ABSTRACT
A traditional way of formulating the incompatibilist argument incorporates the notion of power, possibly as the analysis of freedom. Whatever problems pervade the attempt to analyze the notion of power and its relation to control, the idea that determinism reduces power invokes a conception of the implications of determinism, powerlessness, very close to the common conception of freedom. The common freedom of agents has to do with just one set of restrictions on action or decision, namely, those of a political or social character. Compatibilists have advanced analyses of power, the so-called hypothetical analyses, designed to permit judgments that an agent had the power to perform an action he failed to perform in a sense which permits one to regard him as morally responsible for the act he did perform, even if determinism is true.
