Abilities and Incompatibilism

This chapter begins the task of relating a contextualist account of agential modals to questions concerning freedom. In the first two sections, different ways of characterizing abilities and their relationship to freedom are discussed. This helps clarify the framework and assumptions that the subsequent arguments rely upon. Next, an influential argument for incompatibilism, namely the consequence argument, is argued to be problematic. Using the notion of an all-in ability, the question of how best to develop the case for incompatibilism is then considered. After criticizing an argument for incompatibilism based upon all-in abilities, the chapter ends by offering a reformulation of the consequence argument, in light of the characterization of all-in abilities.