Abstract
If moral responsibility requires uncaused action, as I believe, and if a reasons explanation of an action must be a causal explanation, as many philosophers of action suppose, then it follows that our responsible actions are ones we do for no reason, which is preposterous. In previous work I have argued against the second premise of this deduction, claiming that the statement that a person did A in order to satisfy their desire D will be true if the person, while doing A, intended of that action that it contribute to satisfying their desire D, a condition that does not entail any causal connection between the explaining desire and the explained action. This claim has received trenchant criticism from Randolph Clarke. The main part of the present paper responds to Clarke’s latest objections. The rest of the paper addresses another worry about my account (not raised by Clarke): does my non-causal sufficient condition hold as widely as it needs to if responsible, uncaused actions are as widespread as we would like to think?
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Notes
The non-causal libertarian can only hope here because confidence that actions for which we like to think we are morally responsible are, or are traceable to, actions that are uncaused, is far from warranted. Whether it is so is an empirical question to which no one yet knows the answer.
My account of volition can be found in Ginet (1990: Chap. 2).
I am not sure, but this worry might be behind a question put to me by David Widerker: “Where do these intentions come from?”.
Thanks to Ted Everett and David Widerker for comments on an earlier draft, and to David for many stimulating discussions on this and other free-will topics.
References
Clarke, Randolph. 2003. Libertarian accounts of free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, Randolph. 2008. Autonomous reasons for intending. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86: 191–212.
Clarke, Randolph. 2010. Because she wanted to. The Journal of Ethics 14: 27–35.
Ginet, Carl. 1989. Reasons explanation of action: An incompatibilist account. Philosophical Perspectives 3: 17–46.
Ginet, Carl. 1990. On action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ginet, Carl. 2002. Reasons explanations of action: Causalist versus noncausalist accounts. In The Oxford handbook of free will, ed. R. Kane. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ginet, Carl. 2008. In defense of a non-causal account of reasons explanations. The Journal of Ethics 12: 229–237.
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Ginet, C. Reasons Explanation: Further Defense of a Non-causal Account. J Ethics 20, 219–228 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9232-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9232-y