Abstract
Dwayne Moore raises the physical indeterminism luck objection to libertarian theories of free will, which claims that because agents lack control over the indeterministic physical processes that cause choices, agents lack control over those choices. Moore considers the libertarian strategy of identifying these processes with agential states, such as efforts of will, in order to secure agential control over the outcome of these processes. According to Moore, this strategy faces an insurmountable obstacle in the form of a quausation problem. He argues that naturalistically minded libertarians like Kane are committed to the idea that agential states cause what they do only in virtue of their physical properties. This implies that the agential properties are causally irrelevant to the outcome of these indeterministic processes in which case they cannot help to secure agential control over the outcome. I argue that if Kane is a nonreductive physicalist, he has a way of dealing with the quausation problem.
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Notes
For an interesting discussion of the active control problem see (Lemos, 2022).
Kane’s characterization of undetermined choices as playing a role in self-formation is not something that is shared by the other libertarians Moore discusses. Kane finds this important because he thinks what libertarians really crave is not mere freedom of action (which we get from appropriately non-random undetermined choices) but freedom of will, which is about having what Kane calls ultimate responsibility: being responsible via SFAs for having the character and motives that we do.
I should point out here that Lemos is not necessarily committed to this interpretation of Kane.
This is one potential problem with Lemos’s strategy, though it is unclear whether he thinks that the successful reduction of mental to physical properties entails sameness of explanation or just the legitimacy of mentalistic explanation.
Note that this strategy means that although the causal relation holds between events in extension, explanation is a relation between events under a description, or qua the tokening of a certain property, and so a single event can be the source of multiple explananda. This is similar to Dretske’s approach described earlier, but instead of treating bodily movement and intentional action as distinct events, these should be thought of a distinct explanandum facts grounded in the same event.
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Campbell, N. Quausation and the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection: a Reply to Moore. Philosophia 51, 1129–1142 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00623-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00623-2