Goetz on the Noncausal Libertarian View of Free Will

Abstract

According to the libertarian view of free will, people sometimes act freely, but this freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. Goetz (1997, 1998, 2008) has developed an important and unusual libertarian view of free will. Rather than simply arguing that a person’s free actions cannot be causally determined,Goetz argues that they cannot be caused at all. According to Goetz, in order for a person to act freely, her actions must be uncaused. My aim in this essay is to evaluate Goetz’s “noncausal” libertarian view of free will. In section 1, I outline Goetz’s view. In section 2, I develop two criticisms of his view. In section 3, I develop an improved “positive” account of the noncausal view, which takes Goetz’s metaphysical framework as its point of departure but is not subject to the criticisms that plague his development of this framework. Finally, in section 4, I respond to some objections to my proposed noncausal view.