Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the view that free will and moral responsibility can coexist with determinism. It understands freedom in terms of acting through one’s own motives without the relevant forms of constraint.

Determinism: The thesis that every event is fixed by prior conditions together with the laws of nature. Compatibilism accepts determinism while arguing that it does not by itself eliminate freedom.
David Hume: An eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher known for empiricism and a compatibilist account of liberty and necessity. Hume argued that causal regularity and voluntary action can coexist.
Incompatibilism: The view that free will and determinism cannot both be true. It rejects the central compatibility claim.
Moral responsibility: The status of an agent as deserving moral praise or blame for an action or omission. Compatibilism aims to explain how responsibility survives causal determination.
Reasons-responsiveness: The capacity of an agent’s decision-making system to recognize and respond to reasons across relevant situations. Its required range and reliability remain disputed among compatibilist theories.
Coercion: The use of threats or force to make someone act against their will. Compatibilists distinguish coerced action from action that expresses an agent’s own motives.
Thomas Hobbes: A seventeenth-century English philosopher who defined liberty as the absence of external impediments to motion. His account became an influential early model of freedom compatible with causal necessity.
Libertarianism (metaphysics): The view that humans have free will and that determinism is false. It preserves free will by rejecting determinism rather than reconciling them.
Reactive attitudes: Interpersonal responses such as resentment, gratitude, and forgiveness that express expectations about conduct. P. F. Strawson used them to ground responsibility without settling metaphysical determinism.
Manipulation argument: An argument that compares ordinary causal determination with engineered control to challenge compatibilist responsibility. It asks whether determined actions remain attributable when their causes are deliberately arranged.

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