Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: An Overview

Free will skepticism refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action – i.e., the free will – required for moral responsibility in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is de fi ned in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward (see, e.g., Pereboom  ,  ; Levy  ; Caruso and Morris  ). For agents to be morally responsible for their actions in this sense is for the actions to be theirs in such a way that they would deserve to be blamed if they understood that it was morally wrong, and they would deserve to be praised if they understood that it was morally exemplary. The desert at issue here is basic in the sense that the agents would deserve to be blamed or praised just because they have performed the action, given an understanding of its moral status, and not, for example, by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations (Pereboom  :  ). Accordingly, here we will understand free will as the control in action required for basic desert moral responsibility, and free will skepticism as doubt or denial that we have this sort of control.