Free will sans metaphysics?

Abstract

The central thesis of Mark Balaguer’s short, lively and accessible book is that there is no distinctively metaphysical problem of free will. On the one hand, we have a question of conceptual analysis (and hence not of metaphysics): what do we, or should we, mean when we say that someone acts freely? Thus acting freely might be a matter of being able to act on the basis of your choices (‘Humean’ freedom), or having effective second-order volitions (‘Frankfurtian’ freedom), or being in control of decisions that are undetermined right up to the moment of choice (a certain kind of libertarian freedom), and so on. This is the ‘what-is-free-will’ question. On the other hand, we have the ‘which-kinds-of-freedom-do-we-have’ question: do we actually have Humean freedom, Frankfurtian freedom, libertarian freedom, and so on? Granted that it is pretty obvious that most of us do, at least sometimes, enjoy compatibilist freedoms, such as Humean and Frankfurtian freedom, the interesting part of this question amounts to whether we have libertarian freedom. And that, Balaguer argues, is an empirical question—and so, again, not a question of metaphysics. Moreover, it is a question that is, given the current state of scientific enquiry, wide open, hence the title of the book. The book’s structure is admirably straightforward. Chapter 1 sets the stage by identifying what Balaguer sees as the central problem of free will. He defines the notion of ‘L-freedom’ (short for ‘libertarian freedom’) as: ‘a person is L-free if and only if she makes at least some decisions that are such that (a) they are both undetermined and appropriately non-random, and (b) the indeterminacy is relevant to the appropriate non-randomness in the sense that it ‘procures’ or ‘enhances’ nonrandomness (10). He then defines the thesis of ‘FE-determinism’, or ‘No FreedomEnhancing Indeterminism’: ‘There are no freedom-enhancing indeterminacies in any human decision-making processes. In other words ... human beings do not possess L-freedom’ (12). With these definitions in place, Balaguer’s ‘new and