The compatibilist is not intending to deny agency, but to give a particular account of it. The account is in terms of modular brain functions, in which data are taken in, and alternatives generated and ranked, until eventually an output comes ‘on line’ and initiates action. True, these events are all things that ‘just happen’ (passively, as it were) but, according to the compatibilist, they are the things that happen, and all that happens, when you, the person, do something. Describing you as doing something, and for a reason, is a description at the personal level of the upshot of these
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