Could have, would have, might have

The compatibilist readily admits that if determinism is true, then we clearly do not have physical alternatives open to us. But this does not matter, he says, for what really matters is that we have the right sort of alternatives open to us, and these are not physical alternatives.

For many compatibilists, perhaps most compatibilists, the right sort of alternatives for free will are what are termed conditional alternatives. They are conditional alternatives since they depend upon certain counter factual conditionals being true. A counterfactual conditional is a type of statement that indicates what would be the case if the conditions that led to a certain state of affairs had been different. For such compatibilists, an agent had an alternative open to him if, had the causal circumstances been slightly different (such that he would have wanted to decide otherwise), he would have decided otherwise (because there would have been nothing to prevent him from realizing that want).