Hard incompatibilism and its rivals Derk Pereboom Published online: 31 March 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract In this article I develop several responses to my co-authors of Four Views on Free Will. In reply to Manuel Vargas, I suggest a way to clarify his claim that our concepts of free will and moral responsibility should be revised, and I question whether he really proposes to revise the notion of basic desert at stake in the debate. In response to Robert Kane, I examine the role the rejection of Frank- furt-style arguments has in his position, and whether his criticism of my version of this argument is sound. In reply to John Fischer, I argue that the reasons-respon- siveness central to his account of moral responsibility is not best characterized counterfactually, and I provide a suggestion for revision. Keywords Free will Á Moral responsibility Á Frankfurt-style case Á Reasons-responsiveness 1 Characterizing hard incompatibilism According to the hard incompatibilist position for which I’ve argued (Pereboom 1995, 2001), we human beings would not have the sort of free will required for morally responsibility if causal determinism were true of our universe. We would also lack this sort of free will if this sort of determinism were false, and our actions were indeterministically caused exclusively by states or events. For such indeterministic causal histories of actions would be as threatening to this sort of free will as deterministic histories are. However, it could be that if we were undetermined agent- causes—if we as substances had the power to cause decisions without being causally determined to cause them—we would then have this type of free will. But although D. Pereboom (&) Department of Philosophy, Cornell University, 218 Goldwin Smith Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA e-mail: dp346@cornell.edu 123 Philos Stud (2009) 144:21–33 DOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9371-0