Abstract
In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort of problem can be overcome if one realizes that the agent herself, as an irreducible substance, is the true originator of her actions. I’ll present arguments that favor this view. Event-causalists have countered that if the agent identifies with some of the inner states that play the self-determining causal role in bringing about the action, then it is as though the action was directly caused by herself. I’ll object that this is not a distinctive aspect of free agency. Agent-causalism has been criticized from most naturalistically inclined fronts, and it must address risks of implausibility, contradiction and unintelligibility. Even though I’ll acknowledge these challenges, I’ll still argue that libertarian free will cannot be defended by any reductionist alternative, and that agent-causalism does not conflict with contemporary science but only with some of its unproven assumptions.
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Notes
- 1.
For the need to avoid some confusion between the two different senses in which incompatibilists and compatibilities use the concept of ability (specific and general ability, respectively) see Franklin (forthcoming).
- 2.
I’m referring here both to moral and physical responsibility. A putatively free agent is responsible also for her morally neutral free actions, such as choosing what to have for dinner. However, it is important to note that all the definitions in this introduction regard free will, not responsibility. I believe that one should avoid using both concepts interchangeably, as sometimes happens in the literature, hence the present article regards specifically the metaphysical concept of free will, as independently from that of responsibility as possible. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me realize the need to make both these aspects more clear.
- 3.
Let me be more precise: according to the Causal Theory of Action, “an event (a bit of behavior or a mental episode) is an action if and only if the event is caused, in the appropriate manner, by mental states of, and/or events involving, the agent.” [Franklin (2013a), p. 5].
- 4.
Cfr. Pereboom (2004, 2007, 2014), Griffith (2010). The ‘No-Choice argument’ by Van Inwagen also argues for the agent’s insufficient control over her own decision: “If an agent’s act was caused but not determined by his prior inner state, and if nothing besides that inner state was causally relevant to the agent’s act, then that agent had no choice about whether that inner state was followed by that act” [van Inwagen (1983), p. 149, cit. in Clarke (2003), p. 98].
- 5.
Pereboom (2014), p. 62.
- 6.
Cfr. Erkstrom (2000).
- 7.
Of course there is a slight exaggeration here: a supposedly determined agent would in fact have a sort of ‘executive power’: she’d be the one who performs the predetermined actions which, simply by taking place in the world, would make a difference as to how reality and history unfold. [Cfr. Clarke (2003), pp. 7–14, on the value of human actions in a deterministic world]. But this sort of power can hardly be considered enough. The agent does act, but she couldn’t have failed to do so. That’s why, in my opinion, she is not ‘in charge’ at all. Compatibilists try to defend that she somehow is, but they have to use highly complex arguments and thought experiments in order to do so. In fact, compatibilism is a very sophisticated thesis, which is usually said to be hardly accepted by ordinary people and even undergraduate philosophy students. Interestingly, the idea that folk intuitions are mainly incompatibilist has been recently challenged by Eddy Nahmias et al. (2005, 2006), but their results are far from conclusive.
- 8.
Lowe, for example, endorses the view according to which all causes are substances: “Events, in my view, may be said to be causes at best only in a loose and derivative sense, as a convenient façon de parler.” [Lowe (2008), p. 5].
- 9.
Carl Ginet, criticizing Clarke’s view on the collaborative causation of free action by reasons and the agent as a substance, in Kane (2002), p. 398.
- 10.
Cfr. Steward (2012).
- 11.
Randolph Clarke is another philosopher who argues for the relevance of an agent-causal libertarian account for what concerns origination or authorship. In the first part of his Libertarian accounts of free will (2003), Clarke defends a centered event-causal libertarian view insofar as it can endow the agent with as much direct proximal control as any compatibilist view, plus the ultimate control that comes with the absence of determinism. However, in the second part, he analyzes the plausibility of an integrated agent-causal proposal, for he too agrees that in order for the agent to have some further form of positive control over her actions, she should be their true originator, which can be granted only if she is able to substance cause them.
- 12.
O’Connor (2000), p. 29.
- 13.
- 14.
This possibility is related to the well known problem of deviant causal chains.
- 15.
Hierarchical compatibilist accounts, such as Harry Frankfurt (1971) or Gary Watson’s (1982), argue that such an identification might suffice for the agent to be considered morally responsible for her action. But even if one accepts such a view of moral responsibility, that doesn’t entail that a dishonest kleptomaniac can be said to be free when he steals out of compulsion. Hierarchical accounts are a good example, I believe, of how free will and moral responsibility are two distinct concepts.
- 16.
I’m borrowing this term from Clarke (n.d.).
- 17.
Whether the agent-causalist will endorse an account of the agent that defines the human person as an animal, a brain, a soul or something else, is something that I believe can be left unsettled for now. Unlike what is sometimes thought, an agent-causal view doesn’t need to presuppose some spiritual being in order to have theoretical coherence, it only needs an irreducible substance (which can be something as concrete as a living and thinking brain) whose power to act amounts to more than the sum of the powers of its parts. O’Connor (2000), Clark (2003), Lowe (2008) and, more recently, Steward (2012) are all examples of authors who tried to put forward accounts of agent-causation that are compatible with materialism. For a very good study on the different possible positions in personal ontology, see Eric Olson’s What are we? (2007).
- 18.
Pereboom (2014), p. 62.
- 19.
Other authors have argued that reductionism is at least as strong a threat to free will as determinism: Roskies (2006), Murphy and Brown (2007), Bishop (2010). Nahmias has been arguing for years that ordinary people fear much more the consequences of reductionism than those of determinism on their freedom: Nahmias et al. (2007, 2010).
- 20.
Cfr. Lowe (2008).
- 21.
Cfr. O’Connor (2000).
- 22.
Cfr. Hasker (1999).
- 23.
Cfr. Clarke (2003, ch. 8–10).
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
Cfr. Galen Strawson’s ‘impossibility argument’, cited and criticized by Clarke in (2003, pp. 170–173). This argument, as well as Strawson’s ‘basic argument’, has been considered fallacious by Clarke as well as many others, as it misstates the lack of causation as the lack of sufficient reasons.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
I believe we can reasonably say that the efforts of most libertarian philosophers in the last decades have been concentrated precisely on showing that one does not have to give up physicalism (and may even be able to keep reductionism) in order to defend genuine free will.
- 30.
Searle (2001), p. 274.
- 31.
Cfr. Dupré (2001).
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Rigato, M.J. Reductionism, Agency and Free Will. Axiomathes 25, 107–116 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9247-6
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Keywords
- Agent-causalism
- Event-causalism
- Reductionism
- Free will
- Libertarianism
- Substance-causation