It’s also called “soft determinism,” and David Hume was a big fan of it. It says that free will and determinism can go together. Hume says that we shouldn’t think of free will as the ability to have made a different choice in the same inner and outer circumstances. Instead, it is a hypothetical ability to have made a different choice if one’s beliefs or desires had been different or if that had changed how one felt about the situation.

Hume also says that free acts are not random or mysteriously self-caused, as Immanuel Kant thought, but are caused by the choices people make based on their beliefs, desires, and personalities. In Hume’s determinism, there is a way to make decisions, but this way is controlled by a chain of events.