Article

Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter.

January 2015

Authors:

Kadri Vihvelin’s Causes, Laws,and Free Will is a thorough and rigorous discussion of free will as a metaphysical issue. While she counts moral responsibility among the reasons to value free will, her focus is elsewhere—defending the idea that determinism is compatible the ability to do otherwise than what one actually does. Vihvelin distinguishes and clarifies several perceived threats to the idea that we have free will, zeroing in on the challenge to free will posed by a certain conception of determinism. She meets this challenge by showing that commonsense views about ourselves as agents do not commit us to a libertarian Agent Causation theory and arguing that known arguments for incompatibilism fail. While she claims that refuting incompatibilist arguments is sufficient support for compatibilism, she does go on to offer a compatibilist dispositional account of free will as a bundle of abilities.

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Article

Two Accounts of the Problem of Enhanced Control

October 2021 · Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Damir Ćićić

According to event-causal libertarianism, an action is free in the sense relevant to moral responsibility when it is caused indeterministically by an agent’s beliefs, desires, intentions, or by their occurrences. This paper attempts to clarify one of the major objections to this theory: the objection that the theory cannot explain the relevance of indeterminism to this kind of freedom (known as ... [Show full abstract] free will). Christopher Evan Franklin (2011, 2018) has argued that the problem of explaining the relevance of indeterminism to free will (which he calls “the problem of enhanced control”) arises because it is difficult to see how indeterminism could enhance our abilities, and disappears when we realize that beside the relevant abilities free will requires opportunities. In this paper, I argue that the problem occurs not because of the focus on abilities, but because of the difficulty to explain how indeterminism could contribute to the satisfaction of the sourcehood condition of free will in the framework of event-causal theory of action.

Article

Alfred mele's metaphysical freedom?

June 2007 · Philosophical Explorations

In this paper we raise three questions of clarification about Alfred Mele's fine recent book, Free Will and Luck. Our questions concern the following topics: (i) Mele's combination of ‘luck’ and ‘Frankfurt-style’ objections to libertarianism, (ii) Mele's stipulations about ‘compatibilism’ and the relation between questions about free action and questions about moral responsibility, and (iii) ... [Show full abstract] Mele's treatment of the Consequence Argument.

Article

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Libertarian Accounts of Free Will

January 2006

Randolph Clarke

Libertarian accounts of free will face objections that the indeterminism they require would leave behavior random, inexplicable, and beyond agents' control. This book examines three main types of libertarian views-noncausal, event-causal, and agent-causal-to see how well they can meet such challenges. Noncausal accounts are found not to offer satisfactory views of action and reason-explanation. ... [Show full abstract] Event-causal and agent-causal accounts are defended against a number of objections. But if both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism, then there is no adequate account of free will.

Article

Naturalism and moral responsibility. The Frankfurt-type examples

January 2012

B. László

The article analyses the connection between naturalism and moral responsibility in the contemporary debate about free will, focusing on theories which propose accounts of free will compatible with naturalism. The first part of the paper provides a critical assessment of the traditional compatibilist approach and Kane's event-causal libertarianism. I argue that both approaches fail as neither can ... [Show full abstract] simultaneously satisfy the autonomy-condition and the alternative-condition of free will, while the supporters of both conceptions think that satisfaction of these conditions is important. The second part surveys semi-compatibilism and the semi-compatibilists' well-known method of argumentation which is based on Frankfurt-type examples. This, I believe, is the most promising approach; nevertheless, Frankfurt-type examples cannot be conclusive because of the flicker of freedom which is necessarily included in them. My conclusion is that naturalism and moral responsibility cannot be easily reconciled, thus, presumably, naturalism has considerable ethical consequences.

Chapter

Troubles with Libertarianism

November 1990

Richard Double

This monograph offers a new argument concerning free will and moral responsibility. Double identifies hierarchical compatibilism - a view espoused by such philosophers as Frankfurt, Neely, Watson, Levin, and Dennett - as the most plausible account of free will, showing how compatibilism can be successfully defended against incompatibilist objections. He goes on, however, to demonstrate that even ... [Show full abstract] the compatibilist account of free will ultimately faces insuperable objections, and concludes that free will is an essentially incoherent notion.

Article

Event-causal libertarianism, functional reduction, and the disappearing agent argument

September 2014 · Philosophical Studies

Christopher Evan Franklin

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal ... [Show full abstract] libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified.

Article

On alfred mele's free will and luck

June 2007 · Philosophical Explorations

Derk Pereboom

I argue that agent-causal libertarianism has a strong initial rejoinder to Mele's luck argument against it, but that his claim that it has yet to be explained how agent-causation yields responsibility-conferring control has significant force. I suggest an avenue of response. Subsequently, I raise objections to Mele's criticisms of my four-case manipulation argument against compatibilism.

Article

Lucky agents, big and little: Should size really matter?

December 2011 · Philosophical Studies

David Blumenfeld

This essay critically examines Alfred R. Mele’s attempt to solve a problem for libertarianism that he calls the problem of present luck. Many have thought that the traditional libertarian belief in basically free acts (where the latter are any free A-ings that occur at times at which the past up to that time and the laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing at that time) entail ... [Show full abstract] that the acts are due to luck at the time of the act (present luck) rather than to the kind of agent control required for genuinely free, morally responsible action. While libertarians frequently have tried to rebut the claim that basically free acts are due to present luck, Mele argues for the daring thesis that they should embrace present luck rather than try to explain it away. His strategy is to argue that the assumption of present luck in the decisions of very young children (or “little agents”) does not preclude us from attributing to them a small amount of moral responsibility and that this makes it possible to conceive of moral development as a gradual process in which as the frequency of the indeterministically caused free actions increases, the agents take on greater and greater moral responsibility. In this paper I give several possible reconstructions of Mele’s argument and analyze in detail why none of them succeeds. KeywordsDaring soft libertarianism–Present luck–Little agents–Free will–Moral responsibility

Article

Determinism and Its Relevance to the Free-Will Question

September 2015

Mark Balaguer

This paper begins with an argument for the claim that the compatibilism question (i.e., the question of whether free will is compatible with determinism) is less relevant than it might seem to questions about the metaphysical nature of human decision-making processes. Next, libertarianism (i.e., the view that human beings possess an indeterministic, libertarian sort of free will) is defended ... [Show full abstract] against a number of objections, and it is argued that there’s a certain subset of our decisions (which can be called torn decisions) for which the following is true: If these decisions are appropriately undetermined at the moment of choice, then they are also free in a libertarian sort of way. This is an extremely important and surprising result; it entails that the question of whether libertarianism is true reduces to the straightforwardly empirical question of whether our torn decisions are in fact undetermined (in the appropriate way) at the moment of choice. Finally, the paper ends by arguing that as of right now, there is no compelling empirical evidence on either side of this question. In other words, the question of whether our torn decisions are appropriately undetermined is an open empirical question. And from this, it follows that the question of whether libertarianism is true is also an open empirical question.

Article

THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM: AN ABDUCTIVE APPROACH

September 2019 · Social Philosophy and Policy

Kristin Mickelson

This essay begins by dividing the traditional problem of free will and determinism into a “correlation” problem and an “explanation” problem. I then focus on the explanation problem, and argue that a standard form of abductive reasoning (that is, inference to the best explanation) may be useful in solving it. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the abductive approach, I apply it to three standard ... [Show full abstract] accounts of free will. While each account implies the same solution to the correlation problem, each implies a unique solution to the explanationproblem. For example, all libertarian-friendly accounts of free will imply that it is impossible to act freely when determinism is true. However, only a narrow subset of libertarians have the theoretical resources to defend the incompatibilist claim that deterministic laws ( qua deterministic) undermine free will, while other libertarians must reject this traditional incompatibilist view.

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Causality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Nikāya Buddhism

July 2023 · Comparative Philosophy An International Journal of Constructive Engagement of Distinct Approaches toward World Philosophy

Soo Lam Wong

In this paper, I aim to examine the relationship between the Buddhist notions of causality and agency, the questions of whether the Buddhist notion of causality affirms causal determinism and whether the Buddhist notion of agency affirms libertarian free will, the implications of the Buddhist notions of causality and agency for moral responsibility, and the implications of the Buddhist rejection ... [Show full abstract] of the metaphysical self for agency and moral responsibility. My claim is that although the question of whether the early Buddhist notions of causality and agency affirm causal determinism and libertarian free will respectively remains open, they are compatible with each other, and with the Buddhist notion of moral responsibility, without needing to affirm or deny libertarian free will, causal determinism, their compatibility with each other, or retrospective moral responsibility.

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An Essay Arguing Against Moral Responsibility: How Metaphysical Libertarianism Does not Support Blam...

October 2019

David Warren

This paper makes the claim that if Agent Causation Libertarian (free will) is true, we are still not morally responsible for our actions, due to our will existing prior to this.