Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. It is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments that apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition, which are pointless unless different possible results follow from different courses of action. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as serving credit or blame; if there is no free will, there is no retributive justification for rewarding or punishing of free will, varying by how exactly it is conceived, which is a matter of some debate.
Free will is sometimes understood to mean origination, the power to break the causal chain of events, so that one’s choice is uncaused by any previous event, external or internal. The concern for this conception of free will is to reconcile the existence of free will thus conceived with the possibly deterministic nature of the universe. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with the existence of free will thus conceived. As far as we know, this problem was first suggested by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E., but it is till a major focus of philosophical debate. This view that conceives free will to be incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism, and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible, and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible. It also encompasses hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also it negation to be incompatible with free will, and thus free will to be impossible whatever the case may be regarding determinism.
In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out. Compatibilits thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what “free will” even means, and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatibilists consider free will nothing more than freedom of action , considering one free of will simply is, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as psychological capacity, such as to direct one’s behavior in a way responsive to reason. And there are still further different conceptions of free.
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