Buddhist Paleocompatibilism

Neo-compatibilists hold that the causal determination of our mental states is compatible with our being responsible for our actions, in that responsibility does not require that the cause of the action be wholly located in the agent. Incompatibilists find this unpersuasive. It is claimed here that in one way of formulating the Buddhist distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth, compatibilists could accommodate the ostensibly libertarian notion of agent causation. The key to this development is that according to one conception of the two truths, the fact that one determines an action is not incompatible with every mental event being causally determined by prior events, since there are no semantic relations between conventionally true statements and ultimately true statements.