Libertarianism and science.
Libertarianism is true if there is free will and incompatibilism is true.
Upon completion of a scientific experiment the scientist must be able to correctly assess the result, either as "consistent with the hypothesis" or as "inconsistent with the hypothesis", in other words, the scientist must be able to select exactly one of at least two available courses of action and to perform the course of action as selected, so let's take that as our notion of free will and we can assert, if there is science, there is free will.
If determinism is true, every fact about the world is entailed by laws of nature and the state of the world in the distant past, but as every scientific experiment is performed in the present, if determinism were true the laws of nature and some past state of the world might entail that the scientist writes "consistent with the hypothesis" on occasions when the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis and write "inconsistent with the hypothesis" on occasions when the result is consistent with the hypothesis, so we can now assert, if there is science, determinism is false.
Given the above, we can consider the overall history of science as a meta-scientific experiment, an experiment the results of which are consistent with the hypothesis that scientists have free will and determinism is not true. Is this hypothesis falsifiable? Yes, scientists might become unable to do science.
So, here are our commitments:
1) if there is science, there is free will
2) if there is science, determinism is false
3) if compatibilism is true, there could be no science
4) there is science
5) libertarianism is true.
Posted Feb 23, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC