Doing What We Can with Free Will

What is free will and does the idea make sense?How bad would it be if we don't have it?Are we permitted to believe in it and live as though it exists, even if we are not sure we have it?These are crucial questions.Free Will's Value (Lemos, 2023) is a clear, careful and engaging exposition of John Lemos' views on these questions.His position on the free will problem is important, original, and challenging, and it is therefore necessary for all who want to think seriously about the problem to engage with it.I will do so here in three stages.First, I will briefly outline where we both stand on the three questions that, together, constitute the free will problem in order to establish clarity and as a basis for the rest of the discussion.Second, I will briefly take up his discussions of the limitations of happy denialism 1 concerning "criminal justice, pride, and love" (as in the subtitle the book), on which he and I broadly agree, and note some differences and nuances, and why they might matter.Third, and this will be the most important part, I will explore what happens if we confront Lemos's position with my two major and highly controversial ideas on the free will problem, compatibility dualism, and Illusionism.He does not engage with either in this book, but I believe that doing so would be useful in evaluating his own philosophical choices and compromises in the free will debate, possibly strengthening them, and in any case contributing to our understanding the free will problem 1 For the philosophical opponent of the compatibilist I use the term "denialism".Some use the terms "hard determinism", "hard incompatibilism", or "free will scepticism" for roughly this sort of view, but each such term has in my opinion different unwanted connotations.