Abstract
This article is a critical discussion of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent objection” to event-causal libertarianism in his Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014). This objection is an important plank in Pereboom’s argument for free will skepticism. It is intended to knock event-causal libertarianism, a leading pro-free-will view, out of contention. I explain why readers should not find the objection persuasive.
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Notes
As I understand (2), the idea is not that one decides to A and then immediately enters a state of being decided upon A-ing. Instead, one enters that state at the very time at which one decides to A.
The general problem applies to other actions too, but I focus on decisions here.
I mentioned that “decision” sometimes refers to the act of deciding and sometimes to “the immediate issue of the act, a decision state, a state of being decided upon something” (Mele 1992, p. 158). Which is D supposed to be? Pereboom writes: “What the agent-causal libertarian posits is an agent who possesses a causal power, fundamentally as a substance, to cause a decision—or more comprehensively, as O’Connor (2009) specifies, ‘the coming to be of a state of intention to carry out some act’—without being causally determined to do so, and thereby to settle, with the requisite control, whether this state of intention will occur” (2014, p. 51). A “state of intention” to A formed in an act of deciding to A is a decision state.
There are readings of “freely A-ed” on which the following sentence is true: “While Bob was away on vacation, mice ran freely about his house.” Such readings do not concern me. My interest in free action in the present article (and elsewhere) is in what I called moral-responsibility-level free action—“roughly, free action of such a kind that if all the freedom-independent conditions for moral responsibility for a particular action were satisfied without that sufficing for the agent’s being morally responsible for it, the addition of the action’s being free to this set of conditions would entail that he is morally responsible for it” (Mele 2006, p. 17). I note that the subjunctive conditional just quoted leaves it open that there are moral-responsibility-level free actions for which the agents are not morally responsible. As I understand moral responsibility, agents are not morally responsible for nonmoral actions; and a nonmoral action may satisfy the subjunctive conditional.
In Gregory Kavka’s well-known toxin puzzle (1983), there is a payoff specifically for intending to drink a certain toxin—a reward for intending to drink it that is not contingent on one’s drinking it. The payoff might have been for deciding to drink the toxin.
For discussion of the disjunction here, see Mele (2013a).
This idea is developed in Pereboom (2015). I mentioned Pereboom’s uncertainty about the conceptual and metaphysical possibility of agent causation in his 2014 book. He writes: “It may turn out that fundamental substance causation is metaphysically impossible, or even conceptually impossible” (2014, p. 58). This claim is not restricted to substance causation (including agent causation) in an indeterministic setting.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Randy Clarke and Derk Pereboom for comments on a draft of this article and to Stephen Kearns for discussion. This article was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Mele, A.R. On Pereboom’s Disappearing Agent Argument. Criminal Law, Philosophy 11, 561–574 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9374-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9374-1