Consequence Arguments

Abstract

The Consequence Argument, in various forms, has been popular in recent discussions of libertarianism. I want to ask: what is the nature of the ‘necessity’ involved in the claim that necessarilyone cannot change the past or the laws of nature? I will answer that this necessity is not peculiar to the thesis of determinism and does not depend directly on the unchangeability of facts about the remote past; parallel consequence arguments can be constructed to show that libertarian free will is equally incompatible with indeterminism, fatalism, and naturalism.