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Notes
Alfred Mele, Free Will and Luck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). I say “floated” because I do not endorse DSL. In section 2, I comment on the dialectical work DSL does for me.
Martin Montminy, “Soft Libertarianism and the Value of Incompatibilist Control” Journal of Value Inquiry (2021) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09810-4.
Mele, Free Will and Luck, 95.
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 106-11.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., chap. 5
Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 19. For more on deciding, see Alfred Mele, “Deciding to Act,” Philosophical Studies 100 (2000): 81-108 or Alfred Mele, Aspects of Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 2.
Ibid., 105. In a Frankfurt-style case (if it works), there are just two ways things can go at a crucial time: either an agent decides on his own at a time t to A or a fail-safe device or potential intervener makes him decide at t to A. It is claimed that the agent who decides on his own to A freely decides to A and is morally responsible for deciding to A even though he could not have done otherwise at the time than decide to A. For a seminal discussion, see Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829-839.
Ibid., 115.
Ibid.
Montminy, “Soft Libertarianism and the Value of Incompatibilist Control,” 3.
Ibid.
Ibid., 12.
Mele, Free Will and Luck, 114.
19. Montminy focuses on valuing independence from the past, an idea I develop in my presentation of modest libertarianism. An important difference between DSLs and modest libertarians is that the former value independence from the past all the way up to the moment of decision and the latter do not.
20. Montminy, “Soft Libertarianism and the Value of Incompatibilist Control,” 5.
Ibid., 6.
Mele, Free Will and Luck, 114.
23. Ibid.
Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23.
Ibid., 121.
26. Ibid., 125.
Mele, Free Will and Luck, 116.
Ibid., 115-16.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 116-17.
Montminy, “Soft Libertarianism and the Value of Incompatibilist Control,” 2.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 10. For the assumption, see, e.g., Montminy’s report that he wants to “focus on DSLs’ desire that things be such that there is often a probability of their acting akratically because of some indeterministic process occurring in their brain” (Ibid., 7).
Mele, Free Will and Luck, 115-16; italic removed.
Ibid., 202-5. Winning the fight would depend on showing, among other things, that compatibilism is false and that there actually are decisions that are indeterministically caused by their proximal causes. (I do not try to show either of these things.)
Ibid., 115-16.
Event-causal libertarians (unlike non-causal libertarians, for example) contend that free actions have events and states as causes.
Montminy, “Soft Libertarianism and the Value of Incompatibilist Control,” 11.
Ibid., 10.
In chapter 10 of Aspects of Agency, I argue that libertarians should prefer the latter view to Robert Kane’s event-causal libertarian view. I am grateful to Martin Montminy for comments on a draft of this article.
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Mele, A.R. Soft Libertarianism and Quantum Randomizers. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09917-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09917-2