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In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (iv) if for all we know we are free but predetermined, then it is really possible that we are, so (v) compatibilism. We uncover how the crucial epistemic modality underlying (iv) must be understood, and contend that, understood this way, the libertarian can resist (iv). Importantly, however, resisting the argument does commit the libertarian to what has been called “flip-flopping”—but we argue that this is perfectly coherent. We conclude by articulating two crucially ways the libertarian can resist the argument, by saying that we can know that determinism is false "from the armchair".

I explore some issues in the logics and dialectics of practical modalities connected with the Consequence Argument (CA) considered as the best argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to Lewis (1981) in one of the possible senses of (in)ability, the argument is not valid; however, understood in the other of its possible senses, the argument is not sound. This verdict is based on the assessment of the modal version of the argument, where the crucial notion is power necessity (“no choice” operator), while Lewis analyses the version where the central notion is the locution “cannot render false.”Lewis accepts closure of the relevant (in)ability operator under entailment but not closure under implication. His strategy has a seemingly strange corollary: a free predetermined agent is able (in a strong, causal sense) to falsity the conjunction of history and law. I compare a Moorean position with respect to radical skepticism and knowledge closure with ability closure and propose to explain Lewis’s strategy in the framework of his Moorean stance.

Gregg Caruso’s Rejecting Retributivism is a well-written compendium of arguments against retributivism and in favor of a public-health model for dealing with potential criminality. Nevertheless, I still think, even after reading Caruso, that there is an important place for punishment, based on the retributive notions of culpability and deserved blame, in our criminal justice system. I proceed in three parts. First, I point out where his views about our potential to have the kind of free will necessary for basic desert of blame are weakest: his response to compatibilism. Second, I argue that his argument against retributivism proves too much: it radically and implausibly rules out holding people responsible in any meaningful way. Third, I argue that he operates with a misguided conception of the basis for blame. I offer a better one that works well with compatibilism.

The possibility of predetermined choices raises a challenge for Causal Decision Theory [Ahmed 2014b]. Sandgren and Williamson [2021] have recently proposed a response—Selective Causal Decision Theo...

This article aims to reconstruct the main theoretical decisions that characterize the leibnizian concept of freedom. The method adopted is a dialogical confrontation between the most influential conceptions on the problematic reconciliation between the mechanistic and mathematical paradigm of the universe and freedom. Under the influence of the mechanistic model, influential modern philosophers reduced the problem of free will to the problem of free action. Hobbes, Locke and Hume identified freedom with spontaneity and autonomy, consolidating a mechanical compatibilism. Leibniz receives the notions of autonomy and spontaneity. However, Leibnizian Freedom, by implying also intelligence and contingency, introduces teleology into the compatibilist discourse. Leibniz reassumes the notion of free will by reconciling it with the rejection of libertas indifferentiae. Este artículo pretende reconstruir las principales decisiones teóricas que caracterizan el concepto leibniziano de libertad. El método adoptado es una confrontación dialógica entre las concepciones más influyentes sobre la problemática reconciliación entre el paradigma mecanicista y matemático del universo y la libertad. Bajo la influencia del modelo mecanicista, influyentes filósofos modernos redujeron el problema del libre albedrío al problema de la acción libre. Hobbes, Locke y Hume identificaron la libertad con la espontaneidad y la autonomía, consolidando un compatibilismo mecánico. Leibniz recibe las nociones de autonomía y espontaneidad. Sin embargo, la libertad leibniziana, al implicar también inteligencia y contingencia, introduce la teleología en el discurso compatibilista. Leibniz reasume la noción de libre albedrío conciliándola con el rechazo de la libertas indifferentiae. Traducción realizada con la versión gratuita del traductor www.DeepL.com/Translator Este artigo pretende reconstruir as principais decisões teóricas que caracterizam o conceito leibniziano de liberdade. Adota-se como método o confronto dialógico entre as concepções mais influentes em torno da problemática conciliação entre o paradigma mecanicista e matematizado do universo e a liberdade. Sob a influência do modelo mecanicista, influentes filósofos modernos reduziram o problema do livre arbítrio ao problema da livre ação. Hobbes, Locke e Hume identificaram a liberdade com a espontaneidade e a autonomia, consolidando um compatibilismo mecânico. Leibniz recepciona as noções de autonomia e espontaneidade. No entanto, A liberdade leibniziana, ao implicar também a inteligência e a contingência, introduz a teleologia no discurso compatibilista. Leibniz reassume a noção de livre arbítrio conciliando-a com a rejeição da libertas indifferentiae.

The Freedom-determinism debate is one of the important current discussions. Its scope covers philosophy to theology, psychology, and even the neurosciences and genetics. Though there are already attempts to reconcile the freedom-determinism perspective, a definite answer to it remains unclear. This research attempts to contribute an input offered by an indigenous understanding of the two perspectives. Using the hermeneutic phenomenology on the Visayan people in the Philippines, this paper attempts to contextualize and understand the debate from their perspective. As such freedom and determinism are put into the context of Kahimtang. The discussion is divided in two parts. The first part discusses three themes or nuances of kahimtang: 1) kahimtang as hatag sa Ginoo (God-given), 2) the notion of kahimtang as latid sa kinabuhi (path in life), and 3) the concept of kahimtang as baruganan sa pagkatawo (state of being-human). The second part discusses the determinism and freedom found in the themes of the previous part and argues on a framework of compatibilism in kahimtang. The study concludes that life for the Visayan is an interplay of freedom and determinism.

This paper reconstructs Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics from a compatibilist point of view. I shall argue that it is Schiller’s conception of individual self-determination that motivates his aesthetic critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. Schiller conceives of aesthetic self-determination in terms of a compatibilism between reason and nature. As such, Schiller’s aesthetics can be interpreted as an ontological category. His concepts of love, play and the aesthetic state must therefore be understood in terms of volitional structures that describe human freedom in nature, history and society.

espanolEn una descripcion general de la filosofia, se puede decir que todos los temas son controvertidos. Un ejemplo de este tipo de controversia interminable es el debate sobre el libre albedrio. La originalidad del Revisionismo propuesto por Vargas (2007, 2013) consiste en fijar una posicion dentro del debate despues de haber revisado los terminos en los que se discute. Su revisionismo se centra especialmente en examinar como las diferentes posiciones filosoficas del debate estan vinculadas a las intuiciones o preconceptos del sentido comun. Vargas argumenta que el sentido comun —como preconcepcion— posee elementos incompatibilistas que deben ser aceptados a la hora de hacer un diagnostico. Sin embargo, en un nivel prescriptivo, la teoria que debe ser adoptada en filosofia es el compatibilismo. De este modo, Vargas ofrece un revisionismo hibrido. A partir de una lectura neopirronica de Wittgenstein, propongo reconsiderar el papel del desacuerdo en el debate filosofico y revisar la aproximacion al sentido comun para argumentar que es un conjunto plural de practicas. Estas practicas determinan diferentes contextos para el uso de conceptos, en los que pueden tener sentido posiciones tanto deterministas como indeterministas. Esta vision plural del sentido comun tambien modifica el lugar de la filosofia y el tipo de desacuerdo enfrentado en el debate. EnglishFrom an overview of philosophy, it can be said all issues are controversial. An example of this kind of never-ending controversy is the free will debate. The originality of Revisionism proposed by Vargas (2007, 2013) is to establish a position within the debate after having reviewed the terms in which it is discussed. His Revisionism focuses especially on reviewing how the different philosophical positions of the debate are linked to the intuitions or preconceptions of common sense. Vargas argues that common sense —as a preconception— has incompatibilistic elements that ought to be accepted when making a diagnosis. However, at a prescriptive level, the theory that ought to be adopted in philosophy is compatibilism. Thereby, Vargas proposes a hybrid Revisionism. By reading Wittgenstein from a neo-Pyrrhonic orientation, I propose to reconsider the role of disagreement in the philosophical debate and the approach to common sense in order to argue that it is a plural set of practices rather than a preconception. These practices determine different contexts for the use of concepts, in which both deterministic and indeterministic positions can make sense. This pluralistic view of common sense also modifies the place of philosophy and the kind of disagreement faced in the debate.

This article deals with the similarities and differences between Ben Sira and Chrysippus regarding their solutions to the tension between free will and determinism. Both Ben Sira and Chrysippus argue for compatibilism, the theory that free will and determinism are compatible. However, Ben Sira and Chrysippus have different understandings of freedom required by moral responsibility. According to Chrysippus, consent is the internal cause of persons’ actions, and, thus, they should be responsible for these actions. By contrast, Ben Sira claims that although being shaped by God’s plan, persons could have done otherwise and, in this sense, are responsible for their sins. The first section of this article examines the texts of Ben Sira and Chrysippus regarding the problem of free will. The second section discusses the positions of Ben Sira and Chrysippus on compatibilism. The last section explains the possible influence of Chrysippus on Ben Sira and the main difference between their understandings of freedom.

The article explores the agreements and disagreements between the author and the authors of Responsible Brains on how neuroscience relates to moral responsibility. The agreements are fundamental: neuroscience is not the harbinger of revolutionary revision of our views of when persons are morally responsible for the harms that they cause. The disagreements are in the details of what is needed for neuroscience to be the helper (rather than the challeger) of the moral sciences.

Contrary to Lewis (1981) and Vihvelin (2013), I argue that free will in a deterministic world is an ability to break a law of nature or to change the remote past. Even if it were true, as Lewis and Vihvelin think, that an agent who is predetermined to perform a particular act might not break a law or change the remote past by doing otherwise, it would nevertheless be true that he is able to do otherwise only if he is able to break a law or to change the remote past.

According to the new dispositionalist’s response to the Frankfurt cases, Jones can do otherwise. Black merely masks (or finks) that ability, but does not deprive Jones of it. This suggestion stands...

This essay reframes salient issues in discussions of free will using conceptual apparatus developed in the works of Saul Kripke, with particular attention paid to his little-discussed technical notion of a prejudice. I begin by focusing on how various forms of modality (metaphysical, epistemic, and conceptual) underlie alternate forms of compatibilism and discuss why it is important to avoid conflating these forms of compatibilism. The concept of a prejudice is then introduced. We consider the semantic role of prejudices, in particular conditions in which prejudices turn out to express metaphysically necessary truths. With that as background, I discuss a set of prejudices involving the notion of choice. We consider the role these prejudices might play, should they turn out to be true, in determining the answer to various compatibility questions concerning the nature of moral responsibility and choice.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between free will conceptions and the surrounding metaphysical beliefs in substance dualism or physicalism. More Specifically, to investigate whether the established relation between dualism beliefs and free will beliefs is due to differences in the understanding of what (in)determinism entails.

In a series of three pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings.

In this paper, I show that Kant’s solution to the third antinomy is a reply sui generis to the consequence argument. If sound, the consequence argument yields that we are not morally responsible fo...

This is a critical notice of Alfred Mele’s, Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. I agree with Mele that moral responsibility is a historical phenomenon, but give some considerations (based on analogous phenomena) in favor of a positive, rather than negative, historical condition for moral responsibility. I focus on Mele’s Zygote Argument, which is intended to present a challenge for compatibilism. I contend that the challenge can be met, and I offer an error theory of the appeal of the Zygote Argument.

This paper targets a nearly universal assumption in the philosophical literature: that prepunishment is unproblematic for consequentialists. Prepunishment threats do not deter, as deterrence is traditionally conceived. In fact, a pure prepunishment legal system would tend to increase the criminal disposition of the grudgingly compliant. This is a serious problem since, from many perspectives, but especially from a consequentialist one, a primary purpose of punishment is deterrence. I analyze the decision theory behind pre- and postpunishments, which helps clarify both what deterrence is and how it operates in consequentialist justifications of punishment. I end by sketching a road map for the future of prepunishment as artificial intelligence and other technological advances generate increasing possibilities for its use.

The argument from the sense of freedom, unlike many other libertarian arguments, doesn’t question the compatibility of free will and determinism, but is aimed against the belief that determinism is true. The endorsement of determinism undermines the sense of freedom and thereby excludes the possibility of rational choice. And since its possibility is a necessary condition for free will, the belief that determinism is true excludes it as well, the argument concludes. In the first part of the article, I outline how the sense of freedom can be understood and what are the reasons to admit its existence. For it is possible that the sense of freedom is misleading, in the second part I consider why we should think that it doesn’t deceive us, and what are the reasons against skepticism about it. In the third part, I formulate the argument from the sense of freedom; I also examine standard compatibilist defence strategies against such kind of arguments and demonstrate their inefficiency against the argument from the sense of freedom. In conclusion, I argue that the argument from the sense of freedom, supplemented by the antiseptic thesis, reveals vulnerabilities of all but the most desperate compatibilist theories.

While many philosophers of religion are familiar with the reconciliation of grace and freedom known as Molinism, fewer by far are familiar with that position initially developed by Molina’s erstwhile rival, Domingo Banez (i.e., Banezianism). My aim is to clarify a serious problem for the Banezian: how the Banezian can avoid the apparent conflict between a strong notion of freedom and apparently compatibilist conclusions. The most prominent attempt to defend Banezianism against compatibilism was (in)famously endorsed by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. Even if it were true that freedom does not require alternative possibilities, Banezians have a grounding problem.

The articles by Corlett, McKenna and Waller in the present issue call for some further enlightenment on Lehrer’s defense of classical compatibilism. Ultimate explanation in terms of a power preference, which is the primary explanation for choice, is now the central feature of his defense. This includes the premise that scientific determinism may fail to explain our choices. Sylvain Bromberger (1965) showed that nomological deduction is not sufficient for explanation. A power preference, which is by definition a preference over alternatives, is the primary explanation when the power preference explains the choice without the need to appeal to anything else, including even anything that explains it. The author notes that explanation is not generally transitive. The power preference must stand alone as an ultimate explanation independent of other explanations. It is thus the ultimate preference over alternatives of choice.

In this article the author makes the case for a hybrid sourcehood–leeway compatibilist account of free will. To do so, she draws upon Lehrer’s writing on free will, including his preference-based compatibilist account and Frankfurt-style cases from the perspective of the cognizant agent. The author explores what distinguishes kinds of intentional influence in manipulation cases and applies this distinction to a new perspectival variant of Frankfurt cases, those from the perspective of the counterfactual intervenor. She argues that it matters what kind of intentional influence is at issue in the counterfactual intervention and, further, that our judgments about desert of praise (and blame) are affected by occupying the POV of the counterfactual intervenor. The author concludes that such attention to perspectival variants of Frankfurt cases supports the view that compatibilist sourcehood accounts of moral responsibility require an additional compatibilist could-have-done-otherwise condition to capture a more robust sense of moral responsibility.

Hobart’s classic 1934 paper “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It” has been widely cited (and taught in many undergraduate courses) as an example of an argument for the view that free will requires the truth of determinism. In this paper, I argue that this reading of Hobart’s paper is mistaken and that we should instead read Hobart as arguing that an agent exercises their free will only if the proximate causes of the agent’s action deterministically cause their action. After arguing that Hobart’s view, rightly understood, escapes the problems typically raised for Hobart’s compatibilism, I also argue that Hobart’s view is problematic for different reasons. Nevertheless, I argue that there is a crucial insight (concerning the relation between indeterminacy and free will) to be gleaned from Hobart’s paper—one that provides compatibilists with a new recipe for challenging libertarian accounts of free will.

Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility.

This essay aims to explore imitation in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds (Bargh and Chartrand in J Pers Soc Psychol 76(6):893–910, 1999; Bargh and Ferguson in Psychol Bull 126(6):925–945, 2000; Bargh and Ferguson in Trends Cogn Sci 8(1):33–39, 2004), but what the agent perceives and experiences becomes potential motives for her actions only through her identification with a particular way of being and acting. Therefore, although the agent’s actions are conditioned by perceptual stimuli, the latter are not the cause of the actions. The agent is the ultimate cause. That is, a convergence between perceptual stimuli and conscious will. I take this latter conclusion to suggest a compatibilist approach whereby action in a social situation would require the perceptual conditioning as much as the freedom and consciousness of the agent.

This paper aims to defend deliberation-compatibilism against several objections, including a recent counterexample by Yishai Cohen that involves a deliberator who believes that whichever action she performs will be the result of deterministic manipulation. It begins by offering a Moorean-style proof of deliberation-compatibilism. It then turns to the leading argument for deliberation-incompatibilism, which is based on the presumed incompatibility of causal determinism and the ‘openness’ required for rational deliberation. The paper explains why this argument fails and develops a coherent account of how one can rationally deliberate and believe in causal determinism without inconsistency. The second half of the paper then takes up Cohen's proposed counterexample and his Four-Case Deliberation Argument (FCDA) against deliberation-compatibilism, which is meant to mirror Derk Pereboom's famous Four-Case Manipulation Argument. In response, the author defends a hard-line reply to FCDA but also argues that the notion of ‘sourcehood’ relevant to rational deliberation differs from that involved in free will.

The Idea philosophiae moralis (1679) by James Dundas (c.1620–1679) is an unfinished manuscript in the tradition of Reformed scholasticism. There Dundas answers the challenge posed by Thomas Hobbes’...

In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation (Proudfoot 2013). This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism (Proudfoot 2017a). The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism.

Naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs, in the form of the cognitive science of religion (CSR), have become increasingly popular in the contemporary sphere of philosophy and theology. Some...

This article deepens the relationship between Martin Luther's theology and the logical structure of free will. First, the article analyses different positions on free will, by organizing them into ...

Este trabajo pretende exponer y comentar la interpretación aristotélica de la filosofía de Parménides. En primer lugar, se analiza la refutación del monismo parmenídeo en Phys. I 2-3. Luego se comenta una serie de pasajes relevantes del corpus en los que Aristóteles hace referencia tanto a la ontología y cosmología de Parménides como a su metodología de investigación filosófica. Se propone una interpretación compatibilista de la lectura aristotélica de Parménides, según la cual este último habría afirmado la unidad e inmovilidad de lo real según el concepto y su pluralidad cambiante según la sensación. Si bien es evidente la influencia platónica en ciertos aspectos de la interpretación aristotélica, esta última no es una mera recepción y repetición de la lectura de Platón. En efecto, Aristóteles parece haber comprendido el pensamiento de Parménides a partir de una distinción metodológica operativa en Phys. I 5.

Compatibilists about free will maintain that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilists disagree. Incompatibilist believers in free will have been challenged to solve a problem that luck poses for them—the problem of present luck. This article articulates that challenge and then explores a novel compatibilist view recently proposed by Christian List. It is argued that List’s view, unlike standard compatibilist views, faces a very similar problem about luck.

In an outline of a paper found amongst his philosophical papers and correspondence after his untimely death in 2001—“Nihil Obstat: An Analysis of Ability,” reproduced in this volume—David Lewis sketched a new compatibilist account of abilities, according to which someone is able to A if and only if there is no obstacle to their A-ing, where an obstacle is a ‘robust preventer’ of their A-ing. In this paper, we provide some background context for Lewis’s outline, a section-by-section commentary, and a general discussion of the account’s main features.

Hawthorne (2001) toys with the view that ascriptions of free will are context-sensitive. But the way he formulates the view makes freedom contextualism look like a non-starter. I step into the breach for freedom contextualism. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that freedom contextualism can be motivated on the basis of our ordinary practice of freedom attribution is not ad hoc. The view explains data which cannot be accounted for by an ambiguity hypothesis. On the other hand, I suggest a more plausible freedom contextualist analysis, which emerges naturally once we pair the assumption that freedom requires that the agent could have acted otherwise with a plausible semantics of "can" statements. I'll dub the resulting view Alternate Possibilities Contextualism, or APC, for short. In contrast to Hawthorne's view, APC is well-motivated in its own right, does not beg the question against the incompatibilist and delivers a context parameter which allows for a wide range of context shifts. I conclude that, far from being a non-starter, freedom contextualism sets an agenda worth pursuing.

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will (in the sense of genuine agency) and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure.

We propose a compatibilist theory of free will in the tradition of naturalized philosophy that attempts to: 1) provide a synthesis of a variety of well-known theories, capable of addressing problems of the latter; 2) account for the fact that free will comes in degrees; and 3) interface with neurobiology. We argue that free will comes in degrees, and that these degrees vary with the agent's capacity to make assumptions and use theories. Our model, then, highlights that free-willed actions are consciously monitored by the agent, through beliefs, assumptions, and ultimately theories — hence, the CMT model (for Conscious-through-Monitoring-through-Theories).

This paper explores one facet of Paul Russell’s unique “critical compatibilist” position on moral responsibility, which concerns his rejection of R. Jay Wallace’s “narrow construal” of moral responsibility as a concept tied exclusively to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. After explaining Russell’s critique of Wallace’s view, the paper considers a Wallace-inspired challenge based on the idea that questions of moral responsibility raise distinct issues of “fairness” that apply only to a narrow subset of the Strawsonian reactive attitudes. The paper offers a defense of Russell’s view against this challenge.

In a recent paper, Pruss (Can J Philos 43:430–437, 2013) proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can be formulated. This new transfer rule is immune to the counter-examples involving the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. However, we show that counter-examples to this new rule can also be generated, demanding that the Lewisian semantics be generalized for higher dimensions where counter-examples can always be generated.

Humeans about laws maintain that laws of nature are nothing over and above the complete distribution of non-modal, categorical properties in spacetime. ‘Humean compatibilists’ argue that if Humeanism about laws is true, then agents in a deterministic world can do otherwise than they are lawfully determined to do because of the distinctive nature of Humean laws. More specifically, they reject a central premise of the Consequence argument by maintaining that deterministic laws of nature are ‘up to us’. In this paper, we present a new argument for Humean compatibilism. We argue that Humeans about laws indeed have resources for defending compatibilism that non-Humeans lack (though not for the reasons typically discussed in the literature). Moreover, we show that utilizing these resources does not lead to objectionable consequences. Humeans about laws should thus embrace Humean compatibilism.