 Causal determinism, as it is commonly understood, is roughly the thesis that every event or action, including human action, is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions and the laws of nature. The traditional problem of free will and determinism comes in trying to reconcile our intuitive sense of free will with the idea that impersonal forces over which we have no ultimate control may causally determine our choices and actions. [I should note that a related problem arises with regard to God’s foreknowledge (see the entry on  foreknowledge and free will).]  In the past, the standard view advancing moral responsibility skepticism was hard determinism: the view that causal determinism is true, and incompatible with free will and moral responsibility—either because it precludes the ability to do otherwise (leeway incompatibilism) or because it is inconsistent with one’s being the “ultimate source” of action (source incompatibilism). For hard determinists, libertarian free will is simply impossible because human actions are part of a fully deterministic world and compatibilism amounts to a “quagmire of evasion” (James 1884; see the entry on  arguments for Incompatibilism).