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Compatibilism holds that free will and determinism are compatible — an agent acts freely when her action flows from her own desires, reasons, and deliberation, even if those internal states are themselves causally determined. Classical compatibilists (Hume, Hobbes) identified freedom with the absence of external constraint. Hierarchical compatibilists (Frankfurt) add that freedom requires identification with one's first-order desires through higher-order volitions. Reasons-responsiveness accounts (Fischer and Ravizza) require that the mechanism producing action be appropriately sensitive to reasons. Compatibilism is the dominant view among contemporary philosophers but faces the 'manipulation argument' and the 'sourcehood objection'.
Read Frankfurt's 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,' then the manipulation argument by Pereboom. Evaluate: does compatibilism capture what we actually care about when we hold people responsible?
From your study of free will and determinism, you know the basic conflict: if every event is causally necessitated by prior events (determinism), it seems to follow that no one could ever have done otherwise than they did, which seems to undermine moral responsibility and the very idea of free action. Compatibilism is the philosophical strategy of dissolving this apparent conflict by arguing that the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility does not require the ability to have done otherwise in an absolute sense — it requires something weaker, something that determinism leaves intact.
The classical move, associated with Hume and Hobbes, is to redefine freedom as the absence of external constraint. A prisoner is not free because external bars prevent action. A person acting from their own desires and deliberation is free — even if those desires were themselves caused by prior events. On this view, the opposite of free is "compelled" or "coerced," not "determined." You act freely when nothing outside you is forcing your hand; the causal history of your internal states is irrelevant to your freedom. This is intuitive: we do not ordinarily hold people responsible when they act under duress, but we do hold them responsible for actions that flow naturally from their own character.
Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical compatibilism refines this picture significantly. Frankfurt noticed that simple absence-of-constraint accounts cannot distinguish a free addict from a willing one. Both are in some sense acting from their desires, but the unwilling addict is moved by a craving they wish they did not have, while the willing addict endorses their desire. Frankfurt's innovation is the concept of higher-order volitions: you act freely when you endorse — at a higher level of reflection — the first-order desire that moves you to act. The person who acts from a desire they identify with, who would not change it upon reflection, acts freely; the person who acts from a desire they repudiate from the inside does not.
John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza extend this further with reasons-responsiveness: an agent acts freely when the mechanism producing their action is appropriately sensitive to reasons. If you would have acted differently had there been sufficient reasons to do so — if you are responsive to moral and practical considerations — then your action was free in the sense relevant to responsibility, even if the actual world was causally determined. This account connects compatibilism directly to the practice of holding people accountable: we blame and praise because doing so is itself a reason to which agents can respond.
The most powerful objection is the manipulation argument: if a neuroscientist implants desires that cause you to perform an action, most compatibilist conditions may be satisfied — you act from your own desires, you would not reflectively repudiate them, you are reasons-responsive — yet the action does not seem free. Compatibilists respond in different ways: some bite the bullet and accept the neuroscientist case as genuinely free, others revise their conditions to require that the history of the mechanism not be manipulated, others argue the intuition is unreliable. Working through this argument carefully is the best test of whether any particular compatibilist theory succeeds.
Topics in reflective domains aren't scored by quiz answers. Read, reflect, and mark when you've thought it through.