ABSTRACT
According to free will skepticism, we human beings lack the sort of free will that is at issue in the traditional debate. On one way to construe this claim, we lack the sort of free will required for moral responsibility in a desert-involving sense. Historically, the most prominent variety of free will skepticism is hard determinism , which claims that because causal determinism is true and compatibilism is implausible, we do not have free will of such a kind. This position is defended by Baruch Spinoza (1677/1985), Paul Holbach (1770), Joseph Priestley (1788/1965), B. F. Skinner (1971), Ted Honderich (1988), and Bruce Waller (1990). Over the past three decades, philosophers have set out varieties of free will skepticism that do not depend on the truth of causal determinism. Such views are defended by Galen Strawson (1986, 1994), Derk Pereboom (1995, 2001, 2014), Tamler Sommers (2007, 2012), Neil Levy (2011), Thomas Nadelhoffer (2011), Gregg Caruso (2012), and Benjamin Vilhauer (2015). A distinctive and currently prominent route to free will skepticism invokes neuroscienti c evidence. According to Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner, we lack free will because there is no conscious state of willing that is causally ef cacious in producing action (Libet 1985, 2004; Wegner 2002; cf. Harris 2012). In Libet’s view, any state that is conscious comes too late in the causal sequence to be ef cacious in producing action, and instead, unconscious neural states cause action.
