Presentism and Fatalism

It is widely believed that presentism is compatible with both a libertarian view of human freedom and an unrestricted principle of bivalence. I argue that, in fact, presentists must choose between bivalence and libertarianism: if presentism is true, then either the future is open or no one is free in the way that libertarians understand freedom. Presentism is the view that it always has been and always will be the case that there are no actual but non-present objects. On this view, dinosaurs and other merely past objects did exist, but there is no sense in which they do exist. Likewise, merely future objects and events (your future grandchildren, for example) perhaps will exist; but, again, there is no sense in which they do exist. Yesterday’s sins are quite literally gone; what tomorrow may bring is in no way actual. It is widely believed that presentism is compatible with an unrestricted principle of bivalence. In particular, presentism is typically thought to be compatible with the view that bivalence holds for sentences of the form ‘S will do A’. In fact, many of the most well-known defenders of presentism will insist on bivalence for such propositions because, as it happens,