Abstract

Philosophers misleadingly speak of "the problem of free will". This is misleading because there is not just one but several different problems of free will. "The problem" to which philosophers usually refer is the question: is free will even possible? I address this question in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, I argue that if free will entails ultimate self-causation, then free will is indeed impossible. But I then argue in Chapter 3 that free will does not entail ultimate self-causation. It doesn't follow from these two conclusions, however, that free will is possible. For there is yet another threat to free will: we may not have something that is necessary for it---namely, the power to do otherwise. I investigate this issue in Chapters 4 through 6. In Chapter 4, do my best to remove two key threats to the power to do otherwise---logical fatalism and divine foreknowledge. Chapters 5 and 6 then constitute a joint effort to undermine Peter van Inwagen's "Consequence Argument", an argument designed to show that the power to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. In Chapter 5, I argue that there is no good reason to accept the incompatibilist interpretation of the power to do otherwise, on which the Consequence Argument implicitly depends. In Chapter 6, I argue that there are at least four different plausible compatibilist responses to the Consequence Argument. Finally, in Chapters 7 and 8, I explore Harry Frankfurt's famous attempt to divorce moral responsibility from the power to do otherwise, his argument against the "Principle of Alternative Possibilities" . In Chapter 7, I argue that Frankfurt's argument against PAP raises a number of different explanatory questions and then do my best to answer them. In Chapter 8, I use Frankfurt's argument against PAP to raise a problem for the traditional distinction between the addict and the weak-willed non-addict, I then draw from the literature six possible solutions to this problem, argue that all of them fail, and propose my own in their place