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Okay, I'm pretty much on board with that.
A lot of people (not me, nor you) would prefer libertarian free will.
I'm not sure that my view is incompatible with libertarian free will? I believe a summarized definition of libertarian free will is that an agent is able to take more than one possible course. And I agree with that! I think we are able to make multiple choices. I also know that we only ever make one choice: from the perspective of someone looking back from the end of time, all the choices have been made and cannot be changed. And of course the choices we make are informed solely by our character, history, and circumstances (how could they be informed by anything else?). But I don't think the fact that we will make one choice, means we were not able to make another choice, just that we chose not to make those choices.
Honestly, any discussion of free will that goes too deep inevitably makes my head start to spin. I wouldn't consider myself a compatibilist, but then again I never really understood the compatibilist position so it's possible I am one and don't know it.
I think libertarians tend to think that we have some faculty of free will which must include some indeterminacy, which makes choices not solely based on our character, history, and circumstances.
I would affirm rather that we do genuinely make decisions between different choices (and so it makes a lot of sense to talk about our being able to do other things), but which choice we make is due to factors which are determined.
Quite fair.
Compatibilists just affirm that we can make meaningful choices in a determined world. Most importantly, the world is not fatalistic (what choices you make matter and are tied up in the world's operation), and people can be held morally responsible for the things they do. I see no real reason why either of those would be a problem with determinism.
People will bring up that there's only one possible path, but I don't think that that's a problem. Epistemically, we have multiple choices before us, and that's how we decide and act, and our decisions and actions play a key part in what we end up carrying out and what effect that has on the world. The fact that only one will option lying before us will ultimately occur, and so the others are in some technical sense impossible isn't especially important.
People might object, saying "Isn't it all a lie, then? You thought you had many options, but only had one?" No! It certainly is not. It did not turn out to be the case that that was always going to happen; it only happened because of the crucial role of our decision-making and agency. That action was only the one that was always going to happen because of the very decision-making process of choosing it over the others. Were it not for the exact interplay and balance of weighing that went down as you chose, you would have chosen and acted differently.
Of course, precisely the problem is that that last "were it not…you would have" is dealing with things that might not, strictly speaking, be possible. But I think this is mostly an artifact of difficulties of talking about possibilities in deterministic world, not an argument that we should abandon the concept outright. Regardless of whatever you think about whether humans have libertarian free will, there would still be features in a deterministic world where it would be useful to talk about counterfactuals.
Every less complete model will treat those actions as possible, including the ones we use in our day-to-day lives.
But I think my core argument for compatibilism is:
I make choices because of reasons. Weakening that makes me less, not more, free.
It sounds like we agree with each other on free will then. If you truly are a compatibilist, then I must be one as well because I see no disagreement between us. That's good to know!
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