Alfred Mele

Libertarianism about free will is the conjunction of two theses: the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and at least some human beings sometimes exercise free will (or act freely, for short). 1 Some libertarian views feature agent causation, others maintain that free actions are uncaused, and yet others – event-causal libertarian views – reject all views of these two kinds and appeal to indeterministic causation by events and states. 2 This article explores the relative merits of two different views of this third kind. One is Robert Kane's prominent view, and the other is the ‘daring libertarian’ view that I floated in Free Will and Luck. 3 (I labeled the view ‘daring’ to distinguish it from a more modest libertarian view that I floated a decade earlier.) 4 I say ‘floated’ because I am not a libertarian. I do not endorse incompatibilism; instead, I am agnostic about it. But if I were a libertarian, I would embrace my daring libertarian view (or DLV, for short). This article's thesis is that event-causal libertarians should prefer DLV to Kane's ‘dual or multiple efforts’ view.

One popular style of argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility features manipulation. Its thrust is that regarding moral responsibility, there is no important difference between various cases of manipulation in which agents who A are not morally responsible for A-ing and ordinary cases of A-ing in deterministic worlds. There is a detailed argument of this kind in Derk Pereboom’s recent book (2001: 112–26). His strategy in what he calls his ‘four-case argument’ (117) is to describe three cases of progressively weaker manipulation in which, he contends, the agent, Plum, is not morally responsible for killing his victim and to compare them to a related deterministic case that involves no manipulation. Pereboom argues that what blocks Plum’s moral responsibility for the killing in the first three cases is the fact that ‘his action results from a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond his control’ and that, because this fact also obtains in the fourth case, Plum is not morally responsible for that killing either (116). My thesis is that Pereboom’s argument fails.

This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision making; the nature and power of conscious deciding; connections among free will, consciousness, and quantum mechanics; why free will and consciousness might have evolved; how consciousness develops in individuals; the experience of free will; effects on behavior of the belief that free will is an illusion; and connections between free will and moral responsibility in lay thinking. Collectively, these state-of-the-art chapters by accomplished psychologists and philosophers provide a glimpse into the future of research on free will and consciousness.

What may cause individuals to act contrarily to their better judgment is that although they have a good reason (or reasons) not to perform an action, they have an insignificant reason to do it. Supposing that the decision to act one way or the other is made by a free agent, un- derstood in the libertarian sense that the person had alternative possi- bilities of action, how does one account for the the actual choice of one alternative? In other words, what accounts for the difference between the fact that one of two alternative possibilities is chosen and the fact that, in another possible world, the other one is chosen? “Event-causal libertarians” who are committed to the view that the situation up until the very moment of choice is identical in both cases, so that the only difference consists in the choice itself, would have to hold that there is nothing that accounts for this difference and that the difference is a matter of luck. A choice contrary to the person’s conscious belief of what is best to do would then be a matter of bad luck, not of weakness of will. Alfred Mele investigates how an event-causal libertarian view that admits these premises can account for the fact that an akratic agent acts freely and responsibly. In addition, he discusses how such a view explains the difference between akratic actions and radical breakdowns of agency. He also gives an account of how the capacity to form free actions for which one is responsible is developed in childhood.

This article describes three experiments that would advance our understanding of the import of data already generated by scientific work on free will and related issues. All three can be conducted with existing technology. The first concerns how reliable a predictor of behavior a certain segment of type I and type II RPs is. The second focuses on the timing of conscious experiences in Libet-style studies. The third concerns the effectiveness of conscious implementation intentions. The discussion of first two experiments highlights some important problems with certain inferences made on the basis of existing data in scientific work on free will. The discussion of the third calls attention to powerful evidence that conscious intentions sometimes are among the causes of corresponding actions. This evidence has been largely ignored in the literature on free will.

In chapter 6 of Attempts , Gideon Yaffe defends the thesis that it is “possible to attempt crimes of negligence” ( 2010 , p. 173). I am persuaded that he is right about this, provided that “attempt crimes of negligence” is read as (potentially misleading) shorthand for “attempt to bring it about that we commit crimes of negligence.” But I find certain parts of his defense unpersuasive. My discussion of those parts of his argument motivates the following thesis: Not only can one attempt to bring it about that one commits a crime of negligence, but the attempt can be successful as well.

David Pears's recent essay, "How Easy is Akrasia?, '' is, in significant part, a refutation of an argument against the possibility of a certain sort of incontinent action. The kind of incontinent action in question is, in Pears's words, "underivative brazen akrasia, which is commonly taken to be akrasia with the fault located between the last line of an agent's reasoning and his action" (p. 40). The argument which he attacks is attributed to Donald Davidson. The purpose of this note is, not to quarrel with Pears, but rather to supplement his interesting essay. In Section I, drawing upon some of Davidson's views on intending and unconditional practical judgments, I construct a stronger argument for the impossibility of the type of akratic action at issue than the one which Pears refutes. In Section II, I explain why even the stronger argument fails and sketch out some implications of its failure for a causal theory of action.

Autonomy, as I understand it, is associated with a family of freedom concepts: free will, free choice, free action, and the like. In much of the philosophical literature discussed in this chapter, issues are framed in terms of freedom rather than autonomy, but we are talking about (aspects of) the same thing. Libertarians argue that determinism precludes autonomy by, for example, precluding an agent's being ultimately responsible for anything. Some compatibilist believers in autonomy argue that libertarians rely on indeterminism in a way that deprives us of autonomy-level control over our decisions. Theorists who contend that no human being is autonomous can benefit from arguments on both sides, alleging that libertarians decisively reveal the ordinary person's notion of autonomy, an incompatibilist notion, and that compatibilist critics of libertarianism show that the notion is incoherent or unsatis-fiable. Is there a way to use the resources both of libertarianism and of compatibilism in defending the following thesis: The claim that there are autonomous human beings is more credible than the claim that there are none? I believe that the answer is “yes.” I defended that answer in Autonomous Agents. Part of my strategy was to develop an account of an ideally self-controlled agent (where self-control is understood as the contrary of akrasia [roughly, weakness of will]), to argue that even such an agent may fall short of autonomy, and to ask what may be added to ideal self-control to yield autonomy. I offered two answers, one for compatibilists and another for libertarians. I then argued that a certain disjunctive thesis involving both answers (identified in Section 4 below) is more credible than the thesis that there are no autonomous human beings.

Do people sometimes exercise self-control in such a way as to bring it about that they do not act on present-directed motivation that continues to be motivationally strongest for a significant stretch of time (even though they are able to act on that motivation at the time) and intentionally act otherwise during that stretch of time? This paper explores the relative merits of two different theories about synchronic self-control that provide different answers to this question. One is due to Sripada (Noûs 1–38, 2012) and the other to Mele (Irrationality, 1987; Autonomous agents, 1995; Motivation and agency, 2003). Special attention is paid to evidence Sripada offers for an affirmative answer to the question, and some guidance is offered on the project of finding evidence for an affirmative answer

Some scientists have reported what they regard as evidence of indeterministic brain processes that influence behavior (Brembs 2011, Maye et al. 2007). How do these reports bear on the positive side of libertarianism about free will? That is an approximation of my guiding question in this article. I make the question more precise in section 1, in light of some conceptual and scientific background. In the remainder of the article, I seek—and eventually offer—an answer. Topics dis-cussed along the way include control, Frankfurt-style cases, and whether event-causal libertarianism is an uninhabitable half-way house between compatibilism and agent-causal libertarianism.

Mele's chapter addresses two primary aims. The first is to develop an experimentally useful conception of conscious deciding. The second is to challenge a certain source of skepticism about free will: the belief that conscious decisions and intentions are never involved in producing corresponding overt actions. The challenge Mele develops has a positive dimension that accords with the aims of this volume: It sheds light on a way in which some conscious decisions and intentions do seem to be efficacious.

Professor Mele uses the term `autonomy' where other philosophers have spoken of `freedom', `free will' and the like. His well-worked-out paper, which is individual in more than its usage, is not committed to either of the tired doctrines that determinism is inconsistent with autonomy and that it is consistent with it. He is agnostic about which choice to make. Some proponents of the first doctrine, those who believe determinism, draw the conclusion that there is no autonomy. Some proponents of the second doctrine maintain also maintain that indeterminism would in fact deprive us of autonomy. Professor Mele, as he says, is confident that we are somehow autonomous. He develops two ideas of it, incompatibilist autonomy and compatibilist autonomy, but is convinced that more work is needed on all sides. His is not the kind of labour that I myself take to be needed, or anyway desirable. Is it is more respectful of the recent past of the problem than is now a good idea? Well, disrespect is sometimes a bad idea. But we agree that the problem of determinism and freedom, once announced by philosophical undertakers to be dead and buried, even undertakers not employed by either side, has outlived all its undertakers.

The present book is a collection of essays exploring some classical dimensions of mind both from the perspective of an empirically-informed philosophy and from the point of view of a philosophically-informed psychology. In the last three decades, the level of interaction between philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically. As a contribution to this trend, this book explores some areas in which this interaction has been very productive – or, at least, highly provocative. The interaction between philosophy and psychology can be of different kinds. For example, psychology can be the subject for philosophy of science. In such a case, the philosopher of science pursues the usual set of issues (explanation, reduction, etc.) within the special case of psychology. Or, philosophy can be the source of proposals for improving psychology. Vice versa, the findings of psychology can be used to criticize philosophical theories and suggest ways to resolve some traditional philosophical questions about the mind, such as the nature of mental representation, perception, emotion, memory, consciousness and free will. The chapters in this book reflect these different forms of interaction in an effort to clarify issues and debates concerning some traditional cognitive capacities. The result is a philosophically and scientifically up-to-date collection of "cartographies of the mind."

Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations - specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made about an action's properly counting as having been done intentionally. These contentions will be made more precise in subsequent sections, where influential proponents are identified. Our aim in this paper is to show that familiar defenses of these more precise claims are unpersuasive and that the claims do not merit acceptance. Our concern, more broadly, is to illuminate the place occupied by intention and intentional action in a conceptual scheme suited both to explanatory needs in the philosophy of mind to evaluative needs in moral philosophy.