Title: Arguments for Incompatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Arguments for Incompatibilism
Arguments for Incompatibilism
1. Preliminaries
2. Two Reasons for Thinking that Free Will is Incompatible with Determinism
3. Arguments based on Intuition
3.1 No Forking Paths Argument
3.2 Manipulation Arguments
4. Sourcehood Arguments
5. Choice and the Consequence Argument
Bibliography
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Content: It is of course possible to agree that the existence of truths about all our future actions is compatible with free will while denying that the existence of nomologically determined truths about all our future actions is compatible with free will. But an argument is needed for this conclusion, an argument which doesn’t rely on fatalist reasoning or an appeal to fatalist intuitions. For comparisons between arguments for incompatibilism and arguments for fatalism, see van Inwagen 1983, Mackie 2003, Perry 2004, and Vihvelin 2008 and 2013. At a first approximation, nomological determinism (henceforth “determinism”), is a contingent and empirical claim about the laws of nature: that they are deterministic rather than probabilistic, and that they are all-encompassing rather than limited in scope. At a second approximation, laws are deterministic if they entail exceptionless regularities (e.g., that all F s are G s, that all A B C D s are E s) and laws are probabilistic if they say that F s have an objective chance N (less than 1) of being G s (note that so-called “statistical laws” need not be probabilistic laws; see Armstrong 1983, Loewer 1996a). The laws of nature are all-encompassing if deterministic or probabilistic laws apply to everything in the universe, without any exceptions. If, on the other hand, some individuals or some parts of some individuals  (e.g., the nonphysical minds of human beings) or some of the behaviors of some of the individuals (e.g., the free actions of human beings) do not fall under either deterministic or probabilistic laws, then the laws are limited rather than all-encompassing. For a more precise articulation of determinism, the contemporary literature offers us two main choices.