The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002; second edition 2011), edited by Robert Kane, is the standard reference work in the contemporary free will debate. It collects essays by nearly all of the major philosophers working on free will — compatibilists, libertarians, hard determinists, and skeptics — and organizes the debate into a coherent map of positions, arguments, and open questions. For anyone who wants to know where the free will debate stands, the Handbook is the first place to look.

The volume is structured to reflect the structure of the debate itself. Its opening essays state the central question — what free will is, and whether it exists — and the major historical positions. The middle sections present the arguments for and against the compatibility of free will and determinism: the Consequence Argument, the manipulation arguments, the Frankfurt counterexamples, and the various defenses of compatibilism. The later sections turn to the positive theories: event-causal libertarianism, agent-causal libertarianism, and the skeptical or "impossibilist" position. A final section engages the sciences of free will — neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary theory.

The Handbook is both an anthology and an argument. Kane's introductory essay maps the terrain, and his concluding essay — which appears in the second edition — surveys the "new" debates: the role of neuroscience, the revival of skepticism, and the question of moral responsibility in a world without libertarian freedom. The volume thus serves as both a textbook and a research instrument, and it has defined the field's self-understanding for two decades.

Core Thesis

The core thesis of the Handbook is not a single position but a claim about the structure of the debate: that the question of free will is best understood as a family of questions — about the ability to do otherwise, about the sources of action, about moral responsibility — and that progress requires keeping these questions distinct. Kane's editorial thesis is that the central problem of free will is the problem of "ultimate responsibility" or "sourcehood": whether an agent can be the ultimate source of their own actions in a world of causes.

The Handbook's essays stake out the full range of answers. Compatibilists argue that freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism because what matters is not the absence of causation but the right kind of causation — action from one's own values, character, and reasons. Libertarians argue that determinism would rule out genuine freedom, and they offer positive accounts of how free action could be nondeterministic. Hard determinists and skeptics argue that there is no free will at all, in any sense that would justify our practices of praise and blame.

The Handbook's implicit thesis is that the debate is alive, rigorous, and consequential. Its essays disagree about nearly everything except one point: the question of free will matters, because on it hangs our conception of ourselves as moral agents.

Key Ideas

The Definition of Free Will

The Handbook opens with the definitional question. Free will is standardly defined as the power of agents to choose and act freely — where freedom involves the ability to do otherwise, or the power to be the source of one's actions, or both. Kane's own definition emphasizes "ultimate responsibility": the agent must be responsible for the origins of their own character and motives, not merely for actions that flow from them.

The definitional essays make clear why the debate persists: different definitions generate different questions. If free will is the ability to do otherwise, determinism threatens it directly. If free will is self-determination — action from one's own authentic values — determinism may be compatible with it. If free will is the power to be the ultimate source of one's self, the demand may be impossible even without determinism. The Handbook's treatment of these distinctions is its most valuable pedagogical contribution.

The Consequence Argument

The Handbook devotes substantial space to the Consequence Argument, van Inwagen's formal argument that determinism rules out the power to do otherwise. The essays present the argument, its modal machinery, and the main strategies of response: denying that we lack control over the remote past and the laws, challenging the inference rules, or accepting the conclusion while denying that it matters.

The debate over the Consequence Argument is the heart of the incompatibilism controversy, and the Handbook's treatment is definitive: it collects both the best statements of the argument and the best attempts to refute it, including the influential challenges to the transfer principle (Rule Beta) developed in the 1990s and 2000s.

The Frankfurt Cases

The Handbook gives central place to Harry Frankfurt's counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities — the claim that responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise. Frankfurt's cases feature agents who act for their own reasons but who would have been forced to act anyway by a hidden device, had they wavered. The intuition is that such agents are responsible even though they could not have done otherwise.

The essays on the Frankfurt cases debate their success in detail. Some argue that the cases show responsibility does not require alternate possibilities; others argue that the cases fail because they surreptitiously rely on the possibility that the agent will choose. The debate connects directly to the question of whether incompatibilism — which traditionally rests on the principle of alternate possibilities — can survive.

Libertarian Theories

The Handbook's chapters on libertarianism present the contemporary attempts to give a positive account of free will: the idea that free action requires indeterminism. Event-causal libertarians argue that free action is caused by the agent's states in a way that leaves the outcome open until the choice — Kane's own "plural deliberation" and "self-forming actions" theory is the paradigm. Agent-causal libertarians argue that free action requires the agent to be a cause in a way that cannot be reduced to events — a position defended by Chisholm and, in a contemporary idiom, by Timothy O'Connor.

The essays on libertarianism confront the perennial objections: the "luck" objection, that undetermined choices are random and hence no more free; the control objection, that the agent cannot control which way a genuinely undetermined choice goes; and the scientific objection, that there is no evidence of the required indeterminism at the right level. The debate is presented with unusual fairness, and the reader sees why libertarianism remains the most intuitively attractive and the most philosophically embattled position.

Compatibilist Theories

The Handbook's compatibilist chapters present the leading strategies for defending freedom under determinism: the classical "conditional analysis" of ability, the "hierarchical" theories of Frankfurt and later authors, and the "reason-responsive" theories of Fischer and Ravizza, on which an agent is responsible when their actions are guided by a mechanism responsive to reasons. The essays defend these views against the new objections of the last generation: the manipulation argument, the "four-case" argument, and the demand that compatibilism explain the source of agency, not merely its structure.

The compatibilist chapters make clear how far the position has evolved since Hume. The contemporary compatibilist does not deny that determinism threatens something — the dispute is over what, exactly, is threatened, and whether it is worth having. The Handbook presents the compatibilist answer: what matters is not the absence of causes but the presence of self-control, reasons-responsiveness, and the right kind of causal history.

The Sciences of Free Will

The Handbook's final sections engage the empirical sciences. The essays on neuroscience examine the Libet experiments and their successors, asking whether the timing studies show that conscious will is epiphenomenal. The essays on psychology examine the experimental literature on choice, self-control, and the sense of agency. The essays on evolution — including contributions building on Dennett's Freedom Evolves — ask how capacities for self-control and moral agency could have arisen naturally.

The Handbook's treatment of the science is characterized by philosophical care: the authors resist the popular conclusion that neuroscience has refuted free will, while taking seriously the possibility that it constrains which theories of free will are viable. The relationship between the empirical findings and the philosophical positions remains, in the Handbook's own verdict, an open and active question.

Historical Context

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will appeared at a moment of remarkable ferment in the field. The 1990s had produced the debate over the Consequence Argument, the revival of libertarianism in Kane's and others' work, the growth of the "reactive attitudes" approach to responsibility, and the beginning of the neuroscience of will. The Handbook was commissioned to consolidate this ferment and to set the agenda for the next generation.

The volume's editor, Robert Kane, was himself one of the central figures of the revival: his 1985 book Free Will and Values and his 1996 The Significance of Free Will developed the most influential contemporary libertarian theory. The Handbook allowed him to shape the field not only through his own work but through the collective statement of the profession. The second edition, published in 2011, added substantial new material on the developments of the intervening decade.

The Handbook also marks a historical shift in the sociology of the field: the free will debate, once dominated by a small group of analytic philosophers, had become one of the largest and most active subfields of philosophy, in constant dialogue with neuroscience, psychology, and the law. The Handbook both reflects and helped create that transformation.

Legacy & Influence

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will is now the standard reference for the free will debate: it is cited in virtually every serious work on the topic, and its chapter structure has shaped the way the field organizes itself. For students, it is the definitive map of the terrain; for researchers, it is the baseline against which new work positions itself.

The volume's influence extends to the neighboring fields. Its treatment of moral responsibility has shaped the philosophical literature on blame and punishment; its engagement with neuroscience has structured the interdisciplinary debate over the Libet experiments; and its chapter on the history of the free will problem has become the standard brief introduction to that history. The second edition's attention to the "new" skeptics — philosophers who argue that free will is impossible whether or not determinism is true — anticipated one of the most important developments of the 2010s.

For readers entering the debate, the Handbook pairs with its primary sources: Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves for compatibilism, An Essay on Free Will for incompatibilism, and Determined for the scientific challenge. The surrounding questions are mapped in what is free will and what is determinism.

Sources

• Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; 2nd ed., 2011).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Free Will.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Compatibilism.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Arguments for Incompatibilism.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Moral Responsibility.

Related Topics

• What is free will
• What is determinism
• What is compatibilism
• Freedom
• Determinism
• Elbow Room
• An Essay on Free Will