Terms
Glossary
Short definitions of the terms used on this site, with links to where they come up, and a few views that do not have pages of their own.
- Agent causation
- The view that free actions are caused not by events, such as a desire or a brain state, but by the agent as a substance. Defended by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796), and in the twentieth century by Roderick Chisholm, who said that in acting freely each of us is a prime mover unmoved. Dennett thought it explained nothing.
- Basic desert
- Deserving blame or punishment just because one knowingly did wrong, not because of any good that blaming or punishing would do. Free will sceptics deny that anyone has it.
- Basic Argument
- Galen Strawson's argument that to be truly responsible for what you do, you would have to be responsible for how you are, which would require the impossible: having made yourself.
- Compatibilism
- The view that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Held by the Stoics, Hobbes, Hume and Dennett; James called its older form "soft determinism".
- Consequence argument
- Peter van Inwagen's argument for incompatibilism: if determinism is true, our acts are consequences of the laws of nature and the remote past, neither of which is up to us, so our acts are not up to us either.
- Counterfactual
- A statement about what would have happened if things had been otherwise: "if I had left earlier, I would have caught the train". Claims about free will and causation lean on them. Deutsch argues they only have content in a multiverse, where the alternatives are real.
- Determinism
- The thesis that the state of the world at any time, together with the laws of nature, fixes the state of the world at every later time. Whether our world is deterministic is a question for physics, and is still disputed.
- Evitability
- Dennett's word for the avoidability of outcomes. In a deterministic world, many things are avoided, because creatures foresee them and act. Determinism does not imply inevitability.
- Fatalism
- The view that what will happen will happen whatever we do, so that effort is pointless. Not the same as determinism, which says outcomes depend on what we do. The Stoics' answer to the lazy argument turns on the difference.
- Frankfurt case
- A thought experiment in which an agent acts on their own, but a hidden mechanism would have made them act the same way if they had been about to choose otherwise. Meant to show that responsibility does not need alternative possibilities.
- Free will scepticism
- The view that we lack the free will needed for basic desert. Includes hard determinism and hard incompatibilism.
- Guidance control
- John Martin Fischer's name for the control needed for responsibility: acting from one's own reasons-responsive mechanism. Contrasted with regulative control, the power to choose between open alternatives.
- Hard determinism
- William James's name for the view that determinism is true and that, as a result, there is no free will.
- Hard incompatibilism
- Derk Pereboom's view: basic-desert free will is incompatible with determinism and with the kinds of indeterminism our physics allows, so we probably lack it.
- Incompatibilism
- The view that free will is incompatible with determinism. Libertarians and hard determinists are both incompatibilists; they disagree about whether determinism is true.
- Leibniz
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) held that God chose the best of all possible worlds, and that our actions are certain without being necessary: reasons incline the will without necessitating it. A compatibilist of a subtle kind, and one of the targets of Kant's "wretched subterfuge".
- Libertarianism
- In the free will debate, the view that we have free will and that it requires determinism to be false. Nothing to do with the political view of the same name.
- Luck objection
- The objection to libertarianism that an undetermined choice is a matter of chance, and so not under the agent's control.
- Manipulation argument
- An argument that ordinary causal determination is no different, in the ways that matter, from covert manipulation by another agent, so that if a manipulated agent is not responsible, nobody is.
- Many-worlds interpretation
- Hugh Everett's reading of quantum theory, proposed in 1957, on which every possible outcome of a quantum event occurs, each in its own branch of a larger reality, the multiverse. The theory as a whole is deterministic.
- Moral luck
- Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel's name, from 1976, for the way our moral standing depends on factors beyond our control: two equally careless drivers are judged differently if only one of them hits a child.
- Principle of alternate possibilities
- The principle that a person is morally responsible for what they did only if they could have done otherwise. Challenged by Frankfurt cases.
- Quarantine model
- The proposal, by Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso, that dangerous offenders may be detained as people with dangerous diseases are quarantined: for protection, not desert, and no more than safety requires.
- Reactive attitudes
- P. F. Strawson's name for responses such as resentment, gratitude, indignation and forgiveness, which react to the good or ill will others show us.
- Readiness potential
- A slow build-up of electrical activity over the scalp before a voluntary movement, first reported in 1965. Central to Libet's experiments.
- Reason view
- Susan Wolf's view, in Freedom Within Reason (1990), that freedom is the ability to act in accordance with the True and the Good. It creates an asymmetry: someone who does right because they see it is right is free and praiseworthy even if they could not have done otherwise, but someone blameworthy must have been able to do better.
- Retributivism
- The view that wrongdoers deserve to suffer in proportion to their wrongdoing, and that this justifies punishment whether or not it does any further good.
- Second-order volition
- Harry Frankfurt's term for a desire that a certain first-order desire be the one that moves you to act.
- Self-forming action
- Robert Kane's term for an undetermined choice, made in a moment of inner conflict, by which a person shapes their own character.
- Semicompatibilism
- John Martin Fischer's view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, whether or not the freedom to do otherwise is.
- Sphexishness
- Douglas Hofstadter's word, taken up by Dennett, for rigid behaviour that looks intelligent until it is tested, after the digger wasp Sphex.
- Swerve
- In Latin, clinamen: the tiny, uncaused deviation of atoms that Epicurus proposed to make room for free will.
- Transcendental freedom
- Kant's name for the power to begin a series of events from oneself, outside the chain of natural causes.
- Ultimate responsibility
- Being responsible for an act and for everything that was a sufficient cause of it, including one's character. Kane thinks it requires undetermined self-forming actions; Galen Strawson thinks it is impossible; Dennett thinks no one needs it.
- Valerian model
- Dennett's 1978 two-stage model of decision: a generator, perhaps random, throws up considerations, and a reliable selector chooses among them. Named after the poet Paul Valéry.
- Veto
- Libet's proposal that conscious will, even if it does not start actions, can stop them in the last fraction of a second. Nicknamed "free won't".
