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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surprising thesis for a libertarian to hold. In light of van Inwagen's holding it, the title of his essay—‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’—may seem unsurprising.
1 I understand determinism, with van Inwagen, as ‘the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future’. See van Inwagen, Peter, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 3Google Scholar.
2 van Inwagen, Peter, ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000), 1–19Google Scholar
3 ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, 17.
4 ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, 17–18.
5 ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, 18.
6 That a world is indeterministic does not entail that no future events have a probability of 1. The following is possible. A certain radioactive particle decayed at t, and that event was not deterministically caused; but the particle had been recruited as a randomizing trigger for a bomb, and once it decayed, the bomb was deterministically caused to explode. At t, when the particle decays, the probability that the bomb will explode at t+n is l.
7 Mele, Alfred, ‘Agents' Abilities’, Noûs 37 (2003), 447–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 My actual statement of this condition qualified agents of the kind at issue further: they have ‘no abnormal source of beliefs about what they will do... and disbelieve all of the following: that they will A unintentionally; that they will A nonintentionally; that they will A but perhaps intentionally and perhaps not’.
9 ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, 17.
10 ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, 18.
11 See e.g. Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 110–11Google Scholar and van Inwagen, ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’.
12 On deciding to A as a momentary mental action of intention formation, see Mele, Alfred, Motivation and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 9Google Scholar. Also see Frankfurt, Harry, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 174–76Google Scholar and McCann, Hugh, ‘Intrinsic Intentionality’, Theory and Decision 20(1986), 254–55Google Scholar.
13 See Motivation and Agency, ch. 9. If it is conceptually impossible to decide to A in the absence of a prior relevant intention to decide what to do, an intention that persists until the decision is made, and if Ann has no such intention before noon in the actual world, the problem arises again. (In the actual world, Ann made up her mind a minute before noon to toss; the coin at noon and did not reopen the question.) However, it is debatable whether the phenomenon at issue is conceptually impossible.
14 For a reference to some complications, see n. 8. Another complication is the possibility of a prior intention to bring it about that one intends to A (for a fanciful illustration, see Motivation and Agency, 203–04Google Scholar). An agent with this higher-order intention would, in certain circumstances, be able to promise to A even though he does not yet intend to A.
15 Two points need to be made here. First, as I use ‘express an intention’, one may express an intention that one mistakenly believes one has. Second, I say ‘typically’ owing to the possibility mentioned in the preceding note.
16 Freedom-level ability may be understood as a kind of ability such that if, setting aside ability conditions, everything necessary for an action's being free were present, adding a suitably exercised ability of this kind would yield sufficient conditions for the action's being free.
17 I am officially agnostic about compatibilism. See Mele, Alfred, Autonomous Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
18 A nontraditional compatibilist view is discussed in Section 4.
19 Kane contends that ‘Exact sameness or difference of possible worlds is not defined if the possible world contains indeterminate efforts or indeterminate events of any kinds’ (The Significance of Free Will, 172). For example, when an agent makes an indeterminate effort to resist temptation, we cannot ‘imagine the same agent in two possible worlds with exactly the same pasts making exactly the same effort and getting lucky in one world and not the other’. According to Kane, in addition to the falsity of determinism, such indeterminacy is required for free action (172–74). For criticism of the idea identified in the first two sentences of this note, see O'Connor, Timothy, Persons and Causes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40–41Google Scholar. For an argument that even if Kane is granted the idea, it does not benefit him, see Mele, Alfred, ‘Ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck’, Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999), 274–93Google Scholar.
20 See Autonomous Agents, 208–9
21 Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 829CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 See Autonomous Agents, 140–42; Mele, Alfred, ‘Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style Scenarios’, Philosophical Topics 24 (1996), 123–41Google Scholar; Mele, Alfred and Robb, David, ‘Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases’, Philosophical Review 107 (1998), 97–112Google Scholar; and Fischer, John, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), ch. 7Google Scholar.
23 ‘Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases’.
24 For references to our critics' work and a reply, see Mele, Alfred and Robb, David, ‘BBs, Magnets and Seesaws: The Metaphysics of Frankfurt- Style Cases’, in Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency, McKenna, M. and Widerker, D. (eds.) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 127–38Google Scholar.
25 See Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, and Fischer, John and Ravizza, Mark, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 The Metaphysics of Free Will, 180.
27 The Metaphysics of Free Will, 168.
28 The Metaphysics of Free Will, 180.
29 Harman, Gilbert, ‘Practical Reasoning’, Review of Metaphysics 79 (1976), 433Google Scholar.
30 Mele, Alfred and Sverdlik, Steven, ‘Intention, Intentional Action, and Moral Responsibility’, Philosophical Studies 82 (1996), 265–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Mele, Alfred, Springs of Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 113–14Google Scholar.
32 On the view I favor, overt actions begin in the brain (see Adams, Frederick and Mele, Alfred, ‘The Intention/Volition Debate’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992), 323–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) But this is another point on which there is no need to insist for my purposes in this article.
33 Perhaps, in normal cases, one's reasons for deciding to A are limited to one's reasons for A-ing. (For discussion, see Mele, Alfred, ‘Intending for Reasons’, Mind 101 (1992), 327–33Google Scholar and Pink, Thomas, The Psychology of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.) But whatever the truth is about normal cases, there are unusual scenarios—for example, the scenario in Gregory Kavka's toxin puzzle—in which one has a reason to decide to A that is not a reason to A (Kavka, Gregory, ‘The Toxin Puzzle’, Analysis 43 (1983), 33–36)Google Scholar. In these cases, there is a (potential) payoff for deciding to A that is not a (potential) payoff for A -ing. Hence, the parenthetical inclusion of ‘decide to’ in the sentence to which this note is appended.
34 See Moore, G. E., Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), ch. 6Google Scholar and Ayer, A. J., ‘Freedom and Necessity’, in Ayer's Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1954), ch. 12Google Scholar.
35 van Inwagen, Peter, ‘When Is the Will Free?’, Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989), 399–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 See Fischer, John and Ravizza, Mark, ‘When the Will is Free’, Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992), 423–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar and O'Connor, Persons and Causes, 101–7.
37 ‘When Is the Will Free?’, 417.
38 See Mele, ‘Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style Scenarios’, 134.
39 An Essay on Free Will, 16.
40 For an unusual science fiction case of this kind, see Mele, Motivation and Agency, 203–4.
41 This claim is compatible, of course, with the idea that promise-level ability is sometimes exercised in performing actions that we have not promised to perform.
42 The second conjunct is explained by the definition of ‘basically free action’ with which I am working.
43 See ‘Ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck’.
44 See Kane, The Significance of Free Will, 109–14, 134–35, 143, 179–80, 191.
45 You toy with the thought that the agent may be blamed for the decision if past free decisions of his had the result, by way of their effect on his character, that there was a significant chance that he would decide contrary to his best judgment. But it occurs to you that the same worry arises about past free decisions the agent made.
46 For discussion of the cited material, see Autonomous Agents, 197–203.
47 Autonomous Agents, 197–98.
48 Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Jean Nicod Institute (Paris; May 2002) and the University of Oxford (September 2002). I am grateful to my audiences for fruitful discussion.
