Chapters 6 to 10 deal with the subjective dimension of salvation, that is, how we appropriate the saving work of Christ through the bestowal of grace, the theological virtues and the sacraments. Through grace we become a lover of God. Grace illustrates the interpersonal, dynamic and transformational aspects of the subjective dimension of salvation. The present chapter addresses some of the key issues of Thomas’s theology, such as predestination, grace and free will. Drawing on the writings of the French Thomist Jacques Maritain, it offers an account of grace and predestination that pulls some of the main themes of the book together: God as the cause of all goodness; the dissymmetry between good and evil; Thomas’s teaching on inattentiveness as negation and the distinction between the antecedent and consequent divine will.

This chapter continues the case for optimistic skepticism by examining whether meaningful forms of love and friendship require belief in free will. The chapter explores various kinds of love – romantic love, parental love, agape love, and the Buddhist virtue of loving-kindness – and argues that none of them depend on the kind of free will required for basic desert moral responsibility. In fact, adopting a skeptical perspective may enhance our ability to cultivate deeper and more compassionate forms of love. Drawing on psychological and philosophical sources, the author shows that many of the factors that lead us to love others – such as personality, shared values, and vulnerability – are not within our control, yet they remain central to authentic and fulfilling relationships. The chapter also explores the Buddhist notion of metta (loving-kindness), emphasizing its emphasis on universal goodwill without attachment or conditions. In the final section, the author turns to Aristotle’s account of friendship to argue that genuine friendship is essential to human flourishing (eudaimonia) and that free will skepticism preserves what matters most in these relationships: mutual support, character development, and shared purpose. Overall, the chapter defends a rich and affirming account of love and friendship that thrives without belief in free will.

This Postscript synthesizes the book’s central claim: that abandoning belief in free will and basic desert moral responsibility does not lead to nihilism or despair, but instead paves the way for a more humane, compassionate, and just society. Rather than seeing ourselves as autonomous agents wholly responsible for our successes and failures, free will skepticism encourages us to recognize the deep causal influences – biological, social, and environmental – that shape human behavior. This recognition invites not fatalism, but moral clarity: a shift from blame to understanding, from retribution to rehabilitation, and from judgment to empathy. The Postscript highlights the real-world implications of this paradigm shift, especially in areas such as criminal justice, where punitive attitudes can be replaced with restorative, forward-looking models that aim to reduce harm and promote healing. It also discusses interpersonal relationships, arguing that viewing others through the lens of compassion and causal understanding can foster forgiveness and reduce moral anger. Ultimately, the Postscript reaffirms the book’s hopeful message: that living without free will allows us to embrace a deeper ethics – one rooted in fairness, humility, and solidarity – and that such a shift can enhance both individual well-being and collective flourishing.

This chapter argues that rejecting belief in free will – far from being nihilistic or socially corrosive – can be morally transformative and psychologically liberating. While many fear that disbelief in free will would undermine personal responsibility, justice, and meaning, the author argues for a position he calls optimistic skepticism, which combines free will skepticism with a hopeful vision of human flourishing. This chapter outlines the case for skepticism about the kind of free will needed for basic desert moral responsibility – the idea that individuals fundamentally deserve blame or praise for their actions. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and empirical evidence, the chapter critiques both libertarian and compatibilist accounts of free will and defends a position known as hard incompatibilism, which holds that we lack the control in action required for basic desert. The chapter also introduces the moral and practical implications of this view, arguing that abandoning the belief in free will enables more humane approaches to criminal justice, social inequality, and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter extends the implications of free will skepticism into the broader realm of social justice. While critics argue that justice requires belief in free will and basic desert, the author contends that many compelling theories of justice – such as those of John Rawls, David Hume, and Amartya Sen – do not rest on desert-based foundations. The chapter introduces and defends the capabilities approach, developed by Sen and Martha Nussbaum, as a promising framework for promoting justice without reliance on retributive or meritocratic notions. This approach emphasizes enhancing individuals’ real freedoms and opportunities – what they are actually able to do and be – while acknowledging the profound effects of luck, social structures, and unequal starting points. Free will skepticism reinforces the moral urgency of this view by highlighting the arbitrariness of birth and circumstance in shaping life outcomes. Rather than attributing success or failure to personal choice alone, this perspective demands attention to systemic barriers and privileges. By rejecting the myth of the self-made individual, the chapter makes a strong case for redistributive justice, inclusion, and structural reform. Ultimately, it argues that free will skepticism not only coheres with the pursuit of social justice but provides a compelling moral rationale for greater compassion, equity, and solidarity.

This chapter addresses the common concern that free will skepticism undermines morality. The author argues that this fear is misplaced. While skepticism about free will and basic desert moral responsibility challenges some traditional moral practices – particularly backward-looking blame – it does not eliminate the meaningfulness of moral judgments or ethical life. The chapter explains how axiological judgments of good and bad, deontic “ought” judgments, and respect for persons can all be preserved within a framework that denies basic desert. Drawing on contemporary moral philosophy, the chapter defends the idea that moral life is still possible – and even enriched – when we shift away from blame and toward virtue. The second half of the chapter turns from deontic ethics to virtue ethics, especially Aristotelian and Buddhist traditions, arguing that the central question of morality is not “What ought I do?” but “What kind of person should I be?” From this standpoint, free will skepticism supports the cultivation of virtues like compassion, humility, and loving-kindness, which do not rely on desert-based assumptions. Rather than weakening our moral lives, the author contends, free will skepticism provides a more compassionate, realistic, and psychologically attuned ethical framework – one that better promotes human flourishing and moral development.

This chapter critically examines the widespread assumption that belief in free will is pragmatically beneficial for society. While some researchers argue that disbelief in free will leads to antisocial behavior, reduced moral responsibility, and societal dysfunction, the chapter challenges these claims by highlighting methodological flaws and replication failures in the relevant studies. The author argues that the supposed benefits of belief in free will are overstated and cannot justify maintaining it as a “noble fiction.” The second half of the chapter explores a more troubling consequence: the moral and political costs of believing in free will. Drawing on empirical research from psychology and political science, the author shows that belief in free will correlates with increased punitiveness, reduced empathy, stronger belief in a just world, and greater acceptance of economic inequality. These views coalesce into what the author calls the “just deserts cluster,” which sustains systems of blame and punishment by presuming individuals deserve their lot in life. In contrast, adopting free will skepticism is shown to promote compassion, humility, and social justice by recognizing the role of luck and systemic factors in shaping human behavior. The chapter lays the groundwork for a moral reorientation grounded in realism and empathy.

This chapter explores the relationship between free will and creativity, asking whether genuine creativity – and the praise and blame that often accompany artistic achievement – requires belief in free will. While philosophical discussions of free will have traditionally focused on moral responsibility, the author argues that creativity is another domain where questions of agency, authorship, and desert arise. Drawing on insights from philosophers such as Paul Russell and Robert Kane, the chapter examines the idea that artistic creation involves a unique form of self-expression, one that is often seen as a reflection of the agent’s freedom and self-authorship. Some thinkers argue that creativity demands the ability to be the ultimate originator of one’s work. The author challenges this view, showing that talent development, creative output, and artistic success are all deeply shaped by factors beyond our control – such as genetic endowments, social circumstances, and access to resources. While creative acts can still be meaningful and admirable, the chapter argues that they do not justify basic desert. Instead, creativity is better understood as a flourishing of human potential rather than a ground for moral praise. Free will skepticism, far from diminishing creativity, encourages humility, gratitude, and a more realistic appreciation of the social and biological scaffolding that makes creative achievement possible.

This chapter applies free will skepticism to the realm of criminal justice, challenging the moral legitimacy of retributive punishment. If no one is morally responsible in the basic desert sense, then the practice of punishing wrongdoers because they deserve it is unjustified. The chapter begins by defining punishment and distinguishing legal punishment from other forms. It then presents two arguments – the skeptical and epistemic arguments – for rejecting retributivism. The author proposes an alternative model: the public health-quarantine model, which treats serious criminal behavior not with moral blame but as a threat to be contained for public safety, akin to quarantining carriers of contagious disease. This model is forward-looking, emphasizing rehabilitation, prevention, and social support rather than desert-based harm. It aims to reduce recidivism and address the social determinants of criminal behavior, such as poverty, trauma, and lack of education. The chapter also addresses objections and argues that belief in free will sustains punitive attitudes, obstructing reform. Rejecting such beliefs can foster more humane, effective, and just approaches to crime. In place of retribution, the public health-quarantine model offers a compassionate framework that prioritizes safety, healing, and systemic change.

This chapter critically examines the concept of moral responsibility at the heart of everyday interpersonal and legal practices. While we routinely hold people morally responsible – praising and blaming them as if they genuinely deserve it – the chapter argues that such desert-based judgments are philosophically unjustified. Drawing on a range of philosophical literature, it distinguishes between several types of responsibility, including causal, role, and liability responsibility, and focuses on the central question of basic desert moral responsibility. The chapter defends the view that this kind of responsibility requires a form of free will we do not possess. Building on Derk Pereboom’s work, the chapter proposes a forward-looking, non-desert-based alternative grounded in protection, moral formation, reconciliation, and restoration. It also challenges the widespread assumption that moral responsibility practices are psychologically fixed or evolutionarily hardwired, citing crosscultural and empirical research to support their malleability. By replacing retributive attitudes with constructive, future-oriented responses, the chapter shows how free will skepticism can preserve what matters most in our moral lives – without relying on morally problematic notions of blame, indignation, or deserved suffering.

Chapter 3 discusses how audiences interpret character motivations. The Iliad frequently draws attention to what drives characters, prompting ancient and modern audiences to reflect on motivations even when they are not explicitly mentioned. Many influential Homeric interpreters denied that characters had free will, and claim that a supposedly ‘complete and unambiguous’ heroic code dictated all their choices. The chapter argues that this view contradicts both the text’s mechanisms and ancient interpretive practices. It also briefly surveys modern literary theories on ‘mind-reading’ and their implications for interpreting literary texts, in order to establish a framework for analysing character psychology

Isaiah Berlin’s essay explores and criticises a conception of human freedom that identifies it with knowledge and, especially, with self-understanding. Even on this conception, freedom seems to require a power to change or reform one’s self – some power of self-determination through choice or decision, through will or volition. But this involvement of self-determination through the will then raises the issue of determinism. Are our choices or decisions antecedently determined? Knowledge and freedom may both be goods, but they are importantly distinct goods, and they may be in tension. Berlin’s reflections on freedom and knowledge are part of a wider project of understanding conceptions such as freedom in terms of their intellectual history and of exploring plurality within goodness and tensions between its various forms. The discussion will explore the relation between two very different forms of freedom – freedom as a form of power, a capacity to produce or prevent outcomes, and freedom as liberation, a desirable condition of fulfilment. It is freedom conceived as a power that seems threatened by determinism.

This chapter considers a number of aspects of Berlin’s celebrated essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. These include a consideration of the origins and evolution of Berlin’s famous essay; the connections between the metaphor derived from an ancient Greek poet and his more philosophically explicit visions of monism and pluralism; Tolstoy’s conflictual view of history and Berlin’s assessment of both; and finally, Tolstoy’s identity as a child of the Enlightenment and his accompanying inability to accept the foxy nature of historical contingency (even if his artistic talent expressed this peerlessly) but also his failure to discuss man’s inhumanity to man, namely evil, in the profound way we might expect of such a major writer as him.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

Isaiah Berlin argues that philosophy has a distinctive task, one which cannot be appropriated by the natural sciences. One of the reasons Berlin gives for holding that philosophy’s task falls outside the scope of science is that its area of reflection essentially employs normative concepts. An understanding of the human agent must, in the end, encompass an understanding, not only of meaning and intentional action but of the moral, political and aesthetic life of fully acculturated human beings. Although Berlin’s historical approach to this task was highly distinctive, his aims and his convictions concerning the relation between philosophy and science, the central place of the human agent in philosophy, and his anti-reductive, anti-positivist approach were shared with a number of his Oxford contemporaries, in particular G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. In this chapter, I look at how these three philosophers understand the nature of philosophy and the relation between philosophy and science, focusing particularly on their attitude to the topic of determinism.