ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I shall investigate the question of whether physical determinism constitutes a threat to our free agency. According to a venerable philosophical tradition, we are responsible agents only if we have free will and our freedom of will implies alternative possibilities in the sense that persons can be held responsible for what they did or failed to do only if they could have done otherwise than they have actually done. But this entails that their actions must have been contingent in the sense that, although they have actually behaved in a certain way, they were not unable to do something else instead. An action’s contingency in this sense may not be suffi cient for responsibility. But the contingency of behavior has traditionally been regarded as a necessary condition of free agency.
