Other Positions and Variants

The four principal positions — compatibilism, incompatibilism (with its libertarian and hard-determinist branches), libertarianism, and hard incompatibilism — organize the debate, but they do not exhaust it. A number of further positions either occupy hybrid ground between the four, attack the framing of the dispute, or sit on an axis the standard map ignores (the normative, the theological, or the cross-cultural). This page surveys them concisely; each could be expanded into a full treatment, and several cross-link to the pages where the underlying machinery is developed.

A useful way to keep them straight: the four main positions answer the metaphysical question (is freedom compatible with determinism, and do we have it?). The views below often answer a different question — which concept of free will we should use (revisionism), whether we should believe in it (illusionism), whether the question is soluble (mysterianism) or even well-posed (dissolutionism), or how freedom relates to God or to the self.

Revisionism

Revisionism (Manuel Vargas, Building Better Beings, 2013) distinguishes two projects that other positions run together: the diagnostic ("what is our ordinary, folk concept of free will?") and the prescriptive ("what concept should we use, given our aims?"). Vargas grants the skeptic's diagnostic point — the folk concept is shot through with libertarian assumptions that the world probably does not satisfy — but denies the skeptical conclusion: we should revise the concept into a naturalistically respectable, broadly compatibilist successor that still does the work of supporting responsibility practices (which are justified by their role in cultivating moral agency). Free will, so revised, exists; it is just not quite what the folk thought. Revisionism is thus a meta-level view — a claim about how to do the philosophy — that lands near compatibilism at the first order while conceding more to the incompatibilist about ordinary intuitions than classical compatibilists do.

Illusionism

Illusionism (Saul Smilansky, Free Will and Illusion, 2000) accepts free-will skepticism at the level of truth — there is no libertarian free will, and even compatibilist responsibility cannot fully ground the desert we ordinarily assume — but adds a striking practical thesis: the belief in free will and desert is, on balance, morally and psychologically beneficial, even necessary, so the illusion should largely be preserved rather than dispelled. Smilansky's "fundamental dualism" holds that compatibilist and hard-determinist insights are both partly right, and that a stable moral life requires not looking too hard at the gap between them. Illusionism is distinctive in being skeptical about the metaphysics but conservative about the practice — the mirror image of the hard incompatibilist's "abandon the illusion, reform the practice" program.

Luck-based skepticism (the "hard luck" view)

A strand of free-will skepticism that makes luck, rather than determinism, the fundamental solvent. Neil Levy (Hard Luck, 2011) argues that constitutive luck (the traits, values, and circumstances we did not choose) and present luck (the chance features of the moment of choice) jointly undermine responsibility, and — crucially — that they do so whether the world is determined or not: indeterminism, by adding present luck, makes matters worse, not better. Bruce Waller (Against Moral Responsibility, 2011) presses a related, naturalistic "no one deserves" view rooted in the pervasiveness of unchosen causes. The position overlaps heavily with hard incompatibilism but is argued from luck directly, sidestepping the determinism axis entirely.

Two-stage models ("free will")

A family of hybrid models that try to capture the benefits of indeterminism while disarming the luck objection by separating chance from choice in time. The schema (William James's "two-stage" picture; later Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, Robert Kane's adjacent view, and Bob Doyle's "free will" model):

1. Generation stage — indeterminism (quantum or neural noise) generates a range of alternative possibilities, candidate thoughts, or options. This is "free."
2. Selection stage — an adequately determined, rational evaluative process selects among them according to the agent's character, reasons, and values. This is "will."

Because the chance does its work before the decision — supplying options rather than making the choice — the final selection is determined by the agent's reasons and so is not itself a coin-flip. Critics ask whether this really secures libertarian free will (the selection may be determined, collapsing the view into compatibilism) or merely relocates the luck (if which options get generated is chancy, that chanciness can still influence the outcome). Two-stage models sit at the border of libertarianism and compatibilism, claiming the best of both.

Mysterianism and agnosticism

Some hold the free-will problem is, or may be, insoluble by us. A mysterian (in the spirit of Colin McGinn's mysterianism about consciousness, and arguably Kant's view that the reconciliation of freedom and nature lies beyond theoretical cognition) claims our cognitive faculties are constitutively unable to grasp how free agency fits the natural order — there is a fact of the matter, but it is closed to us. A more modest agnosticism simply suspends judgment: the arguments on all sides are powerful and none decisive, so the rational attitude is non-belief. Both are second-order stances about the tractability of the question rather than answers to it.

Dissolutionism / "no genuine problem"

A deflationary tradition holds the dispute rests on a confusion and should be dissolved rather than solved. Hume already suspected it was "merely verbal" — a disagreement over how to define "liberty." Some Wittgensteinians and ordinary-language philosophers argue the puzzle arises from misusing words like "could," "cause," and "free" outside their home practices; once usage is clarified, the problem evaporates. P. F. Strawson's reactive-attitudes view has a dissolutionist edge: the demand for a metaphysical vindication of responsibility is itself the error. Critics reply that the stakes — retributive punishment, basic desert — are too real for the problem to be a mere muddle.

New dispositionalism

A contemporary refinement within compatibilism, worth noting as a distinct research program. Kadri Vihvelin (Causes, Laws, and Free Will, 2013) and Michael Fara analyze "could have done otherwise" as the possession of a bundle of dispositions (capacities plus opportunities), on the model of fragility or solubility — properties a thing has even when they are not being manifested, and even in a determined world. The aim is to rescue the categorical ability to do otherwise from both the Consequence Argument and the Frankfurt cases, repairing the classical conditional analysis with the resources of contemporary metaphysics of dispositions.

Theological positions

A largely separate cluster, where the threat to freedom is God rather than physical law. The key positions:

• Theological determinism / predestination (Augustine, Calvin) — God ordains all that comes to pass; human freedom, if any, must be compatibilist.
• The foreknowledge problem — if God infallibly knows today what you will freely do tomorrow, then it seems already settled, hence not free. Classic responses: Boethius (God is timeless, seeing all of history "at once," so foreknowledge is not fore-knowledge); Ockham (the relevant past facts about God's beliefs are "soft," not genuinely fixed); Molinism (Luis de Molina) — God has middle knowledge of what every possible free creature would freely do in any circumstance, and providentially arranges the world accordingly, reconciling robust (often libertarian) freedom with sovereignty.
• Open theism — denies exhaustive divine foreknowledge of free future acts (the future is genuinely open, even for God), purchasing libertarian freedom at the cost of classical omniscience.

These map onto the secular positions (compatibilist vs. libertarian) but with a personal, intentional determiner in place of impersonal laws — which raises distinctive issues of manipulation and authorship sharper than anything in the secular debate.

Non-Western and cross-cultural frameworks

The problem is often reframed outside the Greek-derived tradition:

• Buddhist thought, with its doctrines of no-self (anattā), dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), and karma, dissolves the agent the Western debate presupposes: there is causation and moral consequence but no enduring self to be the ultimate source — a view with affinities to both hard incompatibilism (no ultimate originator) and to a forward-looking, cultivation-based ethics. Contemporary scholars debate whether this yields skepticism, a distinctive compatibilism, or a reframing that makes the Western question moot.
• Indian philosophical schools more broadly weave free agency into debates over karma, fate (niyati), and liberation (mokṣa).
• Comparative work asks whether the intuitions the Western debate treats as universal are in fact culturally variable — a question taken up empirically by experimental philosophy.

Experimental philosophy of free will

Not a position but a method worth flagging: experimental philosophy (x-phi) studies, empirically, what ordinary people actually believe about free will and responsibility — for instance, whether folk intuitions are natively compatibilist or incompatibilist, and how they shift between abstract framings (which tend to elicit incompatibilist judgments) and concrete, emotionally vivid cases (which tend to elicit compatibilist ones). The findings bear directly on revisionism (what is the folk concept?) and on any argument that leans on "the intuitive view," by showing those intuitions to be unstable and context-sensitive.

How these relate to the main map

Most of these are best read against the four core positions rather than as freestanding rivals: revisionism and new dispositionalism are sophisticated compatibilisms; illusionism and luck skepticism are skepticisms with different practical upshots; two-stage models are attempted libertarian/compatibilist hybrids; and mysterianism and dissolutionism are meta-level verdicts on the debate itself. The theological and cross-cultural entries, by contrast, change the cast of characters — substituting God, or dissolving the self — and so deserve fuller, standalone treatment, alongside the still-outstanding page on physics, neuroscience, and quantum mechanics.