ABSTRACT
The views of John Stuart Mill on the freedom of the will are very similar to those of David Hume. As empiricists, they both endorsed the status of the principle that all events have causes as both a posteriori and true, and agreed as well that acts of will are not exempt. The most famous problem confronting the doctrine that laws are empirical generalizations that state the uniform association of properties-the regularity theory of laws-is simply the existence of numerous true generalizations. Mill's ideas were presented in stricter form by Frank Ramsey in 1928 when he invoked both deductive systematization and simplicity and famously claimed that laws are the "consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system". Then develop Mill's insight into an explanation of the distinction between laws and accidental generalizations that a regularity theorist can live with.
