Abstract I have argued that even if time travel is logically possible, there are some things a time traveler would not be able to do. I reply here to critics who have argued that my account entails fatalism about the past or entails that the time traveler is unfree or that she is bound by “strange shackles.” My argument does not entail any sort of fatalism. The time traveler is able to do many of the things that everyone else can do and is as free as any non-time traveler. The time traveler is constrained only as we all are by the laws of nature. My argument shows only how strangely those constraints must operate if those laws permit time travel.
Forthcoming in The Monist: Abilities and Control, Helen Beebee and Ann Whittle eds., June 2020
