Modal Matters: Determinism, Omniscience, Truth

"Does man have free will?". This question has been a perennial issue in the history of philosophy, for it can be sensibly asked whether human actions might be necessitated to take place as they do by such factors as (i) eternal truth, (ii) divine foreknowledge, (iii) physical determinism - not to mention other menaces to free will such as environment, unconscious desires, and the like. Two main responses mark the current debate, namely Compatibilism and Incompatibilism: according to the former, men have free will in spite of necessitating factors acting upon them; according to the latter, such necessitating factors, whenever obtaining, are sufficient for denying free will to human beings. The main purpose of our project is showing that both Compatibilism and Incompatibilism over each threat - semantic, theological, physical - are not really at odds, even on their respective best spelling, because the free will problem is by and large parasitic over some crucial issues pertaining to the metaphysics of modality over which there is no consensus thus far. Accordingly, producing novel arguments for or against free will is not what our intended work is about; for, if valid arguments seem to militate against free will under some (or all) of the aforementioned varieties of necessitation, it is nevertheless the case that arguments in favour of free will are as plausible. To the contrary, the project is intended to accomplish the tasks of showing that both views are immune from refutation from the opposite camp because they do not start off from the same background of assumptions, and hence that Incompatibilism and Compatibilism are not (and cannot be) logically contradictory claims because they cannot help addressing different questions, namely different modal matters; no wonder, then, that opposite claims do coexist within the free will debate without substantive contradiction. Since, moreover, it will be insisted on there being no way of assessing (let alone settling) the free will problem without first resolving those basic issues in the philosophy of modality, the project also intends to stand out as a contribute to shedding more light on the latter issues, especially on problems concerned with modal identity, viz. identity across possible worlds. Finally, and to the extent that interest in the problem of free will is not limited to philosophers, since jurists, psychologists, historians, and others theorists are deeply concerned with it, the project purports to qualify itself also as an overall undertaking at diagnostics: for, in case such issues as the problem of modal identity should eventually prove as not susceptible of counting literally true or false, but having at most sufficient net utility and greater net utility than its rivals, we should conclude that points of rational disagreement in the free will problem are not resolvable and that, as a consequence, it does not in fact admit of any clear-cut answer anyway, to the effect that any theorist coping with it will have to acknowledge there are "a number of rationally acceptable alternatives, and figuring out what they are and what they each offer to us is about the best we can do".

"Does man have free will?". This question has been a perennial issue in the history of philosophy, for it can be sensibly asked whether human actions might be necessitated to take place as they do by such factors as (i) eternal truth, (ii) divine foreknowledge, (iii) physical determinism - not to mention other menaces to free will such as environment, unconscious desires, and the like. Two main responses mark the current debate, namely Compatibilism and Incompatibilism: according to the former, men have free will in spite of necessitating factors acting upon them; according to the latter, such necessitating factors, whenever obtaining, are sufficient for denying free will to human beings. The main purpose of our project is showing that both Compatibilism and Incompatibilism over each threat - semantic, theological, physical - are not really at odds, even on their respective best spelling, because the free will problem is by and large parasitic over some crucial issues pertaining to the metaphysics of modality over which there is no consensus thus far. Accordingly, producing novel arguments for or against free will is not what our intended work is about; for, if valid arguments seem to militate against free will under some (or all) of the aforementioned varieties of necessitation, it is nevertheless the case that arguments in favour of free will are as plausible. To the contrary, the project is intended to accomplish the tasks of showing that both views are immune from refutation from the opposite camp because they do not start off from the same background of assumptions, and hence that Incompatibilism and Compatibilism are not (and cannot be) logically contradictory claims because they cannot help addressing different questions, namely different modal matters; no wonder, then, that opposite claims do coexist within the free will debate without substantive contradiction. Since, moreover, it will be insisted on there being no way of assessing (let alone settling) the free will problem without first resolving those basic issues in the philosophy of modality, the project also intends to stand out as a contribute to shedding more light on the latter issues, especially on problems concerned with modal identity, viz. identity across possible worlds. Finally, and to the extent that interest in the problem of free will is not limited to philosophers, since jurists, psychologists, historians, and others theorists are deeply concerned with it, the project purports to qualify itself also as an overall undertaking at diagnostics: for, in case such issues as the problem of modal identity should eventually prove as not susceptible of counting literally true or false, but having at most sufficient net utility and greater net utility than its rivals, we should conclude that points of rational disagreement in the free will problem are not resolvable and that, as a consequence, it does not in fact admit of any clear-cut answer anyway, to the effect that any theorist coping with it will have to acknowledge there are "a number of rationally acceptable alternatives, and figuring out what they are and what they each offer to us is about the best we can do".