Warfield’s new argument for incompatibilism

Warfield (2000) has noticed that this argument commits a modal fallacy. For the most that one could hope to show by means of the argument is that there is no freedom if determinism is true. But the thesis of incompatibilism is not this (weak) claim, but rather its necessitation. And, as everyone accepts, from the fact that a proposition is true it does not follow that it is necessary. Warfield acknowledges that there might be ways to shore up the Consequence argument to avoid this objection, but proposes to sidestep the issue by offering an entirely new argument for incompatibilism. Despite its ingenuity, our purpose in this paper is to establish that Warfield's argument does not succeed. Let us begin by adopting some standard abbreviations, beginning with the use of 'D' for the material conditional: