Karol Milczarek
University of Warsaw
A recent proposal in the debate over the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom states that divine essential omniscience does not pose a threat to our ability to do otherwise, since God’s beliefs depend on agents’ actions, and not vice versa (Merricks 2011, Swenson 2016, Law 2020, Wasserman 2021). In the exposition of this view, the advocates of the so-called ‘Dependence Response’ argue for the following account of agent’s abilities: S is able to do A at T (in the actual world) iff there is some possible world in which all the facts that do not depend on S’s actual action at T obtain and in which S does A at T.
In the presentation, it is argued that this solution is susceptible to counterexamples–such as the case of an agent being observed by a bodyguard who thwarts agent’s efforts to perform some action upon noticing any sign of its beginning. This is so because the view in question cannot account for these constraints on agent’s freedom which are triggered by their own mental or overt behaviour. And since such constraints are not independent of agent’s action, they cannot be held fixed during the assessment of one’s abilities. This leads to the conclusion that the account of abilities put forward on the basis of Dependence Response is not sufficiently restrictive.
In the discussion of the available responses to this challenge, I argue that it cannot be consistently dismissed by means of deploying a distinction between different parts of the action (choice, trying, execution etc.), on which the relevant facts depend, as it would limit the scope of the view only to those behaviours which are not temporally extended in any way. I conclude the presentation with some remarks on the significance of this argument for the purported asymmetry between theological and nomological compatibilism.
Chair: Melina Bardt
Time: September 11th, 18:20 – 18:50
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 