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  1. Free will.Timothy O'Connor & Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...)
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  • Free Will, Agent Causation, and “Disappearing Agents”.Randolph Clarke - 2017 - Noûs:76-96.
    A growing number of philosophers now hold that agent causation is required for agency, or free will, or moral responsibility. To clarify what is at issue, this paper begins with a distinction between agent causation that is ontologically fundamental and agent causation that is reducible to or realized in causation by events or states. It is widely accepted that agency presents us with the latter; the view in question claims a need for the former. The paper then examines a “disappearing (...)
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  • The Problem of Enhanced Control.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):687 - 706.
    A crucial question for libertarians about free will and moral responsibility concerns how their accounts secure more control than compatibilism. This problem is particularly exasperating for event-causal libertarianism, as it seems that the only difference between these accounts and compatibilism is that the former require indeterminism. But how can indeterminism, a mere negative condition, enhance control? This worry has led many to conclude that the only viable form of libertarianism is agent-causal libertarianism. In this paper I show that this conclusion (...)
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  • If Anyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist, then Everyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2016 - Mind 125 (500):1101-1131.
    Nearly all defences of the agent-causal theory of free will portray the theory as a distinctively libertarian one — a theory that only libertarians have reason to accept. According to what I call ‘the standard argument for the agent-causal theory of free will’, the reason to embrace agent-causal libertarianism is that libertarians can solve the problem of enhanced control only if they furnish agents with the agent-causal power. In this way it is assumed that there is only reason to accept (...)
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  • The Obligation Dilemma.Ishtiyaque Haji - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (1):37-61.
    I motivate a dilemma to show that nothing can be obligatory for anyone regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true. The deterministic horn, to which prime attention is directed, exploits the thesis that obligation requires freedom to do otherwise. Since determinism precludes such freedom, it precludes obligation too. The indeterministic horn allows for freedom to do otherwise but assumes the burden of addressing whether indeterministically caused choices or actions are too much of a matter of luck to be obligatory (...)
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  • Events, agents, and settling whether and how one intervenes.Jason D. Runyan - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (6):1629-1646.
    Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s settling of whether certain states-of-affairs obtain on a particular occasion can be reduced to the causing of events (e.g., bodily motions, coming to a resolution) by certain mental events or states, such as certain desires, beliefs and/or intentions. Agent-causal libertarians disagree. A common critique against event-causal libertarian accounts is that the agent’s role of settling matters is left unfilled and the agent “disappears” from such accounts—a problem known as the disappearing agent problem. Recently, Franklin (...)
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  • Historical Moral Responsibility: Is The Infinite Regress Problem Fatal?Eric Christian Barnes - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4):533-554.
    Some compatibilists have responded to the manipulation argument for incompatibilism by proposing an historical theory of moral responsibility which, according to one version, requires that agents be morally responsible for having their pro-attitudes if they are to be morally responsible for acting on them. This proposal, however, leads obviously to an infinite regress problem. I consider a proposal by Haji and Cuypers that addresses this problem and argue that it is unsatisfactory. I then go on to propose a new solution (...)
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  • Rejecting Pereboom’s empirical objection to agent-causation.Jordan Baker - 2017 - Synthese 194 (8):3085-3100.
    In this paper I argue that Pereboom’s empirical objection to agent causation fails to undermine the most plausible version of agent-causal libertarianism. This is significant because Pereboom concedes that such libertarianism is conceptually coherent and only falls to empirical considerations. To substantiate these claims I outline Pereboom’s taxonomy of agent-causal views, develop the strongest version of his empirical objections, and then show that this objection fails to undermine what I consider the most plausible view of agent-causal libertarianism, namely, reconciliatory integrationist (...)
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  • Grounding and the luck objection to agent-causal libertarianism.Joel Archer - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1763-1775.
    Many philosophers think there is a luck problem confronting libertarian models of free will. If free actions are undetermined, then it seems to be a matter of chance or luck that they occur—so the objection goes. Agent-causal libertarians have responded to this objection by asserting that free actions, in their essence, involve a direct causal relation between agents and the events they cause. So, free actions are not lucky after all. Not everyone, however, is convinced by this response. Al Mele (...)
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  • Reductionism, Agency and Free Will.Maria Joana Rigato - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (1):107-116.
    In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...)
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  • From Neuroscience to Law: Bridging the Gap.Tuomas K. Pernu & Nadine Elzein - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
    Since our moral and legal judgments are focused on our decisions and actions, one would expect information about the neural underpinnings of human decision-making and action-production to have a significant bearing on those judgments. However, despite the wealth of empirical data, and the public attention it has attracted in the past few decades, the results of neuroscientific research have had relatively little influence on legal practice. It is here argued that this is due, at least partly, to the discussion on (...)
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  • Agential Settling Requires a Conscious Intention.Yishai Cohen - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 3 (01):139-155.
    Helen Steward holds that an agent’s settling something does not require a conscious, full-fledged intention. Rather, sub-intentional acts can be instances of settling by the agent if that act is subordinated to the agent’s personal-level conscious systems. I argue that this position is mistaken, and that agential settling does in fact require a conscious intention. I argue for this claim by offering a case which on Steward’s position has counterintuitive implications. I consider a variety of ways in which Steward might (...)
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  • Downward causation and supervenience: the non-reductionist’s extra argument for incompatibilism.Joana Rigato - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (3):384-399.
    Agent-causal theories of free will, which rely on a non-reductionist account of the agent, have traditionally been associated with libertarianism. However, some authors have recently argued in favor of compatibilist agent-causal accounts. In this essay, I will show that such accounts cannot avoid serious problems of implausibility or incoherence. A careful analysis of the implications of non-reductionist views of the agent (event-causal or agent-causal as they may be) reveals that such views necessarily imply either the denial of the principle of (...)
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  • Luck, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism.Ishtiyaque Haji - 2015 - Dialogue 54 (4):611-631.
    Plusieurs ont soutenu par le passé que les descriptions libertariennes de l’action libre achoppent sur le problème de la chance. Il a récemment été proposé que les descriptions compatibilistes, selon lesquelles l’action libre et le déterminisme sont compatibles, sont affaiblies par un problème similaire. Dans cet article, je soutiens que le problème de la chance compatibiliste n’est pas nouveau, dans la mesure où il s’agit d’une manifestation d’une question plus générale à laquelle les compatibilistes et les libertariens ont répondu. En (...)
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  • Reductionism, Agency and Free Will.Joana Rigato - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (1):107-116.
    In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...)
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  • Luck’s Extended Reach.Ishtiyaque Haji - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3):191-218.
    Something is a matter of luck if it is beyond our control. In this paper, I argue for the primary thesis that luck can undermine varieties of obligation, such as moral and prudential obligation, as well as judgments that are best from an agent’s own point of view. Among the considerations invoked to defend this thesis is a prevalent form of libertarianism, event-causal libertarianism. Arguments for the primary thesis that call on event-causal libertarianism raise concerns with this variety of libertarianism.
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  • The Disappearing Agent.Filip Čeč - 2017 - In Boran Berčić, Perspectives on the Self. University of Rijeka. pp. 235-253.
    In this paper I will address a specific luck argument that has been put forward against event causal libertarianism: the disappearing agent objection. I will show why some replies are unsatisfactory while dealing with this objection and, by criticizing the notion of settling and the conception of selfhood invoked by this objection I’ll suggest that the event causal libertarian should reject the objection as it rests on an unacceptable ontology and that consequently, he should bite the bullet and admit that (...)
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