good free will essay topics, ❓ questions about free will.

• Concept of Free Will in “Paradise Lost” by John Milton All these kind of punishments provokes the image in the readers’ mind that God has done what he warned to Adam and Eve.
• Perspectives on Free Will: A Comparison of Hobbes and Berkeley Hobbes argued that God has a free will because his free will is not affected by anything that happens. On the other hand, George Berkeley believed that free will was controlled by God in his […]
• Free Will and Fate in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King Drama Even though the role of fate and prophecy is significant in influencing the life of Oedipus, the king’s destiny can be discussed as a direct result of his actions, choices, and decisions.
• Free Will: Towards Hume’s Compatibilist Approach According to Williams, libertarians are of the view that free will is rationally incompatible with the concept of determinism, and that a deterministic world may be rationally impossible or false.
• Free Will and Determinism According to William James and Jean-Paul Sartre What is important to note at this point is that both philosophers rejected the notions of free will and determinism albeit in varying levels and for different reasons.
• Calvinism and Wesleyanism: Predestination vs. Free Will On the one hand, the emphasis on the sovereignty of God has been the source of Reformed piety, the inspiration of the courage, self-sacrifice, and broad humanitarianism that has often marked the Children of Geneva.
• Free Will and Argument Against Its Existence Determinism is a theory which states that the course of the future is determined by a combination of past events and the laws of nature, creating a unique outcome.
• Determinism and Free Will Controversy The problem of determinism is that applying such a system to an individual would bring it to the point of absurdity.
• The Concept of Free Will by Susan Wolf In the Asymmetry of the Reason view, Wolf argues that responsibility depends on the aptitude to operate and act in agreement with the true and good.
• “The City of God” by Saint Augustine: Theme of Free Will I am going to analyze the theme of free will in the book written by Saint Augustine “City of God” as it is an imprescriptible symbol of religious text, aspects of morality, and the interpretation […]
• Hunting, Death, and Free Will: “No Country for Old Men” by the Coen Brothers From the beginning, the directors of the film warn the viewer that the movie is about at least two things: hunting and death.
• Predestination vs. Free Will The protagonists of free will acknowledge that God is always aware of the choices that people intend to make and the consequences thereof.
• Fatalism and Free Will: Terms Comparison Some of them, especially at the initial stages of the development of the mankind, kept to the point of view that certain supernatural forces control and predetermine all actions of people and events in the […]
• Saint Augustine and the Question of Free Will Applying Augustine’s idea of free will to the concept of an all-knowing God, one could think that after God deprived Adam and Eve of free will, the future choices we make are made by God […]
• Morality and Free Will in “Daisy Miller” by James Later on that evening, Daisy suggests to Winterborne about her wish to ride on the lake and willingly overlooks the appropriateness of the time.
• Free Will in Hinduism and Christianity: Ideologies on Both Religious Practices and Philosophy On the basis of the aspect of free will, the determination of the laws of karma is not favoring to particular people as everyone is treated the same, and has the same opportunity for personal […]
• Free Will and Determinism Analysis Jonathan Edwards, in his fundamental work The Freedom of the Will, argues that the will always choose according to its greatest desire at the moment of choice.
• Human Free Will in Philosophical Theories The above factors are completely out of our control thereby affirming the fact that we do not act out of free will. Essentially, we may seem to have free will but our actions and decisions […]
• The Divine Sovereignty of God and the Free Will of Man God’s intervention in history means for most biblical authors that the will of God ultimately determines the course of events, and human freedom is manifested in the fact that he either accepts this will of […]
• Moral Responsibility, Free Will and Determinism On the other hand, however, it would be unreasonable to assume that the phenomenon of free will is entirely applicable in today’s social and moral contexts as well.
• The Role of Free Will and Determinism Thus, the presence of free will is important for marking a person as guilty and subsequent punishment. We can define the soul as the consciousness of matter, its mental world, responsible for it.
• Machiavelli’s Views on Free Will and Class Conflict Thus, Machiavelli raised the question of the historical and political process laws and the need for both objective conditions and the role of the human factor, participants in political activity.
• The Book of Genesis: Predestination and Free Will The Book of Genesis sets the stage for the later books, explains the main concepts, laws, God’s promises to the people, and introduces the characters who played an essential role in God’s plans and God […]
• Free Will: Determinism and Libertarianism The first one constitutes a belief that there is no free will in nature and that all of the actions are already predetermined.
• Free Will vs. Determinism as Philosophical Concepts An objective and meticulous examination of the freedom and responsibility spectrum that highlights the difference between choice and causation explains whether human actions are free or predetermined.
• Free Will in Human Life: Reality or Fraud? The paradox of the question about free will for humans is also related to the role of God and the impossibility of great philosophers to provide a clear answer.
• Free Will and Its Possible Extent According to Compatibilism philosophy, Clarence’s murdering his girlfriend is a free action, because, as Hume states, “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform as that between cause and effect in […]
• Against Free Will: Determinism and Prediction On the other hand, humans have the ability to make predictions about themselves and others, some of which will come true, undermining the idea of free will.
• Analysis and Comparison of Determinism, Compatibilism and Libertarianism, Free Will It would be safe to assume that a person’s environment is limited by the geography of the planet and the amount of possible places to visit, which is enormous but is nonetheless limited.
• Free Will and Choice in Islamic Psychology The free choice is concentrated on nafs that a human being has, according to Quran: nafs can be good or bad, and it is up to an individual whether to strive towards the higher potentials […]
• Free Will and Determinism: Discussion In particular, it would not provide the capacity to be the origin of one’s decisions and actions that according to incompatibilists is unavailable to compatibilists.
• Free Will and Willpower: Is Consciousness Necessary? This plainly makes it a duty to love ourselves and regard our own happiness by the value of the scale. It is our desire only that induces within us the spirit to help others therefore […]
• Van Inwagen’s Philosophical Argument on Free Will The notion of a state should be treated in such a way that the physical condition of the world remains independent of logic.
• Free Will in Philosophy and Society The emergence and popularization of democratic values all around the world raised the question of social and political pressures that used to be overlooked in the past.
• Philosophy: Free Will of Aristotle and Lucretius The philosopher says that every action having place under the influence of the external force is not a free will, which comes from the inner desire and motivation of an individual. Moreover, the movie is […]
• Ontology, Free Will, Fate and Determinism On the other hand, fate is simply the predetermined course of the events or the predetermined future. It is pragmatic that people should not believe in the cause and effect.
• Nielsen’s Free Will and Determinism: An Analysis and Critique Despite the proof that Nielsen provides for the fact that determinism and freedom can actually coexist and, moreover, complement each other, Nielsen makes it clear that the existence of moral luck defines the boundaries of […]
• Ethical Issue of Free Will in Business In this paper, we shall discuss and understand the importance of free will in the sphere of business. According to some people, social reforms are the duty of politicians and not the business community.
• Free Will Does Not Exist It cannot be imagined how the society would be is there was no thought in the minds of the people about the existence of God who oversees the actions of deeds of people in the […]
• Do Humans Have Free Will? However, he takes the view that some humans are not guided only by laws to act and they are not able to exercise their own free will.
• Free Will of a Heroin Addict This paper seeks to present the case of a heroin addict who makes herself and the other people surrounding her suffer evaluating whether she is the one to be fully responsible for her actions or […]
• What is the difference between compatibilsm and incompatibilist in relation to free will The no choice statement provides that if a person lacks choice in relation to p, and also lacks choice in relation to whether if p, then q, then there is no choice in relation to […]
• The Issue of the Free Will On the one hand, the opponents of the hard determinism state that free will exists and people do not base their own decisions on anything, however, it is possible to say that the decision was […]
• Faith or Free Will Used in the Movie – Minority Report and the Drama – Antigone In life, people have the freewill to choose what they want; however, in some cases, faith and fate takes the center stage despite the choices made through freewill.
• The Workings Of Destiny, Fate, Free Will And Free Choice In Oedipus The King
• The Natural Law on Free Will and the Nature of Evil According to St. Thomas Aquinas
• The Unalienable Right of Free Will in A Clockwork Orange, a Novel by Anthony Burgess
• Were Adam and Eve Influenced By the Snake or Free Will
• The Three Claims on the Debate on Free Will Between Libertarianism and Determinism
• What is The Meaning of Free Will in Life
• The Theme of Free Will in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a Novel by Mark Twain
• The Role of Fate Versus Free Will in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
• Determinism Vs. Indeterminism And The Existence Of Free Will
• Critically Examine the Claim That Free Will and Determinism Are Incompatible
• The Struggle Between Fate and Free Will in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a Novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• How Free Will And Inborn Neurological Hardwiring Influence Morality
• Triumph of Free Will in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
• An Overview of the Imposition of Law as Free Will and the Myth of the Social Contract
• Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice – Prophecies in Oedipus, Antigone, and Agamemnon
• An Analysis of Fate and Free Will in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
• Baron D’holbach And William James On Free Will And Determinism
• Can Free Will And Determinism Co-exist
• The Theory Of Free Will And Determinism
• What is Frankfurt’s account of free will? Is it successful?
• Aeneas’s Free Will Despite His Fate in The Aeneid
• The Theme of Free Will and Spirituality in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• An Argument in Favor of Hard Determinism in the Debate on Free Will and Determinism
• Comparing Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King and Antigone
• Boundaries of Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King
• Analysis of the Actions of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus Based on Free Will and Fate
• Who Is Responsible for the Downfall of Oedipus Fate or Free Will
• The True Nature And Extent Of Influence Of Free Will Versus Fate
• The Varying Levels of Free Will in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
• Understanding the Foreknowledge of God and Its Influence in Free Will and Predestination
• Concept Of Free Will In The Brothers Karamazov
• Understanding the Existence of Free Will and Determinism
• Compatibility Of Free Will In The Tenseless Theory Of Time
• Emotions and Free Will in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King
• The Scorch Trials Movie And The Issue Of Free Will
• The Question of Free Will Versus Determinism in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Control and The Role of Destiny, Free Will, and Fate
• Existence, Conee And Sider Go Over The Description Of Free Will
• The Witches In Macbeth: Corruption And Fate Vs. Free Will In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
• Augustine´s View on the Origins of Sin, Grace, and Free Will
• The Issue of Free Will in The End of Evil, an Article by Ron Rosenbaum
• Destiny, Fate, Free Will and Free Choice in Oedipus the King – Fate and the Modern World
• Attitudes and Free Will in the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost by John Milton
• How Do Our Duties and Responsibility Affect Our Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism?
• Why Does Galen Strawson Think Free Will Is Impossible?
• What Was Benjamin Libet‘s Free Will Experiment?
• Does Advertising Erode Free Will?
• How Does Pride Effect Free Will and Fate?
• Can You Put Free Will Into an Equation?
• How Can Quantum Brain Biology Rescue Conscious Free Will?
• Does Free Will Exist or Is It All an Illusion?
• Is Free Will a Third Option Aside From Chance and Necessity?
• How Do Race, Gender, and Socioeconomic Class Limit the Free Will of Americans?
• Are Our Lives Governed by Fate or Free Will?
• Does Oedipus Have Free Will?
• Can Free Will and Determinism Coexist?
• Does Free Will exist within Milton’s Hierarchy’s Constraints in Paradise Lost?
• How Does the Conflict Between Free Will and the Predestination Play Out?
• Does Macbeth Have Free Will?
• How Do Fate and Free Will Play a Part in the Odyssey?
• Were Adam and Eve Influenced by the Snake or Free Will?
• What’s the Problem With Free Will?
• Is the Theory of Evolution a Good Basis for an Argument Against Free Will?
• Why Did God Give Us Free Will?
• For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility?
• How Does Shakespeare Present Macbeth as Having Free Will?
• What Is the Difference Between Free-Will and Randomness and or Non-determinism?
• Does Having Free Will Presuppose Consciousness, Can Philosophical Zombies Have It?
• What Are the Necessary Conditions for an Action to Be Regarded as a Free Choice?
• Is Free Will Reconcilable With a Purely Physical World?
• How Does Quantum Mechanics Affect the Modern Account of Free Will and Determinism?
• What Counters Are There to Spinoza’s Argument That Acts of Free Will Create Infinite Regress?
• Is Kant’s “Noumenal Self” Argument on Freedom Flawed?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, September 19). 117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/

"117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 19 Sept. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples'. 19 September.

IvyPanda . 2023. "117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "117 Free Will Essay Topics & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/free-will-essay-topics/.

• Freedom Topics
• Human Rights Essay Ideas
• Women’s Rights Titles
• Freedom of Speech Ideas
• Civil Rights Movement Questions
• Elections Essay Titles
• Freedom Of Expression Questions
• Individualism Topics
• Mind Research Ideas
• Abortion Paper Topics
• Consciousness Ideas
• Abraham Lincoln Topics
• Determinism Research Topics
• Antigone Ideas
• Moral Dilemma Paper Topics

January 1, 2020

My Go-To Arguments for Free Will

Free will must exist if some of us have more of it than others

By John Horgan

You chose to read this column, didn’t you? That’s proof of free will.

Yuri Arcurs Getty Images

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

I often dwell on free will as the new year begins, and my resolutions ( quit caffeine, again , start  meditating, again ) are already wavering. Plus, late last semester I found myself trying, again, to convince my students to believe in free will. For these reasons, and just because I feel like it, I decided to jot down a few arguments for free will. 

By free will, I mean a capacity for deliberate, conscious decisions. Choices. Free will is variable. The more choices you have, the more free will you have. Our choices are constrained by all sorts of factors, physical, biological, social, economic, political, even romantic. My choices, for example, are often overruled by those of my willful girlfriend “Emily,” but that’s okay, because I’m with her by choice. Choices are never  entirely  free, but that doesn’t mean we lack them.

I’m not going to invoke quantum mechanics, information theory or arcane philosophical reasoning. I find slick, technical defenses of free will almost as unpersuasive as slick, technical denials. My arguments will leave many questions unanswered. Did we discover free will or invent it? I don’t know, both, perhaps. Do non-human animals possess it? Maybe, maybe not, but I know  we  have it. All right, enough throat-clearing, here are my arguments:

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Just Because Physics Can’t Account for Free Will Doesn’t Mean It Doesn’t Exist.  Free-will deniers tend to be  hard-core materialists , who think reality, ultimately, consists of particles pushed and pulled by fundamental forces. This hyper-reductive worldview can’t account for choice. Or  consciousness, for that matter , or  beauty ,  morality ,  meaning  and other trappings of the human condition. That doesn’t mean these things are somehow illusory. It just means materialistic science, which does a splendid job explaining protons and planets,  remains baffled by us .

Don’t let  mean reductionists  bully you into agreeing with them. They’re  not as smart as they think they are . In fact, anyone who argues strenuously against free will is a walking, talking contradiction. Their disbelief, like my belief, is a choice stemming from (in their case, faulty) reason, another mind-based capacity irreducible to physics and chemistry.

This Sentence Is Proof of Free Will.  And this one. And this one. This whole column constitutes proof that free will exists. Free will is an idea, a packet of meaning, that cannot be reduced to mere physics. The  idea  of free will, not its instantiation in my brain, provoked me, my physical self, to type this column. I’m not  compelled  to write it. I have lots of other things to do, like watch  Couples Therapy  on Showtime with Emily, or find a birthday present for her. (No matter what I choose, she probably won’t like it. She’s very choosy.)

No, I  choose  to write this column, because I want others to share my belief in free will. It matters to me. Once I decide to write the column, then I must decide how to write it. That process entails countless choices. They are constrained, limited, by factors such as time, my verbal skills and knowledge, my sense of what readers will like and so on. Like I said, just because free will is never  entirely  free doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

You Reading This Sentence Is Proof Too.  You don’t have to read this column, do you? Of course not. You choose to read it, freely. More proof of free will! If you’re irritated by the substance or style of this column, and you jump to Twitter to find something more amusing, that’s another choice! More proof!

Libet’s Experiments Are Bogus.  Decades ago, psychologist Benjamin Libet monitored subjects’ neural activity while they chose to hit a button, and he discovered a burst of activity preceding the conscious decision to push the button by a split second. Free-will deniers seized upon Libet’s experiments as evidence that our  brains  make decisions, and our conscious choices are mere afterthoughts. Hence, no free will.

First of all, deciding when to push a button is not remotely analogous to genuine choices, like whether to get married, have kids, get divorced. The Libet experiments are profoundly flawed, as psychologist Steve Taylor points out in a  recent  Scientific American  column . The question is, why did anyone ever take seriously the claim that Libet had disproved free will? Why do smart people accept such flimsy evidence? I honestly don’t get it, unless it’s that some intellectuals enjoy attacking beliefs that give others comfort. Many adamant free-will deniers are also adamant atheists.

Free Will Must Exist If Some People Have More of It Than Others.  You have more free will—more ability to see, weigh and make choices--now than when you were a baby. Right? You have more than if you were suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, or addicted to heroin, or imprisoned for manslaughter. If you are black or female, gay or transgender, and living in a democracy,  you have more choices and hence free will  than you would have 50, 100 or 200 years ago. If some people and societies have more choices than others—and they obviously do--free will must exist.

This is my best, slam-dunk argument for free will. That doesn’t mean it always or even usually works. My students can be so stubborn! But I feel good making this argument, it convinces me. Usually. To be honest, I have  doubts about free will now and then. Sometimes I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life. I’m a confabulating somnambulist, a bundle of reflexes, twitches and compulsions with no self-knowledge, let alone self-control. I’m not even sure I really choose to be with Emily!

In these dark times, I give myself pro-free-will pep talks, like this column. Free will is like Tinkerbell. If you don’t believe in her, she dies. Maybe that’s what I’m really doing with this column, trying to keep free will alive. Please help me. The more we believe in free will, the more we have, and the more likely we are to change the world for the better.

Further Reading :

Mind-Body Problems   (free online book, also available as  Kindle e-book  and  paperback ). For reflections on free will, see especially chapters on  Douglas Hofstadter ,  Owen Flanagan  and  Deirdre McCloskey .

Meta-Post: Posts on the Mind-Body Problem  (includes previous columns on free will)

Free Will Is Real

Is Scientific Materialism "Almost Certainly False"?

  Take 10% OFF— Expires in h m s Use code save10u during checkout.

Chat with us

• Live Chat Talk to a specialist
• Self-service options
• Search FAQs Fast answers, no waiting
• Ultius 101 New client? Click here
• Messenger  

International support numbers

For reference only, subject to Terms and Fair Use policies.

• How it Works

Learn more about us

• Future writers
• Explore further

Ultius Blog

Sample essay on free will and moral responsibility.

Select network

Free will is a fundamental aspect of modern philosophy. This sample philosophy paper explores how moral responsibility and free will represent an important area of moral debate between philosophers. This type of writing would of course be seen in a philosophy course, but many people might also be inclined to write an essay about their opinions on free will for personal reasons.

History of free will and moral responsibility

In our history, free will and moral responsibility have been longstanding debates amongst philosophers. Some contend that free will does not exist while others believe we have control over our actions and decisions. For the most part, determinists believe that free will does not exist because our fate is predetermined. An example of this philosophy is found in the Book of Genisis .

The biblical story states God created man for a purpose and designed them to worship him. Since God designed humans to operate in a certain fashion and he knew the outcome, it could be argued from a determinist point of view that free will didn't exist. Because our actions are determined, it seems that we are unable to bear any responsibility for our acts.

Galen Strawson has suggested that “in order to be truly deserving, we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving.”

However, Strawson also has implied that we are unable to be responsible. We are unable to be responsible because, as determinists suggest, all our decisions are premade; therefore, we do not act of our own free will. Consequently, because our actions are not the cause of our free will, we cannot be truly deserving because we lack responsibility for what we do.

Defining free will

Free will implies we are able to choose the majority of our actions ("Free will," 2013). While we would expect to choose the right course of action, we often make bad decisions. This reflects the thinking that we do not have free will because if we were genuinely and consistently capable of benevolence, we would freely decide to make the ‘right’ decisions.

In order for free will to be tangible, an individual would have to have control over his or her actions regardless of any external factors. Analyzing the human brain's development over a lifetime proves people have the potential for cognitive reasoning and to make their own decisions.

Casado has argued “the inevitability of free will is such that if one considers freedom an illusion, the internal perspective – and one’s own everyday life – would be totally contradictory” ( 2011, p. 369).

On the other hand, while we can determine whether or not we will wake up the next day, it is not an aspect of our free will because we cannot control this. Incidentally, determinism suggests everything happens exactly the way it should have happened because it is a universal law ("Determinism," 2013). In this way, our free will is merely an illusion.

Have a philosophy assignment? Think about buying an essay from Ultius .

The determinism viewpoint

For example, if we decided the previous night that we would wake up at noon, we are unable to control this even with an alarm clock. One, we may die in our sleep. Obviously, as most would agree, we did not choose this. Perhaps we were murdered in our sleep. In that case, was it our destiny to become a victim of violent crimes, or was it our destiny to be murdered as we slept? Others would mention that the murderer was the sole cause of the violence and it their free will to decide to kill.

Therefore, the same people might argue that the murderer deserved a specific punishment. The key question, then, is the free will of the murderer. If we were preordained to die in the middle of the night at the hand of the murderer, then the choice of death never actually existed. Hence, the very question of choice based on free will is an illusion.

Considering that our wills are absolutely subject to the environment in which they are articulated in, we are not obligated to take responsibility for them as the product of their environment. For example, if we were born in the United States, our actions are the result of our country’s laws. Our constitutional laws allow us the right to bear arms and have access to legal representation. In addition, our constitutional laws allow us the freedom to express our thoughts through spoken and written mediums and the freedom to believe in a higher power or not. We often believe we are free to act and do what we want because of our free will.

Harris (2012) has agreed that “free will is more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot even be rendered coherent” conceptually.

Moral judgments, decisions, and responsibility for free will

Either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are a product of chance, and we are not responsible for them” (p. 46). This being the case, can we be deserving if we can so easily deflect the root of our will and actions? Perhaps, our hypothetical murder shot us. It could be argued that gun laws in the United States provided them with the mean to commit murder.

Either the murderer got a hold of a gun by chance or he or she was able to purchase one. While the purchase is not likely, one would have to assume that someone, maybe earlier, purchased the weapon. Therefore, it was actually the buyer’s action that allowed this particular crime to take place. Essentially, both would ‘deserve’ some sort of punishment.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary (2001), the word “deserving” means "Worthy, as of reward or praise” (p. 236), so it regards to punishments, it seems deserving has a positive meaning.

Free will and changing societal views

However, the meanings will change depending on our position. For example, some would suggest that the murderer acted with his or her own free will. However, once they are caught and convicted, they are no longer free in the sense that they can go wherever they want. On the other hand, they are free to think however they want.

If they choose to reenact their crimes in their thoughts, they are free to do so. Some many say, in the case of the murderer, he or she is held responsible for his or her crime, thus he or she deserves blame. However, if the murderer had a mental illness and was unaware he or she committed a crime, should we still consider that the murderer acted with his or her free will? With that in mind, it seems that Strawson’s argument is valid because the murderer was not acting of his or her free will.

Many would consider Strawson to be a “free will pessimist” (Timpe c. Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Pessimism, 2006, para. 5). Strawson does not believe we have the ability to act on our own free will. However, he does not believe our actions are predetermined either.

Specifically, in his article “Luck Swallows Everything,” Strawson (1998) has claimed that “One cannot be ultimately responsible for one's character or mental nature in any way at all” (para. 33).

Determining when free will is not applicable

While some would agree young children and disabled adults would not hold any responsibility, others would claim that criminals should bear responsibility when they commit a crime. What if the actions are caused by both nature and nurturing of the parents ? Or, what if they're caused by prior events including a chain of events that goes back before we are born, libertarians do not see how we can feel responsible for them. If our actions are directly caused by chance, they are simply random and determinists do not see how we can feel responsible for them (The Information Philosopher Responsibility n.d.).

After all, one would not argue that murderers are worthy of a positive reward; however, Strawson has argued that we, whether good or evil, do not deserve any types of rewards. Instead, our actions and their consequences are based on luck or bad luck. In order to have ultimate moral responsibility for an action, the act must originate from something that is separate from us.

We consider free will the ability to act or do as we want; however, there is a difference between freedom of action and freedom of will. Freedom of action suggests we are able to physically act upon our desire. In a way, some believe that freedom of will is the choice that precedes that action. In addition to freedom of act or will, free will also suggests we have a sense of moral responsibility. This moral responsibility, however, is not entirely specified. For example, is this responsibility to ourselves or those around us? While this is a question that may never be answered, no matter how many essays are written on the subject, it is one that many consider important to ask, nonetheless.

https://www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/sample-essay-on-free-will-and-moral-responsibility.html

• Chicago Style

Ultius, Inc. "Sample Essay on Free Will and Moral Responsibility." Ultius | Custom Writing and Editing Services. Ultius Blog, 18 May. 2014. https://www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/sample-essay-on-free-will-and-moral-responsibility.html

Copied to clipboard

Click here for more help with MLA citations.

Ultius, Inc. (2014, May 18). Sample Essay on Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Retrieved from Ultius | Custom Writing and Editing Services, https://www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/sample-essay-on-free-will-and-moral-responsibility.html

Click here for more help with APA citations.

Ultius, Inc. "Sample Essay on Free Will and Moral Responsibility." Ultius | Custom Writing and Editing Services. May 18, 2014 https://www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/sample-essay-on-free-will-and-moral-responsibility.html.

Click here for more help with CMS citations.

Click here for more help with Turabian citations.

Ultius is the trusted provider of content solutions and matches customers with highly qualified writers for sample writing, academic editing, and business writing. 

Tested Daily

Click to Verify

About The Author

This post was written by Ultius.

• Writer Options
• Custom Writing
• Business Documents
• Support Desk
• +1-800-405-2972
• Submit bug report
• A+ BBB Rating!

Ultius is the trusted provider of content solutions for consumers around the world. Connect with great American writers and get 24/7 support.

© 2024 Ultius, Inc.

• Refund & Cancellation Policy

Free Money For College!

Yeah. You read that right —We're giving away free scholarship money! Our next drawing will be held soon.

Our next winner will receive over $500 in funds. Funds can be used for tuition, books, housing, and/or other school expenses. Apply today for your chance to win!

* We will never share your email with third party advertisers or send you spam.

** By providing my email address, I am consenting to reasonable communications from Ultius regarding the promotion.

Past winner

• Name Samantha M.
• From Pepperdine University '22
• Studies Psychology
• Won $2,000.00
• Award SEED Scholarship
• Awarded Sep. 5, 2018

Thanks for filling that out.

Check your inbox for an email about the scholarship and how to apply.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, how to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples, how to write topic sentences | 4 steps, examples & purpose, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, what is your plagiarism score.

Advertisement

Free Will and Desire

• Original Research
• Published: 07 February 2019
• Volume 85 , pages 1347–1360, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

• Brian Looper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8635-5002 1  

494 Accesses

6 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

I make a case for the thesis that no one can refrain from trying to attain the object of his or her currently strongest desire. (More precisely, I argue for this given that our domain of concern doesn’t include desires for things—such as visiting with a deceased relative or flapping one’s arms and flying—that one deems unattainable, but rather is restricted to desires for things one might deliberate about pursuing.) I arrive there by defending an argument by Peter van Inwagen for a relatively mild conclusion about the way desires limit our abilities, and by arguing that if van Inwagen’s conclusion is correct, and correct for his reasons, so is my bolder thesis. I close with replies to objections, such as the objection that it is better to take my argument as a reductio ad absurdum of van Inwagen’s than to take my conclusion seriously.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Moral zombies: why algorithms are not moral agents

Carissa Véliz

Science and Philosophy: A Love–Hate Relationship

Sebastian De Haro

Lying and self-defeating prophecies

Wolfgang Freitag

Say I desire all of X, Y, and Z, and that I desire X more than the others. And say I am now given a choice between X or (exclusive ‘or’) Y and Z, and that I would rather have Y and Z than X alone. I intend for the claim that we always act on our strongest desire to entail that I would choose Y and Z over X.

This, for reasons to be explained, is amended from the definition at van Inwagen ( 1989 , p. 408).

See van Inwagen ( 1989 , p. 408). I have taken the liberty of adding the temporal component (van Inwagen leaves it tacit).

The counterexample was first given in McKay and Johnson ( 1996 ), who suggest what I am calling Beta Double-Prime as a replacement. Huemer ( 2000 ) and van Inwagen ( 2000 ) suggest similar replacements.

This claim had been uncontroversial until Jack Spencer ( 2017 ) argued against it recently. His paper warrants a longer discussion than would be fitting for the present paper. Here I can only record my belief that the sense of ‘able’ in which he shows that we are able to do the impossible (for, on my view, he does show it) is not the sense that is relevant in van Inwagen’s argument. Imagine that one man is examining a broken-down motorcycle when another asks him whether he is able to ride. The first man will be puzzled since there are two things the question could mean. In the in one’s power sense of ‘able’, he is of course unable to ride; but in the sense of a skill , perhaps he is. Now, the sense in which van Inwagen is claiming that we are unable to do the impossible is the former, in one’s power, sense (cf. van Inwagen 1983 , pp. 10–13). I believe that if Spencer succeeds in showing that we are able to do the impossible, it is only in a sense akin to the sense of skill.

I am not certain whether the example of desire-production offered by Fischer and Ravizza is of the normal sort—like the dinner guest—or of the relevant sort. They imagine a case in which a man has a strong desire for a certain act, but produces and then acts upon a desire to refrain from it in order to prove that he can act contrary to his strongest desire (p. 433). Now, if we suppose the agent already has a desire to prove his freedom, then there is in fact opposition to his initial desire and the case is not of the relevant sort. If, on the other hand, we suppose he has no such opposing desire, then we do indeed have the relevant sort of case, but, first, experience offers no reason to think this can be done, and, secondly, there is good reason to think generating a desire to refrain from an unopposed desire is impossible, as I am about to show.

Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection, and for suggesting the second and third examples that follow.

For responses to Fischer and Ravizza that are distinct from the one I just gave, see van Inwagen ( 1994 ) and Vander Laan ( 2001 ).

As noted above, however, the overall thesis of his paper is far from mild: it is that we have “precious little free will” (p. 405) if we have free will at all. Still, it is a mild claim that he makes about the influence of desires in particular—though by “mild” I by no means want to suggest obvious or uninteresting .

I beg pardon from those who have read Snow’s The Masters (from which van Inwagen takes the case of Nightingale) and who are grimacing at this anachronism.

Of course, Kant does not claim that having a desire for a particular act that duty requires is incompatible with one performing it with a good-will. For one could perform the act not on the basis of desire but rather on the basis of duty.

It might be thought that I am assuming the controversial view that reasons for action are always grounded in desires. I am not; what I have argued is consistent with, for example, John Searle’s view that a reason for action may be “prior to the desire and the ground of the desire” ( 2001 , p. 170; italics removed). I am indeed assuming that we do not act on desire-independent reasons unless they do ground a desire. Searle seems to assume the same. Sometimes he speaks of desire-independent reasons grounding motivations (e.g., p. 171), but these terms appear to be used interchangeably.

Note that Kane rejects the thesis that one is only morally responsible for an act if one was able (at that time) to do otherwise, for he thinks one may be responsible for an unfree act in virtue of earlier character-forming decisions that were free. See, e.g., Kane ( 1996 , p. 72).

Balaguer, M. (2010). Free will as an open scientific problem . Cambridge: MIT Press.

Google Scholar  

Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1992). When the will is free. Philosophical Perspectives, 6, 423–451.

Huemer, M. (2000). Van Inwagen’s consequence argument. Philosophical Review, 109, 524–544.

Kane, R. (1996). The significance of free will . New York: Oxford University Press.

Kane, R. (1999). Responsibility, luck, and chance: Reflections on free will and indeterminism. Journal of Philosophy, 96, 217–240.

Kant, I. (2012/1785). Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McKay, T., & Johnson, D. (1996). A reconsideration of an argument against compatibilism. Philosophical Topics, 24, 113–122.

Pereboom, D. (2001). Living without free will . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (2001). Rationality in action . Cambridge: MIT Press.

Spencer, J. (2017). Able to do the impossible. Mind, 126, 465–497.

Van Inwagen, P. (1983). An essay on free will . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Van Inwagen, P. (1989). When is the will free? Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 399–422.

Van Inwagen, P. (1994). When the will is not free. Philosophical Studies, 75, 95–113.

Van Inwagen, P. (2000). Free will remains a mystery. Philosophical Perspectives, 14, 1–19.

Vander Laan, D. (2001). A regress argument for restrictive incompatibilism. Philosophical Studies, 103 , 201–215.

Download references

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Jeremy Dickinson, John Martin Fischer, Dan Korman, Corey McGrath, Aaron Zimmerman, and three anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions or discussion.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-3090, USA

Brian Looper

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brian Looper .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Looper, B. Free Will and Desire. Erkenn 85 , 1347–1360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0080-y

Download citation

Received : 26 October 2017

Accepted : 07 November 2018

Published : 07 February 2019

Issue Date : December 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0080-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Home ›
• Reviews ›

Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will

John Martin Fischer, Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will , Oxford University Press, 2016, 243pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199311293.

Reviewed by Martijn Boot, Waseda University

Contemporary debates about free will are dominated by two questions: ‘Is causal determinism true?’ and ‘Is free will compatible with causal determinism?’ These issues are important with respect to the question of to what extent we are morally responsible for our choices and actions. Moral responsibility cannot be detached from some form of free will and self-determination. Parallel to the issue of (in)compatibilism of free will and causal determinism is the question of whether free will and moral responsibility are compatible with divine foreknowledge.

John Martin Fischer investigates the relationship between divine foreknowledge, human freedom and moral responsibility. His book is a collection of eleven previously published essays. Fischer starts with a new introductory article in which he summarizes, extends and applies elements of the analyses presented in the other essays.

Fischer mainly concentrates on the question of whether God’s foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom to do otherwise. But he also pays attention to the still more important question about the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human moral responsibility.

Fischer tries to show that the answer to the first question is negative: God’s foreknowledge excludes human freedom to do otherwise. This seems to imply that the answer to the second question is negative as well: God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with human moral responsibility. However, Fischer believes that this doesn’t follow, because, according to him, moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise. I will describe and discuss some of the main arguments Fischer adduces in his book to support these views.

Are divine foreknowledge and freedom to do otherwise reconcilable?

Fischer points out that the arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise are in important ways similar to arguments for the incompatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise. Both kinds of arguments are related to ideas about the “fixity of the past”. Still there are also relevant differences, which have to be taken into account because the conclusions of the two kinds of arguments with respect to moral responsibility may differ.

Fischer discusses different families of arguments for the incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise (‘the Arguments for Incompatibilism’), which are largely based on the premise of ‘the fixity of the past’ and on the so-called Transfer Principle. This principle shows circumstances in which doing X means doing Y , so that if we cannot do Y , we cannot do X . The incompatibilist uses the Transfer Principle by showing that we cannot do X (e.g. we cannot do otherwise) because we cannot do Y (e.g. we cannot bring it about that God held a false belief) . Fischer investigates several challenges to the Arguments for Incompatibilism, such as

• ‘Scotism’: counterexamples to the Transfer Principle, attributed to Duns Scotus and developed by Anthony Kenny;
• ‘Ockhamism’: based on ideas of William of Ockham who made a distinction between ‘hard’ (temporally nonrelational) and ‘soft’ (temporally relational) facts about the past;
• ‘Molinism’: inspired by doctrines of the Jesuit philosopher Luis de Molina about God’s ‘middle knowledge’ — knowledge of what free agents would do in various situations.

Fischer defends the Arguments for Incompatibilism against these challenges. He argues that some versions of these Arguments are vulnerable to some challenges, while these challenges do not affect other versions. For instance, Kenny’s counterexamples to one of the versions of the Transfer Principle do not apply to another version. Besides, the Arguments for Incompatibilism do not exclusively depend on the Transfer Principle. So, one could reject some specific Arguments for Incompatibilism without thereby having to reject others. According to Fischer, Molinism provides an interesting model of divine providence but is not a response to the Arguments for Incompatibilism. He shows that, with respect to the issue of incompatibilism, it begs the question and doesn’t help with the specific problem of reconciling God’s foreknowledge with human freedom.

In addition to the previously published articles, Fischer offers some new reflections on related issues. He defends the theological incompatibilist’s argument against the challenge that it begs the question. Further he tries to show that a rejection of Ockhamism does not depend on the claim that God’s beliefs concern hard instead of soft facts about the past. Finally, he argues (against William Hasker, Patrick Todd and others) that, even in a causally indeterministic world (a world in which events are not causally determined), God can know with certainty that some future event will occur. A causally indeterministic world does not prevent an ordinary human being from having a justified and more or less certain belief in what a particular person, given his personal characteristics, will do in a future choice situation. God’s foreknowledge may be partly conceived in a similar way. But unlike a human being, whose beliefs are fallible, God knows that what He believes is true, because he knows that He is omniscient. God can thus ‘bootstrap’ his first-order belief to a second order of certain knowledge (Fischer calls this approach of God’s foreknowledge the Bootstrapping View). In this perspective God’s foreknowledge may be compatible with a causally indeterministic world. This is important with respect to the question of whether God’s foreknowledge can be reconciled with human moral responsibility. Indeed, if God’s foreknowledge would be inextricably bound up with a causally deterministic world, it would probably exclude human moral responsibility. Still, Fischer recognizes that, also if God’s foreknowledge is unrelated to causal determinism, it may be problematic to reconcile it with human moral responsibility, if it excludes the freedom to do otherwise. This problem forms the second main question to which the book pays attention.

Are God’s foreknowledge and moral responsibility reconcilable?

For a detailed discussion and defense of his theory of moral responsibility Fischer refers to previous publications. Many philosophers believe that the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted differently (the argument of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities). This would mean that incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and the freedom to do otherwise implies that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with moral responsibility. However, Fischer tries to make plausible that incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise — a freedom that he calls ‘regulative control’ — does not imply that God’s foreknowledge is irreconcilable with human moral responsibility. Moral responsibility requires another kind of freedom than regulative control, namely ‘guidance control’. An individual exhibits guidance control to the extent that he acts from his own mechanism of practical reasoning and human deliberation, as a response to divergent reasons for alternative choices. An agent’s mechanism becomes his own when he ‘takes responsibility’. Thus guidance control consists of two important components: ownership and reasons-responsiveness .

Fischer adduces the following example — inspired by examples given by Harry Frankfurt — to demonstrate that somebody can be held morally responsible for his choice, although he could not have chosen otherwise.

Black has secretly inserted a chip in Jones’s brain. This enables Black to monitor and control Jones’s activities. If, in the presidential election, Jones were to show any inclination to vote for anyone other than the Democrat candidate, then the chip in Jones’s brain would intervene to ensure that he actually decides to vote for the Democrat. But if Jones decides on his own to vote for the Democrat, the chip does nothing. Suppose that Jones decides to vote for the Democrat on his own, just as he would have if Black had not inserted the chip in his head. It seems, upon first thinking about this case, that Jones can be held morally responsible for his choice, although he could not have done otherwise.

Fischer uses this Frankfurt-like approach to support his semicompatibilist view: he believes that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free choices between alternative possibilities, but compatible with moral responsibility, because moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise.

Some other philosophers, including Derk Pereboom, also do not believe that moral responsibility requires freedom to do otherwise, but they nevertheless hold that moral responsibility requires that the agent be the ‘ultimate source’ of his behavior. Causal determination is incompatible with the agent being the ultimate source of his behavior. Therefore, even if moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise, causal determination seems incompatible with moral responsibility if the ultimate source requirement is right.

However, according to Fischer, his semicompatibilism is not vulnerable to the challenge of source-incompatibilism because, unlike causal determinism, the conception of divine foreknowledge does not exclude that the agent remains the source of his behavior, insofar as God’s foreknowledge is not conceived as causing human action. Still, Fischer points out that, also in the context of God’s foreknowledge and the Frankfurt Cases, something entirely external to the agent and out of his control is sufficient for his behavior. In this sense the source of his behavior is external to him. If, as Fischer believes, this is still compatible with guidance control — and, therefore, with moral responsibility — then this may mean that likewise the external source of the agent’s behavior in the case of causal determinism need not imply that moral responsibility is excluded. Therefore, Fischer argues, his Frankfurt-like approach casts doubt not only on the requirement of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility, but also on the requirement that, to be morally responsible, the agent must be the ultimate source of his behavior.

In sum, Fischer argues that it is at least plausible that, if God knows everything about our future, it follows that we are never free to do otherwise. But he further argues that it does not follow from this lack of regulative control that we lack guidance control of our future. If guidance control is the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility, then we can be morally responsible for our behavior, even if God knows everything we will ever do in advance.

Robert Kane notices in the Introduction of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will that contemporary debates about free will in the light of God’s foreknowledge “surpassed even medieval discussions in labyrinthine complexity.” Also Fischer’s profound analyses are complicated and not easily to follow for readers who are not specialized in the relevant issues. Therefore, the book is relevant and important mainly for specialists. Fischer’s argument is interesting not only for specialists who are interested in the (in)compatibility of God’s foreknowledge , the freedom to choose otherwise and moral responsibility but also for specialists who are interested in the (in)compatibility of causal determinism , the freedom to choose otherwise and moral responsibility. The reason is that the two issues have much ground in common, while there are also relevant differences, which Fischer elucidates.

Fischer’s approach consists of subtle conceptual analyses and rigorous evaluations of premises and the logical validity of arguments adduced in the free will debate. For instance, he discusses and defends the premise of the fixity of the past against challenges; he shows that the distinction between hard and soft facts may both reveal and conceal something, and that this distinction should be distinguished from the distinction between fixed and nonfixed facts; he points at confusions about the meaning of concepts such as various senses of ‘can’; he reveals logical fallacies such as equivocation and begging-the-question; he uncovers the fallacy of moving from one ‘language game’ to another (warned against by Wittgenstein).

Fischer recognizes that Frankfurt-type examples (which he adduces to make plausible that moral responsibility does not depend on freedom to do otherwise) are contentious and that he offers only a sketch of his theory of moral responsibility without a thorough defense. This may be one of the reasons why Fischer’s distinction between regulative and guidance control does not take away the doubt whether guidance control — in the absence of the possibility to do otherwise — is sufficient to make the agent morally responsible for his actions. The doubt especially applies to his suggestion that guidance control may be sufficient for moral responsibility even if causal determinism is true (causal determinism obtains if the initial state of the world together with the laws of nature entails every truth about what happens in the future).

Suppose Peter murders John, while he has guidance control (he ‘acts from his own suitably reasons-responsive mechanism’) but not regulative control. Not having regulative control means that Peter is not free to do otherwise and, thus, that it is impossible that Peter does not murder John. It is true that Peter acts from his own reasons-responsive mechanism and that he deliberately murders John. However, if causal determinism is true, then not only Peter’s actions but also his guidance control (and ‘every truth’ related to it, for instance, whether and how and with what results he exercises this control) are entirely determined by factors outside of him. The conditions sufficient for the necessary outcome of his deliberation and choice were already in place long before he even existed. As Fischer recognizes, the fixity of the past means that “the past is like the dog’s tail, and it is the tail that wags the dog”, not the other way round. Therefore, guidance control seems insufficient for rescuing moral responsibility, if the latter requires at least a minimum of self-determination. It seems inappropriate to blame somebody and hold him morally responsible for something entirely caused by external factors, which he, despite his guidance control, could not possibly influence, change or remove.

It is true that the unavoidability with respect to causal determinism differs from the unavoidability with respect to divine foreknowledge, insofar as God’s foreknowledge is not conceptualized as bringing about human action. However, as Fischer points out, it is questionable whether this difference makes a difference . Besides, Fischer admits that his ‘bootstrapping’ argument (which detaches God’s foreknowledge from causal determinism) is controversial. If we take into account these uncertainties, the conclusion seems justified that, if we are not free to do otherwise, it is implausible that divine foreknowledge and causal determinism are compatible with human moral responsibility.

Kane refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost , in which the angels, debating their freedom in the light of God’s foreknowledge, were lost in “endless mazes”. As he notices, this is “not a comforting thought for us mortals.” Fischer does not pose the question whether human beings are sufficiently capable of understanding the relationship between an omniscient God and human freedom, but he recognizes that every major view about God’s knowledge of the future “has at least a mystery associated with it, if not a significant problem.” This may mean that the problems under consideration are irresolvable, even in principle, due to a fundamental incompleteness of human knowledge with respect to the relation between God and man.

Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Make a Gift

• Translators
• Graphic Designers
• Editing Services
• Academic Editing Services
• Admissions Editing Services
• Admissions Essay Editing Services
• AI Content Editing Services
• APA Style Editing Services
• Application Essay Editing Services
• Book Editing Services
• Business Editing Services
• Capstone Paper Editing Services
• Children's Book Editing Services
• College Application Editing Services
• College Essay Editing Services
• Copy Editing Services
• Developmental Editing Services
• Dissertation Editing Services
• eBook Editing Services
• English Editing Services
• Horror Story Editing Services
• Legal Editing Services
• Line Editing Services
• Manuscript Editing Services
• MLA Style Editing Services
• Novel Editing Services
• Paper Editing Services
• Personal Statement Editing Services
• Research Paper Editing Services
• Résumé Editing Services
• Scientific Editing Services
• Short Story Editing Services
• Statement of Purpose Editing Services
• Substantive Editing Services
• Thesis Editing Services

Proofreading

• Proofreading Services
• Admissions Essay Proofreading Services
• Children's Book Proofreading Services
• Legal Proofreading Services
• Novel Proofreading Services
• Personal Statement Proofreading Services
• Research Proposal Proofreading Services
• Statement of Purpose Proofreading Services

Translation

• Translation Services

Graphic Design

• Graphic Design Services
• Dungeons & Dragons Design Services
• Sticker Design Services
• Writing Services

Please enter the email address you used for your account. Your sign in information will be sent to your email address after it has been verified.

25 Thesis Statement Examples That Will Make Writing a Breeze

Understanding what makes a good thesis statement is one of the major keys to writing a great research paper or argumentative essay. The thesis statement is where you make a claim that will guide you through your entire paper. If you find yourself struggling to make sense of your paper or your topic, then it's likely due to a weak thesis statement.

Let's take a minute to first understand what makes a solid thesis statement, and what key components you need to write one of your own.

A thesis statement always goes at the beginning of the paper. It will typically be in the first couple of paragraphs of the paper so that it can introduce the body paragraphs, which are the supporting evidence for your thesis statement.

Your thesis statement should clearly identify an argument. You need to have a statement that is not only easy to understand, but one that is debatable. What that means is that you can't just put any statement of fact and have it be your thesis. For example, everyone knows that puppies are cute . An ineffective thesis statement would be, "Puppies are adorable and everyone knows it." This isn't really something that's a debatable topic.

Something that would be more debatable would be, "A puppy's cuteness is derived from its floppy ears, small body, and playfulness." These are three things that can be debated on. Some people might think that the cutest thing about puppies is the fact that they follow you around or that they're really soft and fuzzy.

All cuteness aside, you want to make sure that your thesis statement is not only debatable, but that it also actually thoroughly answers the research question that was posed. You always want to make sure that your evidence is supporting a claim that you made (and not the other way around). This is why it's crucial to read and research about a topic first and come to a conclusion later. If you try to get your research to fit your thesis statement, then it may not work out as neatly as you think. As you learn more, you discover more (and the outcome may not be what you originally thought).

Additionally, your thesis statement shouldn't be too big or too grand. It'll be hard to cover everything in a thesis statement like, "The federal government should act now on climate change." The topic is just too large to actually say something new and meaningful. Instead, a more effective thesis statement might be, "Local governments can combat climate change by providing citizens with larger recycling bins and offering local classes about composting and conservation." This is easier to work with because it's a smaller idea, but you can also discuss the overall topic that you might be interested in, which is climate change.

So, now that we know what makes a good, solid thesis statement, you can start to write your own. If you find that you're getting stuck or you are the type of person who needs to look at examples before you start something, then check out our list of thesis statement examples below.

Thesis statement examples

A quick note that these thesis statements have not been fully researched. These are merely examples to show you what a thesis statement might look like and how you can implement your own ideas into one that you think of independently. As such, you should not use these thesis statements for your own research paper purposes. They are meant to be used as examples only.

• Vaccinations Because many children are unable to vaccinate due to illness, we must require that all healthy and able children be vaccinated in order to have herd immunity.
• Educational Resources for Low-Income Students Schools should provide educational resources for low-income students during the summers so that they don't forget what they've learned throughout the school year.
• School Uniforms School uniforms may be an upfront cost for families, but they eradicate the visual differences in income between students and provide a more egalitarian atmosphere at school.
• Populism The rise in populism on the 2016 political stage was in reaction to increasing globalization, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and the Syrian refugee crisis.
• Public Libraries Libraries are essential resources for communities and should be funded more heavily by local municipalities.
• Cyber Bullying With more and more teens using smartphones and social media, cyber bullying is on the rise. Cyber bullying puts a lot of stress on many teens, and can cause depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts. Parents should limit the usage of smart phones, monitor their children's online activity, and report any cyber bullying to school officials in order to combat this problem.
• Medical Marijuana for Veterans Studies have shown that the use of medicinal marijuana has been helpful to veterans who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Medicinal marijuana prescriptions should be legal in all states and provided to these veterans. Additional medical or therapy services should also be researched and implemented in order to help them re-integrate back into civilian life.
• Work-Life Balance Corporations should provide more work from home opportunities and six-hour workdays so that office workers have a better work-life balance and are more likely to be productive when they are in the office.
• Teaching Youths about Consensual Sex Although sex education that includes a discussion of consensual sex would likely lead to less sexual assault, parents need to teach their children the meaning of consent from a young age with age appropriate lessons.
• Whether or Not to Attend University A degree from a university provides invaluable lessons on life and a future career, but not every high school student should be encouraged to attend a university directly after graduation. Some students may benefit from a trade school or a "gap year" where they can think more intensely about what it is they want to do for a career and how they can accomplish this.
• Studying Abroad Studying abroad is one of the most culturally valuable experiences you can have in college. It is the only way to get completely immersed in another language and learn how other cultures and countries are different from your own.
• Women's Body Image Magazines have done a lot in the last five years to include a more diverse group of models, but there is still a long way to go to promote a healthy woman's body image collectively as a culture.
• Cigarette Tax Heavily taxing and increasing the price of cigarettes is essentially a tax on the poorest Americans, and it doesn't deter them from purchasing. Instead, the state and federal governments should target those economically disenfranchised with early education about the dangers of smoking.
• Veganism A vegan diet, while a healthy and ethical way to consume food, indicates a position of privilege. It also limits you to other cultural food experiences if you travel around the world.
• University Athletes Should be Compensated University athletes should be compensated for their service to the university, as it is difficult for these students to procure and hold a job with busy academic and athletic schedules. Many student athletes on scholarship also come from low-income neighborhoods and it is a struggle to make ends meet when they are participating in athletics.
• Women in the Workforce Sheryl Sandberg makes a lot of interesting points in her best-selling book, Lean In , but she only addressed the very privileged working woman and failed to speak to those in lower-skilled, lower-wage jobs.
• Assisted Suicide Assisted suicide should be legal and doctors should have the ability to make sure their patients have the end-of-life care that they want to receive.
• Celebrity and Political Activism Although Taylor Swift's lyrics are indicative of a feminist perspective, she should be more politically active and vocal to use her position of power for the betterment of society.
• The Civil War The insistence from many Southerners that the South seceded from the Union for states' rights versus the fact that they seceded for the purposes of continuing slavery is a harmful myth that still affects race relations today.
• Blue Collar Workers Coal miners and other blue-collar workers whose jobs are slowly disappearing from the workforce should be re-trained in jobs in the technology sector or in renewable energy. A program to re-train these workers would not only improve local economies where jobs have been displaced, but would also lead to lower unemployment nationally.
• Diversity in the Workforce Having a diverse group of people in an office setting leads to richer ideas, more cooperation, and more empathy between people with different skin colors or backgrounds.
• Re-Imagining the Nuclear Family The nuclear family was traditionally defined as one mother, one father, and 2.5 children. This outdated depiction of family life doesn't quite fit with modern society. The definition of normal family life shouldn't be limited to two-parent households.
• Digital Literacy Skills With more information readily available than ever before, it's crucial that students are prepared to examine the material they're reading and determine whether or not it's a good source or if it has misleading information. Teaching students digital literacy and helping them to understand the difference between opinion or propaganda from legitimate, real information is integral.
• Beauty Pageants Beauty pageants are presented with the angle that they empower women. However, putting women in a swimsuit on a stage while simultaneously judging them on how well they answer an impossible question in a short period of time is cruel and purely for the amusement of men. Therefore, we should stop televising beauty pageants.
• Supporting More Women to Run for a Political Position In order to get more women into political positions, more women must run for office. There must be a grassroots effort to educate women on how to run for office, who among them should run, and support for a future candidate for getting started on a political career.

Still stuck? Need some help with your thesis statement?

If you are still uncertain about how to write a thesis statement or what a good thesis statement is, be sure to consult with your teacher or professor to make sure you're on the right track. It's always a good idea to check in and make sure that your thesis statement is making a solid argument and that it can be supported by your research.

After you're done writing, it's important to have someone take a second look at your paper so that you can ensure there are no mistakes or errors. It's difficult to spot your own mistakes, which is why it's always recommended to have someone help you with the revision process, whether that's a teacher, the writing center at school, or a professional editor such as one from ServiceScape .

Related Posts

How to Write an Effective Research Paper Introduction

Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) Review: Everything You Need to Know

• Academic Writing Advice
• All Blog Posts
• Writing Advice
• Admissions Writing Advice
• Book Writing Advice
• Short Story Advice
• Employment Writing Advice
• Business Writing Advice
• Web Content Advice
• Article Writing Advice
• Magazine Writing Advice
• Grammar Advice
• Dialect Advice
• Editing Advice
• Freelance Advice
• Legal Writing Advice
• Poetry Advice
• Graphic Design Advice
• Logo Design Advice
• Translation Advice
• Blog Reviews
• Short Story Award Winners
• Scholarship Winners

Need an academic editor before submitting your work?

• FANNATION FANNATION FANNATION
• SI.COM SI.COM SI.COM
• SI Swimsuit SI Swimsuit SI Swimsuit
• SI Sportsbook SI Sportsbook SI Sportsbook
• SI Tickets SI Tickets SI Tickets
• SI Showcase SI Showcase SI Showcase
• SI Resorts SI Resorts SI Resorts

Klay Thompson Reveals Honest Thoughts on Future With Warriors

Klay Thompson wants to re-sign with the Golden State Warriors

• Author: Joey Linn

In this story:

During a recent episode of The Draymond Green Show , Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson opened up about his new perspective on basketball and the future of his career.

"I just can't believe it's here," Thompson said of this final stage of his career. "When you're in your mid-20s, it's so crazy, you think you're going to play forever. And you think if you maintain that athletic level, it seems effortless. But then as time goes on, you realize how demanding this job really is. It's so physically demanding."

Thompson opened up about some of his struggles with accepting where he is at in his career, adding, "I was actually struggling a lot with that at the beginning of this year because of the unknown. I might've let contract situations or playing time or making up a lot of excuses rather than just appreciating what is in front of me. It took me and Steve [Kerr] like four real heart-to-heart talks to finally break my shell. Being like you know what? I got to have fun this year. I deserve to have fun."

On his looming free agency, Thompson said, "Just smelling the roses and appreciating all the work it took to get here. In saying that, when it comes to free agency in July, I just got to keep that in mind. Yes, I want to re-sign with the [Warriors], but I also have to prioritize my mental health and lay out what is important to me at this point in my career. I know we have so much basketball ahead that I haven't given it much thought. Because if I start thinking about July 1, then I'm just doing myself a disservice. For me it's just about staying present, as simple as that is. Staying present and appreciating being in the NBA."

Related Articles

Klay Thompson Shares Strong Message Amid Contract Rumors

Steve Kerr Reacts to Warriors Receiving Zero Championship Votes in GM Survey

Steve Kerr Gets Brutally Honest About Warriors vs. Lakers

Latest Warriors News

Draymond Green and Desmond Bane Dap It Out After Heated Moment in Warriors-Grizzlies

Steph Curry Makes NBA History in Warriors vs. Grizzlies

Memphis Grizzlies Make Roster Move Before Facing Warriors

LeBron James Makes Big Warriors-Celtics Statement

Steph Curry's Brutally Honest Statement on Warriors' Playoff Chances

Advertisement

Georgia Judge Rejects Effort to Dismiss Trump Case on Free Speech Grounds

The defense had argued that some of the charges were based on statements Donald Trump and his co-defendants made in 2020 that were constitutionally protected.

• Share full article

By Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim

• April 4, 2024

A judge in Atlanta on Thursday rejected an effort by former President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants to have the Georgia criminal case against them dismissed on grounds that it was based on comments that were protected by the First Amendment.

The case charges Mr. Trump and 14 of his supporters with taking part in a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. Defense lawyers had argued that some of the charges were based on statements the co-defendants had made in a political context, which they said was constitutionally protected speech.

“Take out the political speech, no charges,” Steven H. Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in Georgia, said at a hearing late last month.

But the ruling on Thursday from Judge Scott McAfee, of Fulton County Superior Court, noted that “free speech — including political speech — is not without restriction.”

“Even core political speech addressing matters of public concern is not impenetrable from prosecution if allegedly used to further criminal activity,” Judge McAfee wrote.

He noted, however, that the bar for certain legal challenges was higher in the pretrial phase. The judge wrote that he was not “foreclosing the ability to raise” a First Amendment challenge later in the case.

Mr. Sadow said in a statement that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants “will continue to evaluate their options regarding the First Amendment challenges.”

In a second ruling on Thursday, Judge McAfee rejected an attempt by David Shafer, a defendant who is the former head of the Georgia Republican Party, to strip language from the indictment referring to “duly elected and qualified presidential electors” and “false Electoral College votes.”

Mr. Shafer served as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020, as part of a broader scheme to create slates of pro-Trump electors in swing states that were won by President Biden. And he played a major role in the former president’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. Judge McAfee ruled that “the challenged language is not prejudicial,” and that there was “no legal basis” to strike it.

The argument that the First Amendment should shield Mr. Trump from being prosecuted for efforts to overturn the 2020 election has previously been rejected by a U.S. District Court judge, Tanya Chutkan, in a separate federal prosecution unfolding in Washington, D.C.

The Georgia case is one of four criminal cases that Mr. Trump is facing. A trial date of April 15 has been set for a New York State case in which the former president is accused of covering up a sex scandal as he was running for president in 2016.

Mr. Trump seems unlikely to go to trial in Georgia before the November presidential election. For much of this year, the case took a detour as defendants sought the disqualification of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney leading it. They said that Ms. Willis had created a conflict of interest by engaging in a romantic relationship with Nathan J. Wade, a lawyer she had hired to manage the prosecution of Mr. Trump.

Last month, Judge McAfee ruled that an “actual” conflict of interest did not exist, but that “the appearance of impropriety” remained. To solve the problem, the judge gave Ms. Willis a choice: either Mr. Wade could step away from the case, or she and her entire office could do so. Mr. Wade resigned a few hours later.

Mr. Trump and other defendants in the case are seeking to appeal the judge’s decision.

Richard Fausset , based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. More about Richard Fausset

Danny Hakim is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about Danny Hakim

Our Coverage of the Trump Case in Georgia

Former president donald trump and 18 others face a sprawling series of charges for their roles in attempting to interfere in the state’s 2020 presidential election..

Fani Willis: Trump’s lawyers had argued that the Fulton County district attorney should be removed  from the case because of her relationship with Nathan Wade, a colleague and former romantic partner . A judge later ruled that Willis could continue leading the prosecution , but only if Wade withdrew from the case. Wade subsequently resigned .

Other Threats to Prosecution:  A special committee of the Georgia State Senate is also looking into accusations of misconduct by Willis , making it clear that the effort to disqualify her from the prosecution is not the only threat to her case .

RICO Charges:  At the heart of the indictment in Georgia  are racketeering charges under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act . Here’s why such charges  could prove to be a powerful tool for the prosecution .

Who Else Was Indicted?:   Rudy   Giuliani , who led legal efforts in several states to keep the former president in power, and Mark Meadows , the former W hite House chief of staff, were among the 18 Trump allies  charged in the case.

Plea Deals: Sidney K. Powell , Kenneth Chesebro  and Jenna Ellis  — three lawyers indicted with Trump in the case — pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors   against the former president.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

Watch CBS News

James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents of Oxford High School shooter, sentenced

By Joseph Buczek , Sara Powers

Updated on: April 9, 2024 / 4:13 PM EDT / CBS Detroit

(CBS DETROIT) -   James  and  Jennifer Crumbley , the parents of the Oxford High School shooter , were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison on Tuesday after a jury found them guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the November 2021 shooting that claimed the lives of four students and injured several others. 

They will both receive credit for 858 days. 

Oakland County Judge Cheryl Matthews handed down the sentencing. Prosecutors were  seeking 10 to 15 years in prison  for the parents. 

READ: James and Jennifer Crumbley: Everything leading up to the sentencing for parents of Oxford High School shooter

Tuesday's sentencing hearing began with a nearly hour-long discussion of the presentence investigation report that was completed on Tuesday, April 2. 

Victim impact statements begin in Crumbley sentencing hearing

Nicole Beausoleil, Madisyn Baldwin's mother, was the first to deliver a victim impact statement Tuesday morning. 

"You said you wouldn't do anything different, well that really says what type of parent you are, because there's a lot of things I would do differently," said Beausoleil. "But the one thing I would have wanted to be different was to take that bullet that day so she could continue to live the life she deserved."   

Jill Soave and Craig Shilling, Justin Shilling's parents, and Reina St. Juliana, Hana St. Juliana's sister, also spoke. 

Reina St. Juliana said that she saw her sister earlier that day, but they parted ways with a smile, and she never got to say goodbye to her.

Hana's father, Steve St. Juliana, also spoke. When referring to James and Jennifer, he said, "They chose to stay quiet, they chose to ignore the warning signs, and now, as we've heard through all the objections, they continue to choose to blame everyone but themselves."

Buck Myre, Tate Myre's father, spoke and said it's time to put the focus on the Oxford School District and how the response to the shooting was horrible. 

After the impact statements, Jennifer and James Crumbley also spoke. 

On Feb. 6, Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting where her son killed four students, Justin Shilling, Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, and Hana St. Juliana, and injured seven other people on Nov. 30, 2021.

Jennifer Crumbley was the first parent in the U.S. to go on trial in a mass school shooting carried out by their child. 

The mother and her defense attorney, Shannon Smith, have asked that she be sentenced to house arrest and that Jennifer Crumbley live in Smith's guest house, which is less than 10 miles from Oxford High School.

READ:   Jennifer Crumbley wants to live in attorney's guest house during her sentence, prosecutors say

On March 14, James Crumbley was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter after a nearly week-long trial. 

READ:  James Crumbley wasn't threatening prosecutor Karen McDonald, he was just venting, attorney says

James Crumbley and his defense attorney, Mariell Lehman, had asked that he be sentenced to time served. 

"If it were not for the actions of James and Jennifer Crumbley, the shooter would have never had access to the gun he used to take four innocent lives inside Oxford High School. We owed it to the victims and their families to pursue the maximum penalty," said Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald. "Nothing will bring their children back, but the Judge recognized the suffering these defendants caused, and she acknowledged the victims and their families. The sentence today provides the highest level of accountability under the law, and that's appropriate.

"These prosecutions will not stop gun violence. We owe it to Justin, Hana, Madisyn, and Tate to address the underlying causes of gun violence and prevent future shootings. I am committed to continuing that work."  

• Oxford High School shooting
• Jennifer Crumbley
• James Crumbley

Joe Buczek is the manager of digital content and promotion at CBS News Detroit. He previously worked at WWTV, the Grand Traverse Insider, the Leader and the Kalkaskian, the Oakland Press and the Morning Sun.

Featured Local Savings

More from cbs news.

Sentencing of James and Jennifer Crumbley begins with discussion over presentencing report, scoring guidelines

James Crumbley wasn't threatening prosecutor Karen McDonald, he was just venting, attorney says

Michigan Board of Education to consider resolutions regarding school safety reforms

The solar eclipse in Southeast Michigan

Jennifer Crumbley expresses sorrow, hatred for prosecutors: 'Alone, I grieve'

Jennifer Crumbley addressed the court and the victims' families before her sentencing Tuesday.

"I sit here today to express my deepest sorrows to the victims' families," Crumbley said, adding that the "gravity and weight that this has taken on my heart and soul" can never be measured and "nothing I can say will ease" the pain and heartache suffered by the victims' families.

"I have taken countless nights to lament," she said, adding: "I pray all the victims are in God's mercy and peace."

She also addressed her controversial testimony, during which she said, "I wouldn't have done anything differently." The comment was cited by the jury foreperson in her case and by Oxford High families as callous and showing her lack of remorse.

More: James Crumbley apologizes to victims' families, urges further investigation of shooting

"I was horrified to learn that my answer had the effect" that it did, she said, explaining that her answer reflected what she knew at the time.

"This was not something I foresaw," Jennifer Crumbley said of the shooting. "With the benefit of hindsight, my answer would be drastically different."

Especially, she added, "if I thought my son was capable of crimes like these." 

"The Ethan I knew was a good kid. My husband and I used to say we had a perfect kid ... that's who I saw and thought I knew," she said.

Their son, who was 15 when he murdered four students and wounded six others and a teacher on Nov. 30, 2021, during a rampage at Oxford High School.

Jennifer Crumbley then laid blame on the school, saying it failed to alert her about troubling behavior her son had at school on several occasions, and when it did summon her over a troubling drawing, "We were led to believe from school officials and Ethan as well that this was an isolated event," she said. "We were never asked to take him home that day."

She added, "The prosecution keeps saying is that we did not give the big picture." But, she said, the school "did not give us the full picture."

Jennifer Crumbley suggested that what her son did could happen to anyone, attempting to refute the idea that she and James Crumbley were bad parents or missed warning signs.

“We were good parents,” she said. “We were the average family. Everything we strived for was to make sure our son had the best life we could give him. I know we did our best.”

More: James, Jennifer Crumbley get 10-15 years in prison for role in Oxford school shooting

She also urged the public to take away this message: "This could be any parent ... your child can make any decision."

Not just with a gun,  she said, but with a knife, a vehicle — and the parents could be held responsible.

She also told the prosecution: "I have hated you."

But she has come to forgive the prosecution over time, she said, and continues to try to forgive herself for decisions she cannot change.

"To the victims and the families, I stand today not to ask for your forgiveness, but to express my sincere apologies for the pain that has been caused."

She added: 

"Alone, I grieve ... I will be in my own internal prison for the rest of my life."

Judge Matthews  sentenced James and Jennifer Crumbley both to 10-15 years in prison for their roles in the shooting.

Contact Tresa Baldas: [email protected]