[julioneander]

Well yes, if you stick to a purely physicalist framework then determinism is fair to defend, but you incur in a lot of debatable compromises to be able to stick to physicalism, and most of the philosophers (if not all) that defend free-will are not physicalists. And even then, if you are a hard determinist, there are fair objections such as Huemer's(1) minimum free will proof, which defends that determinism is self refuting.

[1] https://www.owl232.net/papers/fwill.htm

[dwohnitmok]

Huemer's proof relies on insanely strong premises, especially his second premise, which end up fighting against a strawman of hard determinism.

Under his definition of hard determinism as laid out by his third premise, his second premise becomes "whatever should be done is done," which is a crazy strong axiom under any reasonable definition of "should." "Yesterday you should've gone to school, therefore yesterday you went to school" is the sort of conclusion you get.

A hard determinist simply doesn't accept that definition of "should."

To see just how crazy strong Huemer's axioms are, substitute any other term for MFT. Everything up to step 7 works. So Huemer's axioms amount to the statement "under hard determinism, whatever I believe is true" (as Burner states in premise 6, but restricts to MFT).

No wonder then if you then introduce the premise "I believe hard determinism is false" you get a contradiction.

[akvadrako]

I'm not going to read the paper without a little more context. Why is determinism self-refuting?

I don't even get what determinism has to do with free will.