I am glad to see Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett in the illustration there. If any two books really introduced the public to the issue it would be Free Will by Harris and Elbow Room by Dennett. Regardless of your own position on the subject or your feelings about these two men, they are required reading. Is there any other work that we think is essential here? If so, why?

This article (and the linked one about Harris) are essentially efforts to add minor nuances to these books. If there is some real new angle I sure missed it.

Having read Dennett’s book, I would argue that his brand of compatibilism is best described by what it is not - by what it attacks rather than what it proposes, if anything.

Compatibilism takes determinism at the level of subconscious cognition to be a given. It then points out all the reasons why people apply motivated reasoning to escape this obvious fact, and how misguided they are. Its only real claim is that the commonsense version and experience of free will does not require the super free will philosophers and theologians are chasing. Anyone who is seeking the latter to justify the former is in error on multiple levels. It is not the compatibilists who are trying yo redefine things, the incompatibilists did it first intentionally to perform a bait-and-switch.

Apart from pointing these two things out, there isn’t much else. What the commonsense free will is, how it emerges, and how we should think about it is murky. Is the divide between conscious and subconscious relevant? Can we draw moral or practical implications from this or are we forced to work-arounds? Do we treat moral failures more like hardware failures and focus on containment and repair rather than punishment and virtue?

I feel Dennett merely raises these resulting questions without attempting to solve them.