In this essay I will offer a pragmatic justification for our belief in free choice and moral responsibility. I will claim we are reasonable to believe in such freedom and responsibility even if we believe in determinism. I do not claim we know that we are free and responsible agents, because a condition of our being such agents may be lacking. If this is so, that we are capable of free choice and moral responsibility may be false. Knowledge, as I conceive it, requires that our belief be true, not just that we have good reason, pragmatic or evidentiary, for our belief. Put bluntly, we are pragmatically justified in believing in our free will and responsibility even if we are not free or responsible. My project can be construed as a new attempt to reconcile our faith in causality with our faith in free will and responsibility. I call my view "pragmatic compatibilism."
Conceivably, the kind of necessity sufficient to thwart free choice and responsibility is the kind that philosophers have often attributed to causation. For the sake of argument, I will allow that causal necessity may have this unhappy implication. I argue that the empirical evidence for such necessity is, and must remain, inconclusive. Furthermore, I maintain that we can divorce our concept of causal determinism from any implication of effects being necessary. If so, we can base our view of determinism on pragmatic criteria, taking our lead from William James.