On the Prospects for a Naturalistic Incompatibilist Metaphysics of Agency

Abstract

The ‘metaphysics for freedom’ Helen Steward defends in this wonderfully thoughtful, thorough and challenging book is an ‘incompatibilist’ metaphysics – but hers is an incompatibilism that may surprise many libertarians.1 Steward is an ‘agency-incompatibilist’. She thinks not just that free action is impossible under determinism but that determinism excludes agency altogether. Her principal concern is thus with developing, not so much an indeterministic metaphysics for freedom as an indeterministic metaphysics for agency. Libertarians may also be startled by Steward’s strong attachment to the continuity of human with (higher) animal agency generally. She explicates agency using the notion of the agent’s settling something (‘when an agent acts … various matters are thereby settled by that agent at the time of action’ (31)), and her argument for incompatibilism is essentially that agents cannot settle what has already been settled as would be the case under determinism. But she applies this agent-causal notion of settling, and the incompatibilist conclusion dependent on it, to all animal agency, and not to human agency only.