ABSTRACT
In metaphysics, moral responsibility is important in the context of the free will debate. Performing an action freely is generally taken to be necessary for moral responsibility: someone who does not act freely is not morally responsible for what they do. Those philosophers who subscribe to incompatibilism hold that acting freely, and so morally responsibly, is incompatible with determinism, whereas the compatibilists hold that there is no tension between freedom and moral responsibility on the one hand, and determinism on the other.
