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This chapter surveys the various responses to hard determinism, all of which seek to salvage responsibility in the face of the thought that all of our actions and choices are caused by factors over which we have no control. Those responses are grouped into three large categories: libertarianisms, fictionalisms, and compatibilisms. Libertarians believe that we do possess contra-causal free will, at least some of the time. Fictionalists believe that we must fictionalize responsibility so that we can construct it so as to be compatible with the determination of human choice by factors themselves unchosen. Compatibilists believe that there is no contradiction between free and responsible action, on the one hand, and determination of human choice, on the other. Various subcategories of each of these groupings are explored, and a case is made to subscribe to one of the forms of compatibilism, classical compatibilism. Ten amendments are offered to classical compatibilism aimed at eliminating the many problems that have been raised for classical compatibilism these past sixty years.

The origins in Ancient Greece of the problem of free will and determinism are briefly described. A preliminary discussion of determinism that includes a discussion of the problems pertaining to its definition as well as its truth is provided. The recent history of discussions reveals general skepticism both about classical compatibilism and the conditionalist version. Given that the concept of free will is usually characterized in one of two ways—self-determination or counterfactual power—the discussion begins by looking at the compatibilist–incompatibilist controversy over self-determination. It is argued that self-determination must be understood as self-regulation or autonomy rather than self-fulfillment and that influential theorists do not take seriously enough the possibility of autonomous self-suppression. Self-regulation can be exercised by the Deliberative Self or the Reflective Self and it can take place autonomously or heteronomously. It is then proposed that self-determination be construed as deliberative/reflective (DR)-autonomy.

This paper examines a particular challenge to responsible agency thought to be mounted by contemporary neuroscience. The challenge stems from the alleged experimental demonstration that human choices, and the actions they putatively cause, are mere epiphenomena of one another, co-effects of common causes in the brain of the acting subject. Denied by this challenge is that choices cause the actions that are their objects, seemingly an indispensable requirement for there to be responsible agency. The force of this challenge is blunted by a showing that in certain cases we can control (and thus be responsible) for more than we cause—that (more specifically) we sometimes are in control of a harm that is one horn of an epiphenomenal fork by knowing of the fork’s existence and by being in control of the other horn of that fork, even while recognizing that of course there can be no causal relationship across the horns of such forks.

The second response to the epiphenomenal challenge is to deny that epiphenomenalism has any implications that are skeptical of responsibility. Such a compatibilist response is seemingly ruled out by adopting the classical compatibilist response to the challenge of hard determinism. Whether this is in fact so is explored in this chapter, the thesis being that in a certain range of cases we are responsible for effects that we do not cause so long as those effects are on one horn of an epiphenomenal fork the existence of which we know and the other horn of which we can control. Because such responsibility across the horns of an epiphenomenal fork can involve control of the past, and because a general control of the past to the extent that we can control the future is implausible, some care is taken to limit the scope of what in the past we can control by our present decisions. These limits are cast in terms of there being a strong necessitation of a past event by a present decision which necessitation is known to the actor as he acts to make it have been the case that such past event occurred.

Chapter 9 explores the nature of the volitional excuses and whether such nature can be reconciled with the classical compatibilism explored in the last chapter. The volitional excuses are those excuses whereby the accused does not claim ignorance or mistake about the wrong-making characteristics of his actions; rather, the claim of excuse is founded on the difficulties some actors have in either choosing or doing what they know is the right thing to do. Classical compatibilism has the danger of eliminating all volitional excuses; the chapter aims to reformulate the counterfactual analysis of ability at the heart of classical compatibilism in ways that do not eliminate volitional excuses. The chapter also assays the extent to which contemporary neuroscience might aid in formulating and/or verifying the presence of, the volitional excuses.