Summary |
Most philosophers believe that almost all normal human beings possess free will, but a minority are skeptics. The standard grounds for skepticism has been incompatibilism: hard determinists believe that determinism is true, and incompatible with free will. More recently, a number of philosophers have conjoined a conditional hard determinism with a belief that free will is incompatible with indeterminism, because indeterninism makes action too much a matter of chance. A very few philosophers advocate skepticism on other grounds: luck, naturalism, or the epiphenomenality of conscious thought. It is standard, though not universal, to hold that if agents lack free will they lack moral responsibility. This alleged link between free will and moral responsibility has sometimes made the debate over skepticism impassioned. |