Free Agency, Causation and Action Explanation

Abstract

Part of our intuitive sense of freedom is our commonsense conviction that we, as free agents, can intervene in the natural world and make a difference to the historical course of events. The supposedly ‘scientific’ picture of the natural world painted by some physicalist philosophers appears to threaten this conviction in various ways. Often, the threat is diagnosed simply in terms of a conflict between the ‘libertarian’ conception of the will and the supposed implication of the scientific world view that, in the natural world, everything happens as a result of some mixture of causality and chance. Such a diagnosis makes libertarianism seem an incoherent position, impossibly seeking some middle ground between lawful causal determination and mere randomness. The problem may be posed in the form of a dilemma. All of our actions, including our supposedly free ones, are (it may be said) just events, and all events are either causally determined by prior events or else are chance occurrences (though their chances may be fixed by prior events). Either way, there is no room for the notion that we are the authors of our actions in any sense that would suit the libertarian. For the libertarian wants to say that we are the authors of our actions in a way which renders those actions neither mere chance occurrences nor events that are wholly causally determined by prior events. The libertarian wants to say that we sometimes make a difference to the historical course of events — that is, make the actual course of events different from what it would have been without our interventions. But this requires our ‘interventions’ not to be seen merely as certain events amongst others in the natural course of events. Once we see our own ‘interventions’ in the latter way, they cease to qualify as ‘interventions’ in the appropriate sense, but become instead just part of the natural order which, as free agents, we conceive ourselves as being able to affect through our free decisions.