Incompatibilist

Incompatibilism is a position in the philosophy of free will that holds determinism and freedom of the will are incompatible. Incompatibilists maintain that if determinism is true, every action is the consequence of prior events and laws in a way that rules out genuine alternative possibilities and ultimate control. Therefore, free will in the sense required for moral responsibility cannot exist within a deterministic universe. By contrast, compatibilists argue that freedom can be preserved even if determinism holds, by redefining free will as acting in accordance with one’s desires and rational capacities without coercion.

Two prominent variants of incompatibilism are hard determinism and libertarianism. Hard determinists accept determinism and conclude that free will, as ordinarily understood, is an illusion, and moral responsibility is problematical. Libertarians reject determinism and hold that agents possess some form of non-deterministic or agent-causal power that allows them to do otherwise in relevant situations, thereby sustaining moral responsibility. Incompatibilists often discuss differing accounts of how agency operates, such as event-causal versus agent-causal theories of action.

Relation to law and ethics: Incompatibilist positions influence debates about punishment, blame, and praise. Critics argue that many intuitions about responsibility survive under determinism or can be preserved by alternative conceptions of accountability. The term incompatibilism is often used interchangeably with hard determinism and libertarianism in contemporary discussion, though some philosophers distinguish the positions in subtle ways.