If determinism rules out real alternatives, what could still make us genuinely responsible for what we do?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His philosophical work focuses on free will, moral responsibility, as well as death, near-death experiences, immortality, and more.
2. Interview Summary
Fischer opens by laying out his long-standing “semi-compatibilist” (or “source compatibilist”) position: even if causal determinism rules out alternative possibilities, it can still leave intact the kind of agency needed for moral responsibility. In other words, his account of responsibility is meant to be independent of settling the classic “could you have done otherwise?” question, and he sketches this as the guiding thread connecting a lot of his work. He also flags a recurring cross-disciplinary problem: debates about “free will” (especially in neuroscience contexts) often get stuck because some participants build libertarian anti-determinism into the definition of free will, so they end up talking past philosophical views that treat the concept more flexibly.
From there, the conversation turns to the major families of arguments that pressure compatibilism: the Consequence Argument (via “fixity of the past” and “fixity of laws”) and various manipulation-style worries. Fischer treats these objections as genuinely powerful—worth taking seriously—even while resisting the conclusion that they defeat compatibilism. He argues that manipulation cases help isolate what incompatibilists find unsettling, but he thinks (with work and care) one can still draw principled differences between deterministic causation and the sort of covert “design/manipulation” that seems responsibility-undermining. This sets up his sustained defense of the idea—associated with Harry Frankfurt—that a person may be responsible even when they lack robust alternatives, and he notes how earlier predecessors (like John Locke’s locked-room case) anticipate the same basic intuition.
In the later portions, Fischer extends the “actual-sequence” style of thinking to theological puzzles—especially divine foreknowledge—emphasizing a structural parallel with determinism while also noting a key difference: foreknowledge needn’t be part of the causal flow that produces an action. He even suggests a provocative way to see things: if omniscient foreknowledge plus theological fatalism were true, we’d effectively be living inside a kind of Frankfurt-style setup where some factor blocks alternatives without entering the agent’s deliberation. The interview then shifts to death-related themes: near-death experiences are treated as real and recurrent human phenomena whose contents can vary with culture (e.g., different narrative imagery across societies), and Fischer suggests that studying them can illuminate how people understand death, how institutions might support the dying more humanely, and what they reveal about meaning in life. Finally, they discuss immortality: Fischer is drawn to a version that includes an “exit option,” and he brings in Bernard Williams-style reflections about whether “living forever” would remain desirable depending on the quality and shape of the life on offer.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:49 - Moral responsibility
02:53 - Free will vs. moral responsibility
06:04 - Disputes as not substantive
08:29 - Attacks on compatibilism
18:16 - Resolving disputes
23:55 - Another approach to free will
31:51 - Comparison to other problems
37:28 - Plausibility of Frankfurt cases
40:03 - Determinism
45:14 - Reductive analysis
47:22 - Determinism and modern physics
51:31 - Frankfurt cases
59:16 - Flickers of freedom
1:01:15 - Fixity of the past
1:08:16 - Criticisms of fixity
1:14:34 - Rational deliberation
1:17:19 - Historical development of free will
1:22:55 - Divine foreknowledge and free will
1:25:38 - Libertarian response
1:32:35 - God as not essentially omniscient
1:37:48 - Omniscience
1:49:56 - Limits to God’s knowledge
1:54:08 - First-order evidence as redundant
1:56:29 - How does it work?
2:04:38 - Perspective as an atheist
2:07:01 - Near-death experiences
2:12:41 - Pessimism about supernatural conclusions
2:15:24 - Worthwhile research?
2:18:05 - Immortality
2:22:23 - Irrational desires
2:25:01 - Pascal’s wager
2:30:10 - Badness of death
2:34:50 - Desires and the badness of death
2:40:11 - Suicide
2:42:57 - Meaning of life
2:53:42 - Value of philosophy
2:58:42 - Conclusion
