The sweet mystery of compatibilism |
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Authors: | Eugene Mills |
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Institution: | 1. Department of Philosophy, Virginia Commonwealth University, Box 842025, 23284-2025, Richmond, VA, USA
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Abstract: | Any satisfactory account of freedom must capture, or at least permit, the mysteriousness of freedom—a “sweet” mystery involving a certain kind of ignorance rather than a “sour” mystery of unintelligibility, incoherence,
or unjustifiedness. I argue that compatibilism can capture the sweet mystery of freedom. I argue first that an action is free
if and only if a certain “rationality constraint” is satisfied, and that nothing in standard libertarian accounts of freedom
entails its satisfaction. Satisfaction of this constraint is consistent with the universal causal predetermination of action
(UCP). If UCP is true and the rationality constraint satisfied, there’s a sense in which our actions are explanatorily (though
not necessarily causally) overdetermined. While it seems plausible (given UCP) that our actions are so overdetermined, it seems utterly mysterious why they should be so overdetermined. Compatibilism’s capacity to accommodate this mystery is a mark in its favor. |
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