I expected most compatibilists to hold that we do in some important sense, though of course not the libertarian one, influence the future via our choices. And I was looking to better understand why the sense in which we can influence the future is strong enough to be a good match for the concept ‘free will’, while the sense in which we can influence the past is presumably non-existent or too weak to worry about
What is missing here is a definition of ‘people’ to determine how we are effective causes of anything.
When you adopt a compatibilist view, you are already implicitly accepting a deflationary view of free will. There’s no interesting sense in which people cause things to happen ‘fundamentally’ (non-arbitrarily, it’s a matter of setting boundaries), the idea of compatibilism is just to lay down a foundation for moral responsibility. They are talking past each other in a way. It becomes a discussion on semantics.
The different deflationary conceptions of free will are mostly just trying to repurpose the expression ‘free will’ to fit it for the needs of our society and our ‘naive’ understanding of people’s behavior.
Sure, our predispositions bias the distribution of possible actions that we’re gonna take such that, counterfactually, if we had different predispositions, we would have acted differently. That’s all there is to it.
Another different thing is what is a mechanistic explanation of choice-making in our brains, but compatibilism is largely agnostic to that.
What is missing here is a definition of ‘people’ to determine how we are effective causes of anything.
When you adopt a compatibilist view, you are already implicitly accepting a deflationary view of free will. There’s no interesting sense in which people cause things to happen ‘fundamentally’ (non-arbitrarily, it’s a matter of setting boundaries), the idea of compatibilism is just to lay down a foundation for moral responsibility. They are talking past each other in a way. It becomes a discussion on semantics.
The different deflationary conceptions of free will are mostly just trying to repurpose the expression ‘free will’ to fit it for the needs of our society and our ‘naive’ understanding of people’s behavior.
Sure, our predispositions bias the distribution of possible actions that we’re gonna take such that, counterfactually, if we had different predispositions, we would have acted differently. That’s all there is to it.
Another different thing is what is a mechanistic explanation of choice-making in our brains, but compatibilism is largely agnostic to that.