is there free will?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Well, if you are going to use smileys to be rude I could just leave, you know.

I just felt like I was repeating myself.

Causation is required to reasonably determine the outcome of a proposed course of action, but in order for someone to be held responsible they must have a choice, i.e. at least two options.

But this depends on how you define choice and options. If I leave the bar drunk, I do have the option of calling a cab instead of driving home. That's very easy and very doable--I am capable of it, and in fact with a minor change (say, having been told recently about the legal penalties) I might have made the right choice. Doing that is an option for my personality. It may be that, given my personality, I was always going to choose to drive home. But that doesn't mean I didn't have the option not to. I only didn't have the option if you see the laws that "govern" human behavior as proscriptive rather than descriptive.

No.

Do you see why I think they are compatible?

Fatalism is the directing of events by an outside force, i.e. God. Determinism assumes the system directs itself. Your "causal determinism" is absolute and its results are therefore the saem as a fatalistic system.

Fatalism assumes that that, for example, I don't need to wear my seatbelt because the date of my death is already set in stone. But of course, not wearing a seatbelt might be what kills you. Determinism says "I'll wear my seatbelt out of habit".

In the UK there is a defence against murder called "autonomy" where the accused's faculties and decision making are deemed to have been bypassed by an outside agent. In your system:

"determinism says that under circumstances X, what will happen is that you will do A"

So, under the correct circumstance Harry will murder his wife, and under those exact circumstances Harry would always muder his wife. Therefore he cannot be held responsible because he is subject to the external circumstance.

So Free Will in your system merely appears to exist because you cannot accurately measure all the variables and therefore accurately predict the outcome of a situation.

But what I was disputing is that he was "subject" to anything. The laws don't govern us, they describe us. In the Greshem's law example, people aren't forced to hoard gold because of greshem's law, remember?

You can hold him responsible for his character by the way. Someone who has the character to murder someone in an argument or for money etc can be deemed immoral, even with determism, don't you think?

I object to the idea that the inevitability of our actions removes personal responsibility. Maybe you could not have done things differently, but that does not change the fact that you are what you are. If you are a sinner, you sin. If regenerated, good works should follow. The notion that in order to be responsible for something, we must make a rational choice to do it, is a very modern one based on the idea of all people being rational agents with free will. If someone gets drunk and kills a guy in a bar fight, he is still held responsible, even if he was unable to use his rational faculties, and acted purely on his animalistic instincts. If a dog bred for fighting mauls a baby, you put it down. It didn't make a reasoned decision, it was just being what it is.

I agree

That's what I was trying to get at with "holding people responsible for their character".

@Sasaki: I think maybe part of the confusion we are all having is due to what we mean by free will. When PVC and myself debate the issue, we always tend to refer to the idea of 'libertarian free will', where freedom is defined as the ability to take more than one path. I get where you are coming from in your arguments, but the issue is that with compatabilitist views, they don't tend to make allowance for the possibility of alternative time lines, or different paths through our lives.

In the reality you describe, everything is inevitable. I was always going to be here typing this post, not one detail of it could be different. This is freedom insofar as we can act according to our nature and our will, but it is not freedom in the sense that the term 'free will' has always been used in philosophical circles, since that suggests a choice. With your view of freedom, everything is inevitable. With libertarian free will, there are countless possible outcomes for the future.

Thanks, that does indeed seem to be the argument. But, the libertarian view and the compatibilist view can't both be correct, yes? I think the libertarian view has a lot to answer, and that if you can get your head around the compatibilist view you can see that determinism is no threat at all to free will.

In other words, I have my definition of free will, but I can't just claim that it is the correct one. Whether the definition is correct is a viable (and essential) source for argument.