Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that the same agential states can cause different possible actions. Nonreductive physicalism is, roughly, the view that mental states cause actions to occur, while these actions also have sufficient physical causes. Though libertarian free will and nonreductive physicalism have overlapping subject matter, and while libertarian free will is currently trending at the same time as nonreductive physicalism is a dominant metaphysical posture, there are few sustained expositions of a nonreductive physicalist model of libertarian (...) free will – indeed some tell against such an admixture. This paper concocts such a blend by articulating and defending, with some caveats, a nonreductive physicalist model of libertarian free will. (shrink)

Dwayne Moore (2021) argues that libertarians about free will who are reductive physicalists cannot make proper sense of free will. In doing so, he presents what he calls “the physical indeterminism luck objection” to libertarian free will. He goes on to consider three different contemporary naturalistic approaches to libertarian free will (LFW) – those of Christopher Franklin, Mark Balaguer, and Robert Kane – and argues that if understood as reductive physicalist views they all fall prey to this objection. While it’s (...) not entirely clear that Kane is a reductive physicalist, it is clear that he would reject any kind of eliminative materialism or eliminative physicalism (Kane 1996, 147). Regardless, in this essay I argue that even if Kane’s view is a kind of reductive physicalist view, it is immune to the arguments made in Moore’s essay. (shrink)

Dwayne Moore raises the physical indeterminism luck objection to libertarian theories of free will, which claims that because agents lack control over the indeterministic physical processes that cause choices, agents lack control over those choices. Moore considers the libertarian strategy of identifying these processes with agential states, such as efforts of will, in order to secure agential control over the outcome of these processes. According to Moore, this strategy faces an insurmountable obstacle in the form of a quausation problem. He (...) argues that naturalistically minded libertarians like Kane are committed to the idea that agential states cause what they do only in virtue of their physical properties. This implies that the agential properties are causally irrelevant to the outcome of these indeterministic processes in which case they cannot help to secure agential control over the outcome. I argue that if Kane is a nonreductive physicalist, he has a way of dealing with the quausation problem. (shrink)