QuestionsAre we free?If determinism is true, nothing we do is up to us
Are we free?Free will

If determinism is true, nothing we do is up to us

The consequence argument

Peter van Inwagen born 1942If everything is fixed by the past and the laws of nature, nothing we do is really up to us.
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What it claims

Determinism is false. If determinism were true, nothing we do would be up to us, and we would have no free will.

Why

If determinism is true, our acts follow from the distant past and the laws of nature, and we can do nothing about those.

The same idea through history
Peter van Inwagen1975In a 1975 article, Peter van Inwagen gives a first version of the argument: if determinism is true, no act is up to us, since it is the consequence of a past and of laws we cannot change.
Peter van Inwagen1983In An Essay on Free Will, he gives three formal versions, including the one based on "rule Beta" (see the objections), and makes it the core of his incompatibilism.
In short

"If determinism is true, nothing we do is up to us" is an argument by Peter van Inwagen (An Essay on Free Will, 1983; "The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism", 1975, 1975) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: Determinism is false. If determinism were true, nothing we do would be up to us, and we would have no free will. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 6 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

An Essay on Free Will, 1983; "The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism", 1975
Valid

Suppose that everything that happens is fixed by the state of the world at some moment and by the laws of nature (this is called determinism). Then your decision today follows from what the world was like ten million years ago, before you existed, and from laws that have never changed. But neither that past nor those laws are up to you. If what you do follows necessarily from them, then it is not up to you either. Peter van Inwagen draws a two-step conclusion: free will is incompatible with determinism, and since he believes we have free will, he denies determinism. He admits that this position has a price: if our decisions are not determined, how are they up to us?

P1If determinism is true, our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and of events in the remote past: given the state of the world ten million years ago and the laws, it had to come to pass that I do now what I am doing.
P2No one can do anything about the state of the world ten million years ago, now or ever.
P3No one can do anything about what the laws of nature are, or about what they entail.
P4If one can do nothing about a fact, nor about the fact that this fact entails another, then one can do nothing about that other fact (van Inwagen's "Principle", called rule Beta in his formal versions).
P5Having free will means being able, sometimes, to act otherwise: if anyone has been able to act otherwise, then someone has been able to cause certain things to be different from the way they are.
P6We have free will: we believe that sometimes more than one course of action is open to us, and this belief seems impossible to give up.
P7 · implicit premiseThe phrase "nothing is up to us" has the same meaning in all the premises: "being able to act otherwise" does mean "being able to make the past or the laws different", and not merely "doing something that would only happen if the past or the laws were different".
Therefore determinism is false. If determinism were true, nothing we do would be up to us, and we would have no free will.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P7, one can accept everything else and still say that we are free in a deterministic world. This is David Lewis's answer: one can have the power to do something that, if one did it, would require a slightly different past, without having the power to change the past.
The argument is valid. P1 to P4 (with P7) give: if determinism is true, nothing is up to us. P5 says free will requires that something be up to us, and P6 says we have it. Therefore determinism is false. The points of attack are P4 (is the "principle" valid?), P7 (is it equivocal?) and P5 (does free will really require being able to do otherwise?). Rejecting P6 leads instead to the conclusion that there is no free will.
Analogy. An actor performing a play already written chooses neither the text nor the story. If his lines follow entirely from the text, we would not say the choice of words is his. For van Inwagen, in a deterministic world the history of the world is the text, and our acts are the lines.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

David Lewis 1981 · attacks premise 7

Lewis distinguishes two claims. One: I have the ability to do something such that, if I did it, the laws (or the past) would have been different. The other: I have the ability to do something that would cause the laws (or the past) to be different. The compatibilist is committed only to the first, which is not incredible: our abilities always depend as well on circumstances outside our control. The consequence argument trades on an ambiguity between the two.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Inwagen in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We did not find a direct reply from van Inwagen to Lewis on this point. Incompatibilists generally answer that the natural reading of "being able to act otherwise" excludes needing a different past or different laws: our powers, they say, are limited by the past and the laws. For Lewis, the choice between the two readings depends on the right theory of counterfactual conditionals, not on freedom itself. The disagreement has remained open.
Alexander McKay and David Johnson 1996 · attacks premise 4

Rule Beta, on which the principle rests, entails a rule of agglomeration: if no one has a choice about p, and no one has a choice about q, then no one has a choice about "p and q". This rule is false. Take a fair coin that is not tossed but could have been. No one has a choice about "the coin does not land heads" nor about "the coin does not land tails". But someone did have a choice about "it lands neither heads nor tails" (by tossing it). So rule Beta is invalid.

Inwagen replies
Peter van Inwagen 2000
Van Inwagen later conceded that rule Beta, as he had stated it, is invalid. He proposed to repair the argument by changing the operator: "N*p" says that p is true and that no one can, or ever could, do anything such that if she did it, p might be false. For this operator, agglomeration is valid.
A
Alicia Finch and Ted Warfield 1998
Another repair has been proposed: keep the original operator but replace rule Beta with a weaker rule, "Beta 2": from "N p" and "it is logically necessary that p entails q", one may infer "N q". This version is enough to rebuild the argument, with the fixity of the laws and the past, and determinism, as premises.
The debate goes on (our summary) This part of the debate is technical. It shows that the consequence argument can be repaired, but that the validity of the chosen rule remains discussed. Some compatibilists conclude that the argument forces no one; incompatibilists answer that the repaired versions keep the same intuitive force.
Harry Frankfurt 1969 · attacks premise 5

One can be morally responsible without having been able to act otherwise. Imagine Jones, who freely decides to act in a certain way. A powerful being, Black, is watching and would have intervened to stop Jones from doing otherwise, but did not need to: Jones did by himself what Black wanted. Jones had no alternative, and yet he seems as responsible as if there had been no Black. So responsibility does not require being able to do otherwise.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Inwagen in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We did not find a reply by van Inwagen in the texts we read. This is the argument of the so-called "source" compatibilists or semi-compatibilists (Fischer): if responsibility does not require being able to do otherwise, the consequence argument can be true without threatening responsibility. Critics answer that the existence of Black, who never intervenes, does not really take away Jones's ability to decide otherwise: there is a difference between having a power and exercising it.
Peter van Inwagen (who states the luck objection himself) 2009 · attacks premise 6

Denying determinism does not save free will. If, at the moment of deciding, several outcomes are physically possible, none is up to the person: the indeterminism that free will seems to require also seems to destroy it. An undetermined decision looks like a roll of the dice, not a choice.

Inwagen replies
Peter van Inwagen 2009
Van Inwagen has no solution to this problem. He concludes that no position on free will escapes mystery. He prefers his own: believing that the outcome of our deliberations is undetermined and that it is nevertheless sometimes up to us what it will be. He calls it "the smallest mystery available".
The debate goes on (our summary) Van Inwagen's answer is honest, but it will not convince those who judge the mystery too big. Other libertarian philosophers try to reduce it through agent causation (see Reid's argument) or through theories of indeterminism in the brain. Compatibilists see in it proof that we must give up a free will that requires being able to do otherwise.
What today's voices say
Criticize it
Sean CarrollHe holds that whether the laws of physics are deterministic has nothing to do with free will; List adds that asking 'is the universe deterministic?' is ill-defined without a level of description, a framing he traces to van Inwagen.