The Consensus and the Remainder: Comments on Four Views on Free Will, Second Edition

Abstract

In the second edition of Four Views on Free Will , John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas have converged on a way of thinking about the free will debate that I dub “The Practical Consensus”. They agree, to varying degrees, that there are robust justifications for some moral responsibility practices even if we do not have libertarian free will. I agree too. But this revisionist-friendly way of thinking about the debate leaves a metaphysical remainder, a bit of thought and practice that resists forward-looking or otherwise anti-libertarian explanation. While this consensus should push Fischer and Pereboom towards free will revisionism, it leaves Vargas and all the authors—even Kane the libertarian—vulnerable in how they treat the remainder. I argue that metaphysical worries about “fundamental unfairness” remain, not as threats to the justification of moral responsibility practices, but as pressures on how those practices are expressed given our practical interests and self-understandings, even within single-tiered forward-looking responsibility systems that eschew basic desert. Though no view is unscathed, perhaps Fischer’s semicompatibilism turns out to be the most honest bookkeeper.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Philosophia, 2026 · DOI ↗