In this paper I shall define a thesis I shall call ' determinism ', and argue that it is incompatible with the thesis that we are able to act otherwise than we do. Other theses, some of them very different from what I shall call ' determinism ', have at least an equal right to this name, and, therefore, I do not claim to show that every thesis that could be called ' determinism ' without historical impropriety is incompatible with (...) free will. I shall, however, assume without argument that what I call ' determinism ' is legitimately so called. In Part I, I shall explain what I mean by ' determinism '. In Part II, I shall make some remarks about 'can'. In Part III, I shall argue that free will and determinism are incompatible. In Part IV, I shall examine some possible objections to the argument of Part III. I shall not attempt to establish the truth or falsity of determinism, or the existence or nonexistence of free will. (shrink)

"This is an important book, and no one interested in issues which touch on the free will will want to ignore it."--Ethics. In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, the author defends the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. He disputes the view that determinism is necessary for moral responsbility. Finding no good reason for accepting determinism, but believing moral responsiblity to be indubitable, he concludes that determinism should be rejected.

I insist that I was able to raise my hand, and I acknowledge that a law would have been broken had I done so, but I deny that I am therefore able to break a law. To uphold my instance of soft determinism, I need not claim any incredible powers. To uphold the compatibilism that I actually believe, I need not claim that such powers are even possible. My incompatibilist opponent is a creature of fiction, but he has his prototypes (...) in real life. He is modeled partly after Peter van Inwagen and partly on myself when I first worried about van Inwagen's argument against compatibilism. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility that chaos theory might be helpful in explaining free will. I will argue that chaos has little to offer if we construe its role as to resolve the apparent conflict between determinism and freedom. However, I contend that the fundamental problem of freedom is to find a way to preserve intuitions about rational action in a physical brain. New work on dynamic computation provides a framework for viewing free choice as a process that is sensitive (...) and unpredictable, while at the same time organized and intelligent. I conclude that this vision of a chaotic brain may make a modest contribution to an intuitively acceptable physicalist account of free will. (shrink)

I discuss several issues that concern human freedom of action. I begin by addressing the question of whether moral responsibility for one's actions and the consequences thereof requires that one have the capacity to have refrained from the action or to have prevented the ensuing consequence. Drawing to a significant extent on Peter van Inwagen's discussion of this matter, I defend certain forms of "alternative possibilities" conditions on moral responsibility against several recent objections, as well as point out a common (...) shortcoming of alternative proposals that abandon such a condition. ;I then go on to ask what sort of account of the metaphysics of action would depict genuinely free and responsible agency. Since I am firmly of the opinion that freedom of action entails causal indeterminism, I restrict my attention to theories that accept this requirement. Broadly speaking, three indeterministic approaches to this issue have been taken in the modern era: simple indeterminism, causal indeterminism, and the agency theory. I argue that and are inadequate for fundamental reasons, through an assessment of the representative work of a few of their contemporary proponents. ;Accordingly, I turn to , the approach that deploys the notion of 'agent-causation', a type of causation that is conceived to be sui generis, irreducible to a relation between events. My attempt to refurbish and defend this rather beleaguered approach takes as its point of departure the work of Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century and, more recently, the writings of Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. In attempting to extend their treatments, I sketch the particular sort of realist account of event causation that I believe is correct, and I try to show that agent causation can readily be understood as a distinct species of the primitive notion of causal production underlying realist accounts of event causation. ;Finally, for the agency theory to provide a truly illuminating model of human action, it must be compatible with ordinary reasons explanations of action. I try to satisfy this constraint by providing an indeterministic account of such explanations that explicitly incorporates the concept of agent causation. (shrink)