The Sense of Freedom

Dana Nelkin

A rare point of agreement among compatibilists, incompatibilists, and skeptics about free will is that in virtue of being rational deliberators, we have an inescapable sense of freedom. This claim has played a key role in classic arguments that we are in fact free. In this paper, I offer what I call a "conception-neutral" interpretation of the claim, and argue that, on this interpretation, the claim is true. On my view, the sense of freedom necessarily possessed by all rational deliberators is the belief that one's actions are up to one in such a way that one is accountable for them.