The following framework of theses, roughly hewn, shapes contemporary discussion of the problem of mental causation: (1) Non-Identity of the Mental and the Physical Mental properties and states cannot be identified with specific physical properties and states. (2) Causal Closure (Completeness) of the Physical The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not (...) advert to any non-physical events or laws. To the extent that there is any explanation available for a physical event, there is a complete explanation available couched entirely in physical vocabulary. We prefer the probability formulation, as it should be acceptable to any physicalist, though some reject the explanation formulation.) (3) Causal Exclusion There is at most one complete and wholly independent explanation for any given event or sequence of events. (shrink)

The paper argues that it is a mistake to interpret Thomas Reid as holding a libertarian notion of freedom, and to make use of Reid to argue in support of a libertarian position. More precisely, this paper shows that Reid’s theory of agent-causation may not be what these philosophers take it to be, once such crucial notions as agent-causation and active power in Reid’s theory of free agency have been fully explicated. Reid is more committed to accepting the view of (...) freedom as rational self-control over the determination of the will than a contracausal view of freedom. (shrink)

Autonomy and free will are essential conditions for moral agency: we aren’t responsible for effects we couldn’t choose or avert. Skeptics argue that the experience of free will is illusory; those defending it say that the conscious experience of intention and responsibility are sufficient evidence of free choice. This essay defends autonomy and free will from an alternate perspective: it affirms that choice has exhaustively material conditions but disputes the determinist claim that every choice is an involuntary step in a (...) causal trajectory progressing blindly from nature’s original conditions. There is a paradox: we are responsible for much we choose and do, though all that comes to pass has sufficient conditions. This is the virtue of soft determinism and its emphasis on autonomy: the sensibility evolving within us is often a barrier to other influences while a sufficient condition for one’s choices and deeds. (shrink)

If God brings about an event in the universe, does it have a preceding cause? For example, if the universe began with the Big Bang and if God brought it about, did the Big Bang then have a preceding cause? The standard answer is: yes, it was caused by a divine willing. I propose an alternative view: God’s actions, unlike human actions, are not initiated by willings, undertakings, or volitions, but God brings about the intended event directly. Presenting a solution (...) to the dilemma of free will I explain what ‘bringing about directly’ means and show that the question of what an action begins with is distinct from the question whether it is a basic action. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how contemporary metaphysics of powers can further an understanding of agent-causal theories of free will. The recent upsurge of such ontologies of powers and the understanding of causation it affords promises to demystify the notion of an agent-causal power. However, as we argue pace, the very ubiquity of powers also poses a challenge to understanding in what sense exercises of an agent’s power to act could still be free—neither determined by external circumstances, nor random, but (...) self-determined. To overcome this challenge, we must understand what distinguishes the power to act from ordinary powers. We suggest this difference lies in its rational nature, and argue that existing agent-causal accounts fail to capture the sense in which the power to act is rational. A proper understanding, we argue, requires us to combine the recent idea that the power to act is a ‘two-way power’ Powers and capacities in philosophy: the new aristotelianism, Routledge, New York, 2013) with the idea that it is intrinsically rational. We sketch the outlines of an original account that promises to do this. On this picture, what distinguishes the power to act is its special generality—the power to act, unlike ordinary powers, does not come with any one typical manifestation. We argue that this special generality can be understood to be a feature of the capacity to reason. Thus, we argue, an account of agent-causation that can further our understanding of free will requires us to recognize a specifically rational or mental variety of power. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

Philosophers discussing causation take on, as one of their responsibilities, the task of specifying an ontology of causation. Both standard and non-standard accounts of that ontology make two assumptions: that the ontological category of causal relata admits a unique specification, and that cause and effect are of the same ontological type. These assumptions are rarely made explicit, but there is in fact little reason to think them true. It is argued here that, if the question has any interest, there are (...) some considerations in favor of rejecting Uniqueness and Uniformity, no good reasons in favor of them, but good reason to think that we are not in a position to make a decisive pronouncement, since some of the information needed to make a judgement on the matter is empirical in character. Philosophers have therefore made two mistakes about the relata of causation: one is to have accepted unwarranted restrictions on the categories pertinent to causation; the other is to have wrongly assumed that we are in a position to name them. (shrink)

There is an argument for incompatibilism that is based on the experience of agency. Authors who endorse this argument place pro tanto evidential weight on one or more of two putative aspects of the experience of being an agent: i) the experience of being the causal source of our actions; ii) the experience of having robust alternative possibilities available to one. With some exceptions, these authors and their critics alike neglect a third significant aspect of the experience of agency: iii) (...) the experience of the future as being modally open. This aspect is either neglected or conflated with or. In this paper I rehabilitate as a notable aspect in its own right, and demonstrate that it is a good candidate for having the same pro tanto evidential weight in the experiential argument for incompatibilism. Then, I go on to assess the prospects of this revised argument in the face of central compatibilist objections that are central to the literature. I find that it fares just as well, if not better, than the original argument. (shrink)

The Luck Objection is an influential family of challenges to libertarianism. In recent years, discussions of the Luck Objection have reached an impasse of sorts. On one hand, existing responses to the objection have failed to satisfy libertarianism’s many critics. On the other hand, a growing number of libertarians seem unimpressed by existing formulations of the objection. To break the impasse, I present a two-stage version of the objection. The first stage has the limited objective of showing that supposed exercises (...) of free will resemble certain nonactions in being truly random outcomes. The second stage seeks to show that we aren’t morally responsible for supposed exercises of free will if they are truly random outcomes. The leading idea is that such actions, qua truly random outcomes of our prior mental states, don’t meet a plausible guidance requirement for morally responsible agency. (shrink)

The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that (...) indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective. (shrink)

Traditional compatibilism about free will is widely considered to be untenable. In particular, the conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise appears to be subject to clear counterexamples. I will propose a new version of traditional compatibilism that provides a conditional account of both the ability to do otherwise and the ability to choose to do otherwise, and I will argue that this view withstands the standard objections to traditional compatibilism. For this, I will assume with incompatibilists that the (...) mere possession of a general ability to do otherwise is not sufficient for having the ability that is required for free will. This concession distinguishes the view from the traditional conditional analysis and from recent dispositional accounts of the ability to do otherwise, and we will see that this concession enables a straightforward response to the counterexamples. This, in turn, will play a crucial role in my response to the strongest version of the consequence argument for incompatibilism. (shrink)

Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for morally responsible agency. (...) I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

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 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 has argued that an “enriched” event-causal account (...) can overcome this problem. Franklin, however, doesn’t consider whether, as Pereboom argues, the agent as decider of “torn decisions” disappears from even enriched accounts. As I show here, Franklin’s enriched account takes some modifying if it is to overcome Pereboom’s torn decision problem—a special case of the disappearing agent problem. However, as I also show, there is a more fundamental problem facing event-causal libertarian accounts. It is implausible that an agent qua event or state simultaneously settles whether and how she intervenes. The upshot is that events and/or states lack an ability essential to completely fulfilling an agent’s role qua settler. This isn’t a problem for agent-causal accounts like the one offered by Steward because in as much as an agent qua substance settles whether her body moves in certain ways on certain occasions she simultaneously settles whether and how she intervenes. As a consequence, event-causal libertarians face a dilemma, or rather several, that agent-causal libertarians do not. This may ultimately be explained by the irreducibility of causation by agents to causation by events. (shrink)

Agent-causal libertarians maintain we are irreducible agents who, by acting, settle matters that aren’t already settled. This implies that the neural matters underlying the exercise of our agency don’t conform to deterministic laws, but it does not appear to exclude the possibility that they conform to statistical laws. However, Pereboom (Noûs 29:21–45, 1995; Living without free will, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; in: Nadelhoffer (ed) The future of punishment, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013) has argued that, if these neural (...) matters conform to either statistical or deterministic physical laws, the complete conformity of an irreducible agent’s settling of matters with what should be expected given the applicable laws would involve coincidences too wild to be credible. Here, I show that Pereboom’s argument depends on the assumption that, at times, the antecedent probability certain behavior will occur applies in each of a number of occasions, and is incapable of changing as a result of what one does from one occasion to the next. There is, however, no evidence this assumption is true. The upshot is the wild coincidence objection is an empirical objection lacking empirical support. Thus, it isn’t a compelling argument against agent-causal libertarianism. (shrink)

There is a growing trend in policy making of holding people responsible for their lifestyle-based diseases. This has sparked a heated debate on whether people are responsible for these illnesses, which has now come to an impasse. In this paper, I present a psychological model that explains why different views on people’s responsibility for their health exist and how we can reach a resolution of the disagreement. My conclusion is that policymakers should not perceive people as responsible while health care (...) personnel should take the opposing view. (shrink)

As good a definition as any of a _philosophical_ conundrum is a problem all of whose possible solutions are unsatisfactory. The problem of understanding the springs of action for morally responsible agents is commonly recognized to be such a problem. The origin, nature, and explanation of freely-willed actions puzzle us today as they did the ancients Greeks, and for much the same reasons. However, one can carry this ‘perennial-puzzle’ sentiment too far. The unsatisfactory nature of philosophical theories is a more (...) or less matter, and some of them have admitted of improvement over time. This, at any rate, is what we self-selecting metaphysicians tend to suppose, and I will pursue that high calling by suggesting a few improvements to a theory of metaphysical freedom, or freedom of the will. (shrink)

Much recent work in neuroscience aims to shed light on whether we have free will. Can it? Can any science? To answer, we need to disentangle different notions of free will, and clarify what we mean by ‘empirical’ and ‘testable’. That done, my main conclusion is, duly interpreted: that free will is not a testable hypothesis. In particular, it is neither verifiable nor falsifiable by empirical evidence. The arguments for this are not a priori but rather are based on a (...) posteriori consideration of the relevant neuroscientific investigations, as well as on standard philosophy of science work on the notion of testability. (shrink)

In the center of this paper is a phenomenological claim: we experience ourselves in our own doings and we experience others when we perceive them in their doings as active in the sense of being a cause of the corresponding physical event. These experiences are fundamental to the way we view ourselves and others. It is therefore desirable for any philosophical theory to be compatible with the content of these experiences and thus to avoid the attribution of radical and permanent (...) error to human experience. A theory of ‘subject causation’ according to which the active subject continuously and simultaneously causes physical changes is sketched. This account is—according to the phenomenological claim defended—compatible with the content of our daily experiences in doing something and in observing others in their doings and it has a number of further more theoretical advantages: it does not touch the autonomy of neurophysiology and it is compatible with a thesis of supervenience of the mental on the physical. It does however require a weak version of subject-body dualism. (shrink)

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of (...) obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. (shrink)

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

Timothy O’Connor has recently defended a version of libertarianism that has significant advantages over similar accounts. One of these is an argument that secures indeterminism on the basis of an argument that shows how causal determinism threatens agency in virtue of the nature of the causal relation involved in free acts. In this paper, I argue that while it does turn out that free acts are not causally determined on O’Connor’s view, this fact is merely stipulative and the argument that (...) he presents for this conclusion begs the question. (shrink)

While skeptical arguments concerning free will have been a common element of philosophical discourse for thousands of years, one could make the case that such arguments have never been more numerous or forceful than at present. In response to these skeptical attacks, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concern that the widespread acceptance of such skeptical attitudes could have devastating social consequences. In this paper, I set out to address whether such concerns are well-founded. I argue that there is reason (...) to believe that should skeptical arguments result in the widespread dismissal of human free will, the results of such a dismissal are likely to be more positive than negative. (shrink)

Suppose that time t is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery (...) of Ockhamism, with its distinction between hard facts and soft facts; indeed, those arguments do not require any complex machinery at all. Instead, those arguments are built on an uncontroversial understanding of the idea that truth depends on the world. In the final section of the article, those arguments are extended to show that foreknowledge of an action does not threaten that action's freedom. (shrink)

This article’s aim is to shed light on direct control, especially as it pertains to free will. I sketch two ways of conceiving of such control. Both sketches extend to decision making. Issues addressed include the problem of present luck and the relationship between direct control and complete control.

Why does the problem of free will seem so intractable? I surmise that in large measure it does so because the free will debate, at least in its modern form, is conducted in terms of a mistaken approach to causality in general. At the heart of this approach is the assumption that all causation is fundamentally event causation. Of course, it is well-known that some philosophers of action want to invoke in addition an irreducible notion of agent causation, applicable only (...) in the sphere of intelligent agency. But such a view is generally dismissed as incompatible with the naturalism that has now become orthodoxy amongst mainstream analytical philosophers of mind. What I want to argue is that substances, not events, are the primary relata of causal relations and that agent causation should properly be conceived of as a species of substance causation. I shall try to show that by thus reconceiving the nature of causation and of agency, the problem of free will can be made more tractable. I shall also argue for a contention that may seem even less plausible at first sight, namely, that such a view of agency is perfectly compatible with a volitionist theory of action. (shrink)

Much has been said about the logical difference between rules and principles, yet few authors have focused on the distinct logical connectives linking the normative conditions of both norms. I intend to demonstrate that principles, unlike rules, are norms whose antecedents are linguistically formulated in a generic fashion, and thus logically described as inclusive disjunctions. This core feature incorporates the relevance criteria of normative antecedents into the world of principles and also explains their aptitude to conflict with opposing norms, namely (...) that their consequents are fulfilled to varying extents more frequently than those of rules. I conclude that the property of genericity should be predicated to the norm antecedent of principles, more precisely to the hypothetical action. This is of paramount importance to explain, in terms of logical implication and exclusion, the expansibility of competing principles, in contrast with the exclusive character of conflicting rules. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental act/bodily act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition, which arguably further undermine the credibility of the (...) distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on ‘inner’ acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action. (shrink)

There is a lively debate over who is to blame for the harms arising from unhealthy behaviours, like overeating and excessive drinking. In this paper, I argue that given how demanding the conditions required for moral responsibility actually are, we cannot be highly confident that anyone is ever morally responsible. I also adduce evidence that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs: it undermines public support for the measures that are likely to have the most impact on these (...) harms. I claim that these two facts—the fact that we cannot be highly confident that anyone is morally responsible and the fact that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs—interact. Together they give us a powerful reason for believing, or acting as if we believed, that ordinary people are not in fact responsible for their unhealthy behaviours. (shrink)

The Blockage Argument is designed to improve upon Harry Frankfurt’s famous argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities by removing the counterfactual intervener altogether. If the argument worked, then it would prove in a way that Frankfurt’s argument does not that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, not even the weakest “flicker of freedom”. -/- Some philosophers have rejected the Blockage Argument solely on the basis of their intuition that the inability to do otherwise is incompatible with (...) moral responsibility. I will argue, however, that it is not merely the inability to do otherwise by itself but rather the inability to do otherwise in combination with the absence of a counterfactual intervener that is incompatible with moral responsibility. If I cannot do otherwise and it is not because of a counterfactual intervener, then it must be the case that I am being forced to choose and therefore act as I do, in which case I cannot be morally responsible for this action. -/- Because the Blockage Argument fails, and because it was really the only way to establish that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, it follows that moral responsibility does indeed require at least one alternative possibility in any given situation. But it turns out that this conclusion does not tip the balance in favor of incompatibilism over compatibilism. It would have if blockage and determinism were equivalent. But they are not. Unlike blockage, determinism is compatible with certain counterfactuals that compatibilists traditionally believed the ability to do otherwise reduces to. So even though moral responsibility is incompatible with blockage, it does not necessarily follow that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

The Blockage Argument is designed to improve upon Harry Frankfurt’s famous argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities by removing the counterfactual intervener altogether. If the argument worked, then it would prove in a way that Frankfurt’s argument does not that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, not even the weakest “flicker of freedom”. Some philosophers have rejected the Blockage Argument solely on the basis of their intuition that the inability to do otherwise is incompatible with moral (...) responsibility. I will argue, however, that it is not merely the inability to do otherwise by itself but rather the inability to do otherwise in combination with the absence of a counterfactual intervener that is incompatible with moral responsibility. If I cannot do otherwise and it is not because of a counterfactual intervener, then it must be the case that I am being forced to choose and therefore act as I do, in which case I cannot be morally responsible for this action. Because the Blockage Argument fails, and because it was really the only way to establish that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, it follows that moral responsibility does indeed require at least one alternative possibility in any given situation. But it turns out that this conclusion does not tip the balance in favor of incompatibilism over compatibilism. It would have if blockage and determinism were equivalent. But they are not. Unlike blockage, determinism is compatible with certain counterfactuals that compatibilists traditionally believed the ability to do otherwise reduces to. So even though moral responsibility is incompatible with blockage, it does not necessarily follow that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

In a recent book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan discusses the Cartesian, or agent causation, view of free will. According to this view, when a person acts of his own free will his action is not caused by antecedent events but is caused by the agent himself, and in acting the agent acts as an uncaused cause. Flanagan argues at length that this view is false. In this article, I defend the agent causation view against Flanagan’s criticisms and (...) I go on to critically address his own ‘neo-compatibilist’ alternative to the agent causation view. In doing so, I hope to exhibit some common misconceptions about the nature of the agent causation view and to show that this is a view that deserves more serious consideration. (shrink)

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...) because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)

WANG Bi 王弼 develops a metaphysic of Dao 道 in his Commentary on Laozi and “The Structure of Laozi’s Subtle Pointers.” I summarize this metaphysic as the following thesis: Dao is featureless and is the ultimate reason why the myriad things exist and are the ways they are. I develop a systematic account of this thesis: I provide an interpretation of the featurelessness of Dao and show how Dao’s featurelessness relates to its fundamental explanatory role as the ontological ground for (...) the myriad things. (shrink)

According to the Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP), no one can now do anything that would require the past to have unfolded differently than it actually did, for the past is fixed, over and done with. Why might doing something in the future require the past to be different? Because if determinism is true—if the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the Big Bang determined a unique future for our universe—then doing anything other than what (...) you are determined to do would require one of two things: either a miracle, a violation of the actual laws of nature, or a different past, all the way back to the Big Bang or beyond. Which would it be? Those who reject miracles accept a Backtracking Principle (BT), according to which the past would (have to) be different. If this is correct, then it follows by (FP) that you cannot now do anything other than what you are determined to do. The conclusion of this much-discussed argument is that the freedom to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. In order to break a stalemate between incompatibilists and compatibilists in the debate over (FP), this article presents a new Action-Type Argument for (FP). The aim is to refute Backtracking Compatibilism, the view that (BT) is true and yet the freedom to do otherwise is compatible with determinism. The form of the Action-Type Argument for (FP) also leads to a Simple Argument for incompatibilism, which does not assume (BT). What the Simple Argument does assume is a “governing” view of laws of nature, a view of laws as more than mere regularities that turn out to be exceptionless over all time. Incompatibilism follows. (shrink)

The trick, of course, is to pick your targets carefully: they should be central to the mainstream of contemporary philosophy, not marginal. Watkins has certainly done that. The target he has chosen is the problem of causation. His three-part aim is, first, to embed Kant’s theory of causation in its 18th century pre-Critical and especially Leibnizian setting; second, to argue that Kant’s Critical theory of causation is not in fact a reply to Hume, and that Kant’s metaphysics of causation depends (...) as much on the Third Analogy of Experience and the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason as it does on the Second Analogy; and third, that reconsidering Kant’s Critical metaphysics of causation from a pre-Critical and rationalist point of view can contribute to a serious reconsideration of the theory of agent causation in the contemporary debate about free will. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom has advanced a four-case manipulation argument that, he claims, undermines both libertarian accounts of free action not committed to agent-causation and compatibilist accounts of such action. The first two cases are meant to be ones in which the key agent is not responsible for his actions owing to his being manipulated. We first consider a “hard-line” response to this argument that denies that the agent is not morally responsible in these cases. We argue that this response invites a (...) dialectically uncharitable reading of the argument. We then propose an alternative interpretation; it affirms that, at least prima facie, the manipulated agent in the first two cases is not responsible. Finally, we question Pereboom’s rationale for why the manipulation in these cases subverts responsibility. (shrink)

The aim of the Consequence Argument is to show that, if determinism is true, no one has, or ever had, any choice about anything. In the stock version of the argument, its two premisses state that no one is, or ever was, able to act so that the past would have been different and no one is, or ever was, able to act so that the laws of nature would have been different. This stock version fails, however, because it requires (...) an invalid inference rule. The standard response is to strengthen both premisses by replacing ‘would’ with ‘might’. While this response ensures validity, it weakens the argument, since it strengthens the premisses. I show that we can do better: We can keep the weak reading of one premiss and just strengthen the other. This provides two versions of the Consequence Argument which are stronger than the standard revision. (shrink)

Cognitive phenomenalism is the view that occurrent thoughts are identical with, or constituted of, cognitive phenomenology. This paper raises a challenge for this view: the cognitive fine-tuning problem. In broad brushstrokes the difficulty is that, for the cognitive phenomenalist, there is a distinction between three kinds of fact: cognitive phenomenal facts, sensory phenomenal facts, and functional facts. This distinction gives rise to the challenge of explaining why, in actuality, these three phenomena tend to be matched together in ways that respect (...) norms of rationality. Various solutions to this problem are explored – divine intervention, value-involving laws of nature, or basic capacities to respond to reasons – all of which are wildly at odds with naturalism. If cognitive phenomenalists want their view to be consistent with naturalism, as many do, they must come up with a naturalistic solution to the cognitive fine-tuning problem. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that candidates for free, undetermined choices must have objective probabilities prior to their performance. Indeed although this premise figures prominently in a widely discussed argument against libertarianism, few libertarians have called it into question. In this article, I will investigate whether libertarians ought to reject it. I will conclude that doing so should not be tempting to event-causal libertarians or most agent-causal ones, because the added costs outweigh the benefits.

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 (...) the agent-causal theory if there is reason to accept libertarianism. I aim to refute this claim. I will argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the agent-causal theory of free will are nonpartisan. The real reason for going agent-causal has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism, but rather with avoiding reductionism about agency and the self. As we will see, if there is reason for libertarians to accept the agent-causal theory, there is just as much reason for compatibilists to accept it. It is in this sense that I contend that if anyone should be an agent-causalist, then everyone should be an agent-causalist. (shrink)

Libertarianism has, seemingly, always been in disrepute among philosophers. While throughout history philosophers have offered different reasons for their dissatisfaction with libertarianism, one worry is recurring: namely a worry about luck. To many, it seems that if our choices and actions are undetermined, then we cannot control them in a way that allows for freedom and responsibility. My fundamental aim in this paper is to place libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible libertarian theory. I begin by (...) arguing that Robert Kane's influential formulation of libertarianism actually generates an acute worry about luck, showing specifically that Kane's recipe for solving the problem of luck and his attendant conception of the location and role of indeterminism derived from it are deeply problematic. I then offer a reformulation of libertarianism ? particularly a new conception of the location and role of indeterminism ? that is capable of avoiding the problems that beset Kane's theory and that, I argue, places libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible theory. (shrink)

The Consequence Argument has elicited various responses, ranging from acceptance as obviously right to rejection as obviously problematic in one way or another. Here we wish to focus on one specific response, according to which the Consequence Argument begs the question. This is a serious accusation that has not yet been adequately rebutted, and we aim to remedy that in what follows. We begin by giving a formulation of the Consequence Argument. We also offer some tentative proposals about the nature (...) of begging the question. Although the charge of begging the question is frequently made in philosophy, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down the precise nature of this dialectical infelicity (or family of such infelicities). Thus we offer some new proposals about the nature of begging the question with an eye to understanding what is going on in central cases in which the charge is legitimately made. We then defend the Consequence Argument against the charge that it begs the question, so construed. We contend that, whatever the other liabilities of the argument may be, it does not beg the question against the compatibilist. (shrink)

Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers presents what is probably the most thoroughly developed version of agent-causal libertarianism in the modern canon. While commentators today often acknowledge Reid's contribution, they typically focus on what appears to be a serious problem for the view: Reid appears to commit himself to a position according to which acting freely would require an agent to engage in an infinite number of exertions of active power. In this essay, we maintain that, properly understood, Reid's (...) version of agent-causal libertarianism generates no regress of exertion. Our discussion begins by presenting Reid's account of free action and why it appears vulnerable to a worrisome regress. We then consider three attempts to address the regress in the contemporary literature offered by William Rowe, Gideon Yaffe, and James Van Cleve, which we find unsatisfactory. We then develop a solution to the worry—one that takes very seriously both what Reid means by an ‘efficient’ cause and his appeal to normative features when explaining action. We call it the ‘networked capacity’ view. (shrink)

Perszyk has argued that Molinists cannot consistently endorse the consequence argument because of a structurally similar argument for the incompatibility of true Molinist counterfactuals of freedom and the ability to do otherwise. Wierenga has argued that on the proper understanding of CCFs, there is a relevant difference between the consequence argument and the anti-Molinist argument. I argue that, even on Wierenga’s understanding of CCFs, there is in fact no relevant difference between the two arguments. Moreover, I strengthen Perszyk’s challenge by (...) highlighting further relevant similarities between CCFs and facts about the laws. (shrink)