If any of us has genuine...

If any of us has genuine, significant freedom, it seems, then it cannot be the case that our future actions are determined by the present state of the world. To be a free agent is to be able to react to the world in any one of several ways, to choose which of several possibilities to realise. If there are free agents, then there are many possible futures. Perfect predictive foreknowledge, then, will be impossible.

Some have sought to resolve this problem with predictive foreknowledge by defending a position know as “compatibilism”. Compatibilists hold that we can have significant freedom even in…