Abstract
For those who maintain that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, a persistent problem is to give a coherent characterization of action that is neither determined by prior events nor random, arbitrary, lucky or in some way insufficiently under the control of the agent to count as free action. One approach—that of Roderick Chisholm and others—is to say that a third alternative is for an action to be caused by an agent in a way that is not reducible to event causal terms. A different approach than the Chisholmian appeal to primitive substance causation is one that, instead, involves causal relations purely among events. This paper presents a particular event-causal indeterminist account of free action, describing both its attractions and recent objections to it, and then proposes a revised version, with the aim of supporting the plausibility of an event-causal indeterminist approach to free will.
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Notes
van Inwagen (1983, p. 3). An alternative formulation is as follows. Thesis of determinism: Every event is causally necessitated by prior events and the laws of nature.
On the alternative formulation, the thesis of indeterminism is this: It is not the case that every event is causally necessitated by prior events and laws of nature.
Shaffer (2014). Since, in the indeterministic case, views of causation set out centrally in terms of nomological subsumption, counterfactual dependence, and manipulability tend to converge in their development with the statistical correlation view, one might count them as instances of the first theme.
For discussion see Shaffer (2001).
Cf. Eells (1991).
Lewis’s theory is, of course, controversial.
Watson (1987). John Martin Fischer’s guidance control account of the sort of agential control over action required for moral responsibility might be thought to be an exception to this generalization. But even Fischer’s account involves an approach to incorporating the idea that a free act is self-directed or one’s own, in that he requires that the mechanism issuing in the act be one’s own. And although Fischer emphasizes that it is the actual-sequence mechanism that grounds moral responsibility for an act, still the way the requisite mechanism is defined, in terms of reasons-responsiveness, incorporates the way things would have gone in nearby possibly worlds (had there been other reasons, the agent would have responded to them and would have acted differently). So the characterization of the actual-sequence mechanism has a particular kind of alternative possibility requirement built in. I note this in Ekstrom (2011). See Fischer and Ravizza (1998).
Watson (1975).
Watson (1987).
Preferences, as I use the term, are not necessarily higher-order in Frankfurt’s sense, as one may prefer to act in a particular way or one may prefer to have a certain desire.
Ekstrom (2011).
Randolph Clarke writes, “(contrary to what Ekstrom implies) human agents are no more constituted by these mental states and capacities than they are by the states and capacities of their circulatory systems” (2003, p. 62). But the project is not to give a metaphysical account of personal identity. Perhaps as a matter of metaphysics a person is a human animal. At issue here, instead, is the question of which attitudes, events, and powers or faculties comprise the self in that they are agent-involving in the production of free action. The aim is to reduce the agent causation of an act to event-causal terms. And so the issue is what plays the role of making it the case that the agent is present and is in charge when she acts freely.
Frankfurt’s account of free action does not incorporate a non-manipulation or non-coercion condition. With respect to free action, Frankfurt says that it matters how we are when we act, but not how we got to be that way.
An even more strict view would result if we were to require that the preference on which one acts cohere with one’s system of preferences and acceptances, as I require for autonomous action in Ekstrom (1993, (2005a, (2005b). But I do not think that autonomous action as it is defined on the coherence account is required for moral responsibility in the desert sense. I argue that the theory of autonomy has other uses.
See van Inwagen (2002), Ekstrom (2000, (2011), Kane (1996), Clarke (2003), Pereboom (2001, 2014a). For development of an intriguing view that defends primitive agent (substance) causation and also incorporates non-causal elements, see Lowe (2008). For critical discussion of Lowe’s account, see Clarke (2010) and Griffith (2009).
Clarke does not reject event-causal indeterminist accounts wholesale—he thinks that a centered event-causal indeterminist account does secure certain values over what is secured by a compatibilist account—but he maintains that the former does not give a right account of the sort of control we need to have for deserved attributions of praise and blame. Pereboom writes, “I think that Ekstrom may well be right to argue that given these conditions [of the undefeated authorized preference account of free action], indeterminacy need not make preferences and decisions purposeless, that is does not make them accidental, and that it does not preclude rational explanation” (2014a, p. 37). Instead Pereboom rejects event-causal libertarianism for reasons to be discussed below.
Ekstrom (2003). In that article, I argued that van Inwagen’s argument for free will-indeterminism incompatibilism implicity relies on differing notions of ‘chance’ and that there is no single construal of the term on which all of the premises are true. Franklin (2011) misunderstands this point, reading me as neglecting van Inwagen’s characterization of chance in terms of probability.
Pritchard’s (2005) account has two conditions:
(L1) If an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual world but which does not occur in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world.
(L2) If an event is lucky, then it is an event that is significant to the agent concerned (or would be significant, were the agent to be availed of the relevant facts).
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Ekstrom, L.W. Toward a plausible event-causal indeterminist account of free will. Synthese 196, 127–144 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1143-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1143-8