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Although Buddhist texts don’t explicitly discuss the problem of free will, they stake out a number of theoretical views that commit them to a certain answer to this problem. Buddhist texts clearly present both the universal causality and predictability in principle forms of determinism, and they reject the agent causation necessary for most forms of libertarianism. They also reject the appropriateness and reasonableness of participant reactive attitudes such as anger and resentment. Although having, or appearing to have, some of these attitudes might sometimes be helpful, feeling them always involves delusion. As a result, we should understand the entire Indian Buddhist tradition as committed to hard determinism. Some have objected that hard determinism denounces attitudes that we are in fact unable to abandon. But through meditation practice, Buddhists hold that we can eliminate anger and resentment, resulting in a better, gentler way to live that is also more theoretically defensible.

Many problems that have been discussed in the philosophy of mind have been discussed from an emergentist's perspective. But there is little consideration, if any, of the problem of free will. This chapter aims to shed some new light on this old problem by approaching it from the perspective of emergentism, where both diachronic and synchronic aspects will play a role. Leading questions are, for example, whether or not the capacity of having a free will can be reductively explained, or whether the ‘emergence’ of this capacity could have been predicted, in principle. To reflect on these questions one has to distinguish various explications of what the capacity of having a free will really is.

If Buddhists really hold consequentialism and hard determinism, we would expect them to endorse utilitarian views of punishment and reject retributivism. We find this kind of view on the justification of punishment in Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland. Nagarjuna sees punishment as sometimes necessary, thereby rejecting a pacifist form of unqualified nonviolence. But he advocates compassionate and merciful punishment in terms incompatible with any form of retributivism. From a Buddhist perspective, the American criminal justice system creates needless suffering on a massive scale. Punishment is necessary to protect society, but should be practiced only to the extent required by deterrence and rehabilitation; our present system can be justified only by appeal to irrational and vindictive retributivist views. Buddhists should advocate the abolition of the death penalty and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, especially for nonviolent offenders.

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.

This chapter focuses on two unconventional claims regarding the free will problem. The first contends that the systematical integration of the partial but crucial insights both of compatibilism and of hard determinism must be achieved so that one ultimately becomes a compatibilist hard determinist, and the second insists on a central role played by illusion in the free will problem, one which is mostly positive. The former argues that philosophers should be free from the so-called “Assumption of Monism,” which forces one to choose between compatibilism and hard determinism. This will make it possible to explore when, how, and how much of each side can be integrated to form a better argument. The latter, on the other hand, argues the centrality of illusion, which has been, for the most part, overlooked.

This chapter examines the fact that one cannot rationally accept both theological determinism and the libertarian conception of free will, and asks which of the two is preferable. The main reason to opt for theological determinism is that it provides an uncontroversial route to a strong notion of divine providence. The only proposal for securing such a conception of providence absent theological determinism is Molinism, and its status is uncertain. Libertarianism would provide us with basic desert moral responsibility, and also a promising response to the problem of evil. But theistic religion can do without basic desert moral responsibility, and responses to the problem of evil that essentially involve free will on the libertarian conception turn out to be ineffective when it comes to horrendous evils. Accordingly, this chapter contends that theological determinism is preferable, and regards the libertarian conception of free will as dispensable.