FREE WILL AND LUCK

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Randy Clarke and Fritz Warfield for comments on a draft of this article and to Neil Levy and Michael McKenna for organizing this symposium. Notes 1. Pereboom sometimes makes the same mistake in his contribution to this symposium. He writes: ‘is there still reason to think that Anne's exercise of her agent-causal power [is] merely a matter of luck? Although there is another world with the same laws of nature and the same past up to the point of Anne's decision in which she does not decide to stop and help, her actual causing this decision is not a matter of luck…’ (my emphasis). 2. Toward the end of Chapter 3, I say that ‘agent causationists would significantly advance their cause if they were to show that’ a cross-world difference, D, of the kind I have highlighted ‘is not just a matter of luck or explain why, despite D’s being just a matter of luck, in agent-causing an action an agent exercises' what I call ‘MR freedom-level control’ (pp. 76–77)—that is, a kind of control ‘such that to exercise control of that kind is to satisfy all freedom-relevant conditions for basic moral responsibility’ (p. 76). I regard the first of the two tasks identified here as hopeless. 3. Consider the following claim by Harry Frankfurt: ‘If someone does something because he wants to do it, and if he has no reservations about that desire but is wholeheartedly behind it, then—so far as his moral responsibility for doing it is concerned—it really does not matter how he got that way. One further requirement must be added …: the person's desires and attitudes have to be relatively well integrated into his general psychic condition. Otherwise they are not genuinely his … As long as their interrelations imply that they are unequivocally attributable to him … it makes no difference—so far as evaluating his moral responsibility is concerned—how he came to have them’ (2002, 27). I believe that compatibilists who agree with Frankfurt also suffer from a kind of tunnel vision (see Chapter 7). 4. I eliminated an asterisk after ‘basically.’ On what the asterisk signifies, see p. 115. 5. Incidentally, I myself do not use a ‘disappearing agent’ formulation of any problem that cross-world luck poses for event-causal libertarians. I debunk a related alleged problem of disappearing agents in Mele (2003 Mele, A. 2003. Motivation and agency, New York: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], chap. 10). 6. Pereboom also asserts that ‘Causal determination by factors beyond Plum's control most plausibly explains his lack of moral responsibility in the first case, and I think we are forced to say that he is not morally responsible in the second case for the same reason’ (2001, 114), and he makes a parallel claim about case 3 (2001, 115). Here the explanandum is the (alleged) fact that Plum lacks moral responsibility rather than the intuition that he lacks it. The test to be sketched of Pereboom's ‘best explanation’ premise about an intuition can be modified to apply to a parallel ‘best explanation’ premise about Plum's alleged lack of moral responsibility. 7. Obviously, additional evidence may support a different conclusion—for example, that something (other than the Ys) that accompanies the Xs broke the original dam. 8. I replace ‘blameworthy’ with ‘morally responsible’ because I want to answer a general question with one sentence rather than using two or more sentences to answer two or more sub-questions. Also, the ellipses mark the deletion of ‘therefore.’ 9. Chapter 4 features an indeterministic Frankfurt-style case. Obviously, in Frankfurt-style cases set in deterministic worlds, there is no possibility of indeterministic initiation.