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Self-forming actions, contrastive explanations, and the structure of the will

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Abstract

Robert Kane’s libertarian theory is often attacked on the grounds that undetermined self-forming actions are not amenable to contrastive explanation. I propose that we should understand contrastive explanations in terms of an appeal to structuring causes. Doing so reveals that Kane’s claim that there can be no contrastive explanation for self-forming actions is not an unwanted implication of his appeal to indeterminism, but is actually an implication of the fact that the agent’s will is not yet appropriately structured. I then explain how this can assist Kane with the luck objection.

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Notes

  1. Here, it is important to note that the kind of contrastive explanation Kane denies for SFAs is one that appeals to reasons that are conclusive in the sense that it would have been irrational for the agent to have chosen otherwise. According to Kane, in an SFA the agent does not have conclusive reasons for the choice she makes, but instead has satisficing reasons that make her choice rational in a way that does not rule out other rational alternatives.

  2. The relevance of such examples has been questioned by Franklin (2013). For Kane’s reply, see Kane (2016b).

  3. For criticisms of this strategy see Allen (2005) and Lemos (2011).

  4. A similar move is made by Ekstrom (2003).

  5. There is actually a fourth aspect to Kane’s reply that constitutes one of his three plurality conditions (alongside plural rationality and plural voluntary control—the first two of which I mentioned above). This is plural voluntariness, which Kane construes in terms of compatibilist freedom from coercion and compulsion.

  6. See also Clarke (1996).

  7. I’m not sure Dretske endorses this approach any longer. In his (1995) Dretske acquiesces to Kim’s (1995) criticism that given his commitment to naturalism, exclusion pressures arise in a new guise. For further discussion see Marras (1998) and Campbell and Moore (2009).

  8. Dretske occasionally drifts somewhat in his characterization of the explanandum when he appeals to structuring causes. At times, he is clear that the structuring cause explains why the triggering cause is sufficient for its effect, or explains how the triggering cause came to play this type of causal role, and at other times he seems to treat structuring and triggering causes as different types of explanation for the same explanandum fact. My reading of Dretske is that these explanations have different explananda and that when they appear to converge this is an elliptical claim about how the triggering cause came to play the causal role it does in the relevant causal system. My examples should be understood in the same way.

  9. Although Dretske claims that triggering causes are nomological, I see no reason to deny the possibility that triggering causes can be probabilistic, given that law-likeness admits of degrees.

  10. Dretske acknowledges that due to the special circumstances of this example (the explosion destroys the causal system) the relationship between the structuring cause and the effect is not one-many as it typically would be in cases where the triggering cause does not bring about the destruction of the causal system in question.

  11. It’s not clear, for example, that the roll-back argument (Van Inwagen 2000) relies on the point about contrastive explanation to motivate the conclusion about luck.

  12. I would like to express my gratitude to Bob Kane and to John Lemos for their generous comments on an early draft of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful feedback and for pushing me to improve this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Ave., West, Waterloo, ON, N2L3C5, Canada

    Neil Campbell

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Campbell, N. Self-forming actions, contrastive explanations, and the structure of the will. Synthese 197, 1225–1240 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1749-0

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