It is contrasted with the Alternative Sequences that result from Alternative Possibilities. Arguments for incompatibilism that consider alternative possibilities are called Indirect Arguments.

Microscopic objects, on the other hand, show the probabilistic consequences of indeterminism, due to quantum mechanics. These probabilistic effects usually average out in large objects, leading to the illusion of strict causal physical determinism, including the powerful and very productive idea of deterministic laws of nature.

Agnosticism ignores the great asymmetry between determinism and indeterminism. Determinism is congenial to claims that freedom consists of following the laws of nature and that God has foreknowledge of our actions. Indeterminism is much more difficult to reconcile with a responsible freedom, since it has such negative implications - randomness, chance, uncertainty, and contingency - leading to the randomness objection to free will.

Note that alternative possibilities should not be interpreted as probabilities for actions. This is a mistake made by many prominent philosophers who assume that indeterminism makes chance the direct cause of action.

Alternative Sequences are contrasted with the Actual Sequence that leads up to the current moment of deliberation and decision. The term is used in Frankfurt-style cases and John Fischer's Semicompatibilism.

The first is the great asymmetry between determinism and indeterminism in the standard argument against free will. Determinism is much easier to reconcile with the will than is indeterminism (pure chance).

Susan Wolf has pointed out the strange asymmetry between praise and blame. Those opposed to punishment for retributive reasons (as opposed to practical consequentialist reasons) are often in favor of praise for good deeds. This reflects the ancient Platonic view that we are responsible only for the good we do. Our errors we blame on our ignorance, which is, unfortunately, no excuse before the law.

Like the term authentic, autonomy suggests that we are the author of our actions, that our actions are "up to us."

It is the libertarian condition that the agent has alternative possibilities for action. Daniel Dennett defends avoidability as an evolved freedom even in a deterministic universe.

Although Strawson is agnostic and says his argument works whether determinism or indeterminism is true, his denial of any causa sui effectively cancels indeterminism and the Basic Argument resembles the Consequence Argument.

Broad Incompatibilism is incompatible with both free will and moral responsibility.

Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim have discussed the possibility of a non-reductive physicalism, in which mental events might not be reducible to physical events.

It can be extended to the idea that "every event has a cause" and that the physical world consists of a series of events as causes.

This makes causalism more or less synonymous with determinism.

Since it is the essence of scientific research to seek out causes, to find causal explanations for all phenomena, scientists generally lean toward causalism in their work. This biases them toward what William James called "antipathy to chance."

Scientists and most philosophers seem opposed to chance, because a random event does not seem to "explain" anything.

Quantum indeterminacy produces uncaused causes. There is still a causal chain, but it no longer permits complete predictability. Events are now merely probable, no longer certain, though the probability can be arbitrarily close to certainty. Most macroscopic events are, for practical purposes, as predictable as perfect determinism would have allowed. Nevertheless, a break in the causal chain is a requirement for free will.

Randolph Clarke uses "centered" to describe free will models, like that of Robert Kane, that locate indeterminism in the decision stage. He opposes it to "deliberative" two-stage models of free will, which locate indeterminism in the first stage.

Clarke calls "centered" free will "direct," whereas "deliberative" free will is only "indirect."

Note that Frankfurt assumes that alternative possibilities do in fact exist, or there would be nothing for his hypothetical intervening demon to block. Since information about the agent's decision does not exist until she makes her decision, Frankfurt's hypothetical intervening demon (much like the similar Laplacian demon or God's Foreknowledge) does not exist. This is the Information Objection to Frankfurt-style examples.

An action is said to be free by classical compatibilists like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume if the agent is not coerced by external forces.

The action may be completely determined by causal chains going back in time before the agent's birth, but they are nevertheless free in the compatibilist sense.

In his essay, Two Kinds of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin defined freedom of action as "negative freedom," and free will as "positive freedom."

John Locke encouraged the separation of the adjective free, which describes deliberation, from the (adequate) determination of the will.

Diodorus Cronus' "Master Argument" denied any future contingency.

Aristotle, ever sensible, decided that there was no present truth or falsity to a future contingent statement. He denied that the truth of a proposition is a necessary truth, and thus denied Logical Determinism. Indeed, contingency means that the event depends on the future, and so does its truth.

Many Stoics appear to have regarded the truth of future contingent statements as predetermining all future events. But Chrysippus denied necessity even as he affirmed fate and physical causal determinism.

Modern philosophers (especially J. Łukasiewicz) have developed a three-valued logic to handle such statements, but not with complete success.

Another kind of control is "regulative control" - the kind needed to choose between "alternative possibilities." Fischer describes guidance control as happening in the "actual sequence," where regulative control refers to "alternative sequences" of events. Derk Pereboom uses the related terms source and leeway incompatibilism.

Hard incompatibilists deny both free will and moral responsibility. They call free will an "illusion" and some call for revisionism. William James called such thinkers "hard determinists." Derk Pereboom coined the new term for those who are agnostic on indeterminism and deny free will and moral responsibility, whether determinism is true or not.

Frankfurt says moral responsibility requires a first-order desire with which the agent "identifies," which means she has a second-order desire that is consistent with the first-order desire that moves her to action.

Illusionists are often revisionists calling for an end to retributive punishment.

Today many incompatibilists declare themselves agnostic about the "truth" of determinism and say the incompatibilities extend to indeterminism as well.

Derk Pereboom coined "hard incompatibilism" to describe agnostics on determinism who deny both free will and moral responsibility. They call free will an "illusion" and some call for revisionism.

The traditional argument for incompatibilism assumes alternative possibilities and the ability to do otherwise. The Consequence Argument and Direct Argument do not.

The intervener needs a "prior sign" of the causal chain. Such a sign is an event that leads causally to the decision, and thus Frankfurt examples "beg the question" by assuming determinism. Information about the agent's decision does not exist until she makes her decision (the ontological Information Objection), so Frankfurt's hypothetical intervening demon (much like the similar Laplacian demon or God's Foreknowledge) can not exist.

The idea appears often in determinist/compatibilist accounts of whether an agent could have done otherwise. "One could only have done otherwise if either the Fixed Past or the Laws of Nature had been different," goes the argument. The Fixed Past refers primarily to the obvious fact that past events are not changeable.

The usual conclusion is "There is but one possible future, and it is determined at each moment by the Fixed Past and the (deterministic) Laws of Nature."

However, the real Laws of Nature, beginning with the most fundamental laws of physics, are indeterministic and probabilistic, reflecting the availability of alternative possibilities..

We are often held responsible for actions that were intended as good, but that had bad consequences. Similarly, we occasionally are praised for actions that were either neutral or possibly blameworthy, but which had good consequences.

In a deterministic world, it is hard to see how we can be held responsible for any of our actions. Counterintuitively, semicompatibilist philosophers hold that whether determinism or indeterminism is true, we can still have moral responsibility.

At the other end of the spectrum, some libertarians are critical of any free will model that involves chance, because the apparent randomness of outcomes would make such free will unintelligible, because it would be a matter of luck.

Unfortunately, much of what happens in the real world contains a good deal of luck, giving rise to many of the moral dilemmas that lead to moral skepticism.

Whether determinist, compatibilist, semicompatibilist, or libertarian, it seems unreasonable to hold persons responsible for the unintended consequences of their actions, good or bad. In many moral and legal systems, it the person's intentions that matter first and foremost.

And in any case, actions need not have moral consequences to be free, that would commit the ethical fallacy of restricting free decisions to moral decisions.

The Manipulation Argument is only meant to enhance the intuition of lost control, in order to support the Consequence Argument and similar Determinism Objections in the standard argument against free will. Derk Pereboom's Four-Case Argument is a well-known example of a Manipulation Argument.

This is related to the problem of future contingency, made famous in the example of Aristotle's Sea-Battle in De Interpretatione 9. Aristotle thought statements about the future lacked any truth value.

Note that the truth value of a statement made in the past can "actually" be changed if an event does or does not happen, showing that the "fixed past" has some changeability.

Van Inwagen named the Mind Argument for the journal Mind, where most of the ranodmness objections were published, especially R. E. Hobart's 1934 classic "Free Will As Involving Determination And Inconceivable Without It."

This proposition is true. (contingent)
If it is true, it cannot be false. (contingent)
If it cannot be false, then it is true and necessarily true (modal fallacy).

Mele feels that randomness anywhere in the causal chain leads to his Luck Objection, a variation on the standard Randomness Objection.

Note that Hume the Naturalist had no problem "Deriving Ought from Is" - something shown logically impossible by Hume the Skeptic.

Note that moral skepticism tends to lead to relativism and moral nihilism in the absence of objective values.

Narrow Incompatibilism is incompatible with free will, but not with moral responsibility.

Naturalists tend to be revisionists on retributive punishment.

Assuming that free will is restricted to morally responsible agents is an example of the Ethical Fallacy. One way of seeing the continuous nature between animals and humans is to recognize that animals, like children, have a will and freedom of action, they just lack moral responsibility.

Moore's ethical non-naturalism resembles David Hume"s denial that "ought" (human ethics) can be derived from "is" (nature).

Note the conflict with Naturalists for whom natural behaviors are moral behaviors, and "un-natural" behaviors are bad.

The existence of real ontological chance is often denied by those who claim that randomness and probability are merely the result of human ignorance. Chance, they say is an epistemic problem, not an ontological one.

Ted Honderich is "dismayed" because the truth of determinism requires that we give up "origination" with its promise of an open future. For him, limiting freedom to classical compatibilist voluntarism means we are not the authors of our own actions. They are not up to us.

Moore's naturalistic fallacy similarly denies that ethical rules can depend on natural facts.

It stands in contrast to actualism, the idea that the events that do happen are the only possible events that could possibly have happened.

Possibilism should not be confused with the idea of possible worlds, David Lewis's methodology in modal philosophy of investigating "nearby possible worlds" that differ only slightly from our world as a tool for examining our world.

Nor should it be confused with the extravagant idea of "parallel universes" - Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics which postulates the world "splitting" into two or more complete universes whenever a quantum experiment requires a "collapse of the wave function."

The astronomer David Layzer analyzes questions of free will in terms of infinitely many possible worlds that must exist in an infinite universe.

It is a bit ironic that philosophers who are skeptical about the existence of alternative possibilities for human actions are optimistic about many possible worlds.

It is what most philosophers mean when they say that free will is compatible with determinism, and when they use determinism in the standard argument against free will.

PAP: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.

Bivalence is also known as "the law of the excluded middle." There is no middle term between true and false. This becomes the basis for the idea that there is no tertium quid or middle betweeen chance and necessity, perceived as logical opposites.

The Principle of Bivalence is also the basis for Logical Determinism, in which the present truth of a statement implies its truth in the future.

Deterministic Laws of Nature guarantee we could predict the future, if only we had all the information needed. Laplace's demon, a supreme intelligence, could know the future, as God foreknows it, if he knew the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe.

Today we know that the Laws of Nature are not deterministic. Not only are they probabilistic, but irreducibly random, due to the underlying quantum mechanics that has replaced classical mechanics as the proper description of the universe's fundamental particles.

The laws become arbitrarily close to certain in the limit of large numbers of particles (billiard balls, planets), leading to the illusion of perfectly deterministic laws.

Probability is the explanation for alternative possibilities and unpredictable "uncaused" causes (causa sui) that are the "free" part of "free will."9999999

Quantum mechanics has replaced classical mechanics as the proper description of the universe's fundamental particles. But note that in the limit of macroscopic objects with large numbers of particles, the quantum laws correspond exactly to (i.e., become the same as) the classical laws. This is Neils Bohr's correspondence principle.

Deterministic Laws of Nature have been replaced with probabilistic laws. Quantum events can start new "causal chains" with events that are unpredictable from prior events, self-caused events that are causa sui.

Quantum phenomena are behind the generation of alternative possibilities that are the "free" part of "free will."

Indeterminism is a greater threat to moral responsibility than determinism, since it is associated with many negative ideas, such as chance. Nevertheless, many philosophers declare themselves agnostic on this objection to free will. The randomness objection is the core idea behind Peter van Inwagen's Mind Argument.

Susan Wolf has pointed out the strange asymmetry between praise and blame. Those opposed to punishment for retributive reasons (as opposed to practical consequentialist reasons) are often in favor of praise for good deeds. This reflects the ancient Platonic view that we are responsible only for the good we do. Our errors we blame on our ignorance, which is, unfortunately, no excuse before the law.

p, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. If p then q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. Hence, q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that.

We can be responsible for current actions that are essentially (viz. adequately) determined by our character and values, as long as we formed that character ourselves by earlier free Self-Forming Actions. For Kane, SFAs in turn require brains that are not deterministically caused by anything outside the agent.

Randolph Clarke calls these respectively Narrow and Broad Incompatibilism.

Classical compatibilists are determinists. Semicompatibilists avoid the determinist label, claiming to be agnostic about the "truth" of determinism or indeterminism. Semicompatibilism grew out of the apparent success of Harry Frankfurt's attacks on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.

Soft Causality includes occasional quantum events, which are only probabilistic and statistical. This means that they are not strictly caused by prior events, although they may be causes of subsequent events. They depend on chance in the form of irreducible quantum indeterminacy

Their unpredictability leads us to call them uncaused events, which in turn become uncaused causes (causa sui) that start new causal chains.

Note that soft compatibilists accept the traditional Voluntarism of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Even if determinism were true, they say, there would still be Freedom of Action.

Soft Incompatibilism stands in contrast to Hard Incompatibilism, which maintains that pre-determinism is true and free will does not exist. It is not incompatible with an adequate determinism.

Soft Incompatibilism involves Soft Causality. Soft Incompatibilists accept occasional quantum events, which are only probabilistic and statistical, since they break strict causal chains back to the Big Bang with uncaused causes (causa sui) that start new causal chains. It resembles Al Mele's Soft Libertarianism.

Soft libertarianism differs from Mele's modest libertarianism in that it does not require robust alternative possibilities (APs). APs produce what John Martin Fischer calls the Alternative Sequences.

Mele also develops a model for "Daring Soft Libertarians." Daring soft libertarians, he says, especially value a power to make decisions that are not deterministically caused - a certain initiatory power. This model reaches out to Robert Kane's idea of Ultimate Responsibility, in which we can be responsible for current actions, ones that are essentially determined by our character and values, as long as we formed that character ourselves by earlier free actions that he calls Self-Forming Actions (SFA). SFA's in turn require brains that are not deterministically caused by anything outside the agent.

Hard incompatibilists deny this indeterminism. By contrast, Leeway Incompatibilism depends on the ability to do otherwise in "alternative sequences."

If determinism is "true" all our actions are determined and we lack free will and moral responsibility. If indeterminism is "true" all our actions are random and we are equally unfree and not responsible.

A subtle combination of randomness and adequate determinism is required for a two-stage model of free will.

Supercompatibilism does for free will what John Martin Fischer's semicompatibilism does for moral responsibility. Fischer was inspired by Peter Strawson. Fischer and his colleague Alfred Mele affirm moral responsibility and accountability for "autonomous agents" whatever the outcome of the problem of free will and determinism.

It is sometimes said that supercompatibilism goes beyond compatibilism by requiring determinism. Does it also require indeterminism, as does comprehensive compatibilism? Note that R.E. Hobart only required determination.

1. If determinism is true, no agent could have avoided acting as she did act - could have done otherwise.
2. An agent is only responsible for actions if she could have done otherwise (the Principle of Alternative Possibilities).
3. Thus, if determinism is true, no agent is morally responsible.

Agent causal libertarians insist that our actions begin with something inside our minds. (Aristotle had also said some actions begin ἐν ἡμῖν - "in us".) They describe this variously as non-occurent causation, contra-causal freedom, metaphysical freedom, a causa sui, or simply non-causal freedom.

If our actions are not "up to us," if we feel they "happen to us," then we cannot feel morally responsible for them.

Mortimer Adler and Robert Kane call this self-realization, contrasting it with the libertarian positive freedom of self-determination. Honderich calls it voluntariness, contrasting it with the libertarian freedom of origination, without which, he says, we are not the authors of our own actions.