Grant C. Sterling called compatibilism absurd. The argument is straightforward.

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Grant C. Sterling called compatibilism absurd. The argument is straightforward.

Compatibilism attempts to preserve the ordinary meaning of “free” and “responsible” while accepting determinism. But it does so by redefining freedom as acting from one’s own determined nature without external compulsion. This is not a solution — it is a substitution. The word “free” is retained while the concept it was meant to capture is abandoned.

Chrysippus’s Position

Chrysippus held that everything occurs according to fate — universal causal determinism flowing from the logos. He attempted to preserve responsibility through compatibilism: what is “up to us” (eph’ hēmin) is our own causal nature expressing itself. Our assents are determined, but they are determined by what we are. This is soft determinism — freedom as acting from one’s own nature without external compulsion.

The Core Absurdity

If every assent is the inevitable product of prior causes, then the faculty that “chooses” to assent correctly and the faculty that fails to are both doing exactly what they were always going to do.

Praise and blame, effort and negligence, progress and deterioration — all become category errors. You are not commending or correcting an agent. You are describing a mechanism.

Chrysippus needed compatibilism because hard determinism and Stoic ethics cannot coexist. The entire structure of Stoic practice — the three phases of sustained attention, the threshold orientation, the concern with virtuous action — presupposes a faculty that genuinely acts. Chrysippus saw the problem and tried to bridge it. The bridge does not hold.

Calling determined assent “free” because it flows from your nature does not restore agency. It merely relocates the determinism one step back.

What the Practice Requires

The discipline of attention to assent requires that when the faculty recognizes an impression, pauses, examines, and returns to the threshold, these are real interventions in the causal sequence — not expressions of a predetermined nature. The desire to assent correctly must be a genuine orientation the faculty adopts, not a determined state it was always going to be in.

Compatibilism is not a position that takes both determinism and freedom seriously. It takes determinism seriously and gives freedom a consolation prize.

Stoic practice requires the real thing: a faculty with genuine originating causal power. No verbal adjustment to determinism can supply it.

Sterling’s commitment to metaphysical libertarianism is one of the six philosophical commitments that function as structural requirements for coherent Stoic practice.