Abstract
Libertarian theories of freedom and responsibility face a worry about luck: if an action is undetermined, the action cannot be legitimately attributed to the agent; instead the action is a matter of luck, and so the agent is not responsible for the action. Robert Kane defends libertarianism by appealing to self-forming actions (“SFAs”). These actions are undetermined because the agent is attempting to act on two conflicting motives, but the agent is responsible for the outcome if she is responsible for having those motives. If the agent “endorsed” both motives in earlier SFAs, Kane argues that we can hold the agent responsible for both motives, and hence responsible for the later SFA. We will further develop others’ arguments that Kane’s appeal to earlier SFAs to explain responsibility for a later SFA is unsatisfactory. We then raise a second objection to Kane’s use of SFAs. On one formulation of an SFA, the agent does three things: she exerts two efforts of will to make opposing choices, and she also acts on one of them. On another formulation of an SFA, the agent does just two things: she exerts two efforts of will to make opposing choices. One of those efforts turns out to be successful, but that success doesn’t require any further intervention from the agent. We distinguish two worries involving luck, a problem of resultant luck and a problem of constitutive luck, and show that neither model of SFAs solves both problems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
There is also a sense in which transmission does generate justification – if B1 is a justified belief, and B2 is justified by inferring it from B1, then the inference bestows justification on B2 that B2 did not already have. In that sense, justification for B2 has been generated via transmission. But the justification accruing to B2 was pre-existing justification for B1, so in the sense we will rely on here, transmission applies pre-existing justification to new beliefs, and as such does not generate justification.
Kane (2007d: 290) writes “If agents must be responsible to some degree for anything that is a sufficient cause or motive of their actions, an impossible infinite regress of past actions would be required unless some actions in the agent’s life history … were not determined”.
“A” is meant to be a decision that would count for Kane as a libertarian free decision. [Thanks to an anonymous referee for noting the need to make this clarification.]
Kane writes in a variety of places (see for example 2007a: 31) that it is question-begging for the anti-libertarian to say that undetermined actions are a matter of luck, though it is common in the literature for the objection to be phrased in those terms. The heart of the objection is that nothing fully explains why an undetermined action occurs, and that in order to regard an agent as the source of an action, there would need to be some feature of the agent that explains why the action occurred so that we could legitimately attribute the action to the agent herself. It is clear that while Kane thinks it is dialectically inappropriate to phrase the objection using the terminology of “luck”, he does think there is a genuine objection to which he owes a response, so we will set aside his worries about using the word “luck” in explicating the problem.
See for instance Kane (2007a: 36).
Kane takes further pains to argue (2007a: 32, 36; 2007b: 174–175) that although the outcome was undetermined, it would not be appropriate to view the presence of indeterminism as the cause of the outcome. Again, Kane is concerned to block objections stemming from the problem of resultant luck. This will be essential to the final conclusions of the present paper, as we will be arguing that Kane faces two distinct problems concerning luck, and that the tempting solution to one of those problems prevents him from solving the other problem.
See for instance (2011: 388–390).
Kane (2007c: 298) quotes a correspondent raising a similar question.
Kane (2007a: 33) writes that an agent is responsible for an SFA because “she will have succeeded in doing what she was trying and wanting to do all along … and … when she succeeded … her reaction was not ‘Oh dear, that was a mistake, an accident – something that happened to me, not something I did.’ Rather she endorsed the outcome as something she was trying and wanting to do all along; she recognized the choice as her resolution of the conflict in her will.” This passage captures what is contained in clause (b).
As noted above, in Section 4 we will consider another kind of response Kane has offered to explain how a libertarian might argue that the earliest SFAs generate a limited degree of responsibility.
The quote in footnote 10 illustrates this – no element in that passage requires indeterminism.
In Section 4 we will consider a way for Kane to argue that the agent was responsible (though only to a limited degree) for the efforts of will precipitating the first SFA.
A different answer will be addressed in the next section.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for noting these references and calling for an expanded discussion.
References
Clarke, R. (1997). On the possibility of rational free action. Philosophical Studies, 88, 37–57.
Clarke, R. (2003). Libertarian accounts of free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. (1996). The significance of free will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. (2004). Agency, responsibility, and indeterminism: reflections on libertarian theories of free will. In J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, & D. Shier (Eds.), Freedom and determinism (pp. 70–88). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kane, R. (2007a). Libertarianism. In J. M. Fischer, R. Kane, D. Pereboom, & M. Vargas (Eds.), Four Views on Free Will (pp. 5–43). Malden: Blackwell.
Kane, R. (2007b). Responses to Fischer, Pereboom and Vargas. In J. M. Fischer, R. Kane, D. Pereboom, & M. Vargas (Eds.), Four Views on Free Will (pp. 166–183). Malden: Blackwell.
Kane, R. (2007c). Free will: new directions for an ancient problem. A reply to Allen and Rogers. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 18, 291–302.
Kane, R. (2007d). Incompatibilism. In J. Hawthorne, T. Sider, & D. Zimmerman (Eds.), Contemporary debates in metaphysics (pp. 285–302). Oxford: Blackwell.
Kane, R. (2011). Rethinking free will new perspectives on an ancient problem. In R. Kane (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of free will (2nd ed., pp. 381–406). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. (2016). On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will. Philosophical Explorations, 19(1), 2–16.
Lemos, J. (2015). Self-forming acts and the grounds of responsibility. Philosophia, 43, 135–146.
Mele, A. (2006). Free will and luck. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (1979). Moral Luck. In Mortal Questions (pp. 24–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pereboom, D. (2007). Hard incompatibilism. In J. M. Fischer, R. Kane, D. Pereboom, & M. Vargas (Eds.), Four Views on Free Will (pp. 85–125). Malden: Blackwell.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the audience at the Tennessee Value and Agency Conference (in particular Robert Kane) and an anonymous referee for comments that helped improve this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Murday, B. Can Self-Forming Actions Dispel Worries about Luck?. Philosophia 45, 1313–1330 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9808-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9808-6