85 - Free Will: Still Real

I respond briefly to Alex O'Conner's free will skepticism, specifically to an objection attributed to Schopenhauer: You can do what you will, but you can't will what you will. While I agree that we can't have ultimate responsibility for our actions, I think we can be responsible for our actions. Being the author of one's actions doesn't require anything magical, just that we are (in some sense) the source of what we do and that we (in some sense) could have done otherwise. As long as we have sourcehood and the ability to do otherwise, I think we have free will; and I think determinism is fatal to neither of these criteria. In defense of alternative possibilities, I appeal to Kadri Vihvelin's dispositional compatibilism, the thesis that "the most fundamental free will facts are facts about our causal powers (for instance, our power to decide on the basis of deliberation) and that our causal powers differ in complexity but not in kind from dispositions like fragility, elasticity, and flammability."

Kadri Vihvelin on Dispositional Compatibilism

Interview with Kadri Vihvelin 

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