A dispute · spans 4 eras
Free Will vs. Determinism
Are we genuinely free, or is everything we do determined by prior causes?
The Stoics held that everything happens according to fate, and yet insisted on moral responsibility (we are still the kind of cause we are). Augustine wrestled with the same problem in Christian terms: how is human responsibility compatible with divine foreknowledge and grace? Spinoza was a hard determinist; Kant tried to rescue freedom by placing it in a noumenal self outside time; Sartre swung to the opposite extreme – radical freedom, condemned to be free. The dispute is unresolved and probably unresolvable.
// The sides
Determinism
Every event, including every choice we make, is necessarily fixed by a prior chain of causes; the feeling of freedom is merely ignorance of those causes, and the one freedom worth the name begins in understanding them.
Compatibilism
Freedom means acting from one's own nature without external compulsion, and in that sense it is fully compatible with everything happening by causes.