This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
In a footnote, McKenna says that because we are situated in the world, it is likely that our concepts bear certain relations to reality. This is undoubtedly true, but I do not think it is enough to undermine my position here. It is plausible to suppose that the fact that we actually possess certain kinds of free will is causally relevant to the fact that we have a concept of free will. But it is not very plausible to suppose that detailed, nuanced facts about the specific kinds of freedom we possess lead us to have a concept of free will that corresponds to these specific kinds of freedom. Thus, determining the exact nature of our concept of free will is not a reliable way of determining which kinds of freedom we have. For instance, and most notably in the present context, suppose we discovered that the ordinary concept of free will is (is not) a libertarian concept; this would not give us any good reason to think that we actually possess (do not possess) libertarian freedom. There is a lot more to say about this, but unfortunately, I cannot get into it here.
Consider the view that ‘free will’ denotes the kind of freedom that human beings actually have, i.e., the kind of freedom that’s actually inherent in choices of the kind that we ordinarily call free, whatever this kind of freedom turns out to be. You might think that this analysis gives us a counterexample to Sweeping Claim. I do not have the space to discuss this worry here, but see pp. 48–50 of my book.
You might want to say that the quantum events that settled which option was chosen form a subset of the events that composed the decision; for you might want to say that the “settling” events were all undetermined events. This will not matter here.
References
Balaguer, M. (2010). Free will as an open scientific problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy, 68, 5–20.
Hausman, D. (1998). Causal asymmetries. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kane, R. (2012). Balaguer’s Fee will as an open scientific problem. Philosophical Studies (this issue).
McKenna, M. (2001). Review of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s Responsibility and control. Journal of Philosophy, XCVIII(2), 93–100.
McKenna, M. (2012). The metaphysical importance of the compatibility question: Comments on Mark Balaguer’s Free will as an open scientific problem. Philosophical Studies (this issue). doi:10.1007/s11098-012-9897-4.
Pereboom, D. (2012). Mark Balaguer’s event-causal libertarianism. Philosophical Studies (this issue).
Velleman, J. D. (1992). What happens when someone acts? Mind, 101, 462–481.
Vihvelin, K. (2004). Free will demystified: A dispositional account. Philosophical Topics, 32, 427–450.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Balaguer, M. Replies to McKenna, Pereboom, and Kane. Philos Stud 169, 71–92 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9893-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9893-8