Compatibilism

1. An effect can depend on me in two ways: either it follows from my nature alone, and I am its adequate cause; or its explanation requires outside forces that I undergo, and I am only its partial cause.
2. In the first case I am active, and free to that extent; in the second, passive. Yet most of our desires move us unawares: freedom is therefore not all-or-nothing, but a matter of degree.
3. This degree grows not by escaping causes but by understanding them: knowing why I desire what I desire, I act from myself understood, not from an outside that stirs me. No power to do otherwise is required.

Therefore So one can be wholly determined and yet more or less free, according to whether one acts as an adequate cause: freedom grows with the knowledge of necessity, not with its abolition.

1. Toward others we spontaneously feel resentment, gratitude or indignation: these reactive attitudes form the ordinary fabric of shared life, and it is in them, first of all, that we hold someone responsible.
2. Yet we do not tune them to any thesis about causes: we suspend them before a very young child or a sick person, not because a proof of determinism would compel us to, but because there, the other was in no position to answer us as an equal.
3. To hold someone responsible is thus to treat them as a partner of whom an account can be asked; and this expectation, woven into our very relationships, we could not give up without ceasing to live among others as human beings.

Therefore So we can hold ourselves and others responsible in a determined world: not through a power to escape causes, but through the relationships in which we stand. This is the path of compatibilism.

1. Compare the addict, driven by a craving he disowns, and the person who weighs her reasons and then acts accordingly: both have causes, but only the latter acts freely.
2. Freedom is therefore opposed not to the cause, but to constraint: free is the act that flows from my own will, even if that will is itself determined.
3. Thus freedom and determinism are reconciled: I am the author of my acts so long as they pass through my deliberation, with no need for a power to escape causes.

Therefore So one can be free and responsible in a determined world: this is the thesis of compatibilism.

1. If determinism is true, my acts follow necessarily from the state of the world long before my birth and from the laws of nature.
2. But I have no power over that distant past, nor over the laws of nature: none of this is up to me.
3. And what is not up to me, its necessary consequences are not up to me either.

Therefore So, if everything is determined, my acts are not up to me: redefining freedom does not suffice to make them mine.

1. The question was: could we have acted otherwise? The compatibilist answers it by changing the meaning of the word "free", not by answering it.
2. Kant called it a "wretched subterfuge"; William James, a "quagmire of evasion". The freedom that truly matters, they say, is the power to do otherwise, which determinism removes.
3. To call an entirely determined act "free" would be to save the word while losing the thing: responsibility, merit, remorse presuppose more than the mere absence of external constraint.

Therefore So the compatibilist compromise may be a word over a problem: either freedom is real, or it is not.