Philosophers

You can categorise philosophers of freewill into ‘compatibalists’ and ‘incompatibalists’, based on whether they think a deterministic universe is compatible, or not, with a meaningful notion of freewill.

I’m a compatibilist. I believe that freewill makes sense in a deterministic universe. I was very convinced by Daniel Dennett’s “Elbow Room”, in which he argues that you don’t need randomness to create a worthwhile kind of freewill - indeed, you don’t even want randomness. It isn’t a kind of freedom worth wanting to have some part of your choices non-determined rather than determined¹.

Dennett also argues that you don’t need indeterminism for personal responsibility - in other words we can hold people responsible for their actions even in a deterministic universe. The freewill questions has ontological and ethical dimensions, which people often confuse (and which it is conceivable that they are intertwined), but I follow Dennett in claiming that they are often more confused than they should be. That is, people often think that the status of the nature of the universe (ontology) has strong bearing on how we should feel about responsibility (ethics). I doubt this and will try and explain why².

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Doesn’t neuroscience contradict freewill? LIBET; direct link libet1

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1: compare with all the various quantum computation neuroscientific theories of freewill, which are all rather desperate and irrelevant in my opinion.

2:Recently Dennett has said that he’s dropped talking about the notion of freewill completely because it such an emotional trigger for people, but instead talks about what he calls “The Moral Agent’s Club” which is a community of people who hold each other morally accountable. This analysis shows why ontological questions are irrelevant, he claims, to the ethical questions about responsibility.