Robert Kane has for many years claimed that in our underivatively free actions, what he calls “self-forming acts”, we actually try to do both of the two acts we are contemplating doing and then we ultimately end up doing only one of them. This idea of dual willings/efforts was put forward in an attempt to solve luck problems, but Randolph Clarke and Alfred Mele argue that for this to work agents must, then, freely engage in the dual efforts leading up (...) to their SFAs. In response, Kane has said they do so freely by meeting compatibilist criteria of freedom. In Free Will and Luck , Mele argues that this move is deeply problematic. In this essay, I defend Kane's position. In doing so, I clarify important differences between the SFAs of adults and those of young children, making more clear the connections between SFAs, character, and responsibility. (shrink)

In a recent article, Meghan Griffith (American Philosophical Quarterly 47:43–56, 2010) argues that agent-causal libertarian theories are immune to the problem of luck but that event-causal theories succumb to this problem. In making her case against the event-causal theories, she focuses on Robert Kane’s event-causal theory. I provide a brief account of the central elements of Kane’s theory and I explain Griffith’s critique of it. I argue that Griffith’s criticisms fail. In doing so, I note some important respects in which (...) Kane’s view is unclear and I suggest a plausible way of reading Kane that makes his theory immune to Griffith’s objections. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief review of some of the central elements of Robert Kane’s event-causal libertarian theory of free will. It then goes on to consider four of the central criticisms Derk Pereboom has made of Kane’s view and it shows how each of these criticisms can be reasonably answered. These criticisms are the no further power/control objection, the disappearing agent/luck objection, the randomizing manipulator objection, and the problem of responsibility for efforts of will.

Robert Kane’s libertarian theory is often attacked on the grounds that undetermined self-forming actions are not amenable to contrastive explanation. I propose that we should understand contrastive explanations in terms of an appeal to structuring causes. Doing so reveals that Kane’s claim that there can be no contrastive explanation for self-forming actions is not an unwanted implication of his appeal to indeterminism, but is actually an implication of the fact that the agent’s will is not yet appropriately structured. I then (...) explain how this can assist Kane with the luck objection. (shrink)

Neil Levy mounts two arguments against Robert Kane’s influential libertarian theory. According to the first, because Kanean self-forming actions are undetermined, there can be no contrastive explanation for why agents choose as they do rather than otherwise, in which case how they choose appears to be a matter of luck. According to the second, if one grants Kane the claim that agents are responsible for their undetermined choices in virtue of the fact that they made efforts of will to choose (...) them, the fact that agents engage in dual efforts of will leads to an implausible doubling of the agent’s responsibility. We defend Kane from both objections. We argue against the first by clarifying the nature of contrastive explanation in the context of Kane’s theory and we argue against the second by showing that the kind of doubling of responsibility implied by an agent’s dual efforts of will is, in fact, innocuous. (shrink)

Central to Robert Kane’s libertarian free will is the distinction between two kinds of action: undetermined self-forming actions by means of which we shape our characters, and actions that are determined by our freely formed characters. Daniel Dennett challenges the coherence of this distinction, but I argue that his arguments rely on highly controversial assumptions. In an effort to improve on Dennett’s criticism, I argue that some considerations about non-self-forming actions, when coupled with Kane’s naturalistic framework, imply that all choices (...) are undetermined, which undercuts the distinction between his two categories of action. I then show that this conclusion threatens to undermine the very idea of self-formation Kane seeks to develop. (shrink)