224 Mesh, Reasons-Responsive, Leeway Theories
does. So, for instance, on Sartorio’s view, given the supplemented case of Jones
proposed in the previous paragraph, when Jones shoots Smith on his own in the
actual sequence while Black remains inactive, Jones is actually reactive to the
reason: Smith’s being accompanied by his child. How so? The absence of this
reason is one of the actual causes of Jones shooting Smith, and it is by virtue of
causation by the absence of this reason that Jones is reactive to it.
9.10. Contemporary Leeway Theories
We turn now to contemporary proposals that focus primarily on establishing the
compatibility of determinism and leeway freedom. Thus far, we have already
discussed several compatibilist theories that endorse a leeway freedom condition
and offer some argument for the compatibility of leeway freedom and determin-
ism. These include the views advanced by Scanlon (1998), Bok (1998), Dennett
(1984, 2003), Wolf (1990), Nelkin (2011), and Watson (1975). These views,
however, do not take up the project of arguing for compatibilism about leeway
freedom by focusing directly on a distinct set of metaphysical and semantic
issues that are characteristic of the type of position we will now consider.^17
Views in this class include those of Michael Smith (2003), Kadri Vihvelin (2004,
2013), and Michael Fara (2008).^18 Because Vihvelin’s is most thoroughly
developed, we will examine it in some detail in the next section.
This strategy returns to a collection of traditional topics familiar to classical
compatibilists like Hume and later Schlick, Ayer, and Hobart. Take the topic of
laws, for instance. One strategy for advancing compatibilism is to offer a deflation-
ary Humean view of the laws according to which they are generalizations
regarding how the course of events actually unfolds. Or consider the classic com-
patibilist move of showing that causation is distinct from coercion or compulsion,
so that coming to understand the causes of one’s intentions is not a matter of dis-
covering what forces or compels those actions.
One strategy for defending leeway compatibilism involves attending to two
metaphysical issues. A first concerns the metaphysics of causation and the
natural laws that pertain to causal relations. Compatibilists shoulder the burden
of explaining how these laws, understood within a deterministic system, and the
nature of causation itself, are not freedom- defeating. A second metaphysical
issue concerns the nature of abilities of free agents and how they might be real-
ized and exercised in deterministic contexts. Are they to be understood as
powers, dispositions, or in terms of intrinsic states of an agent? Along with these
two metaphysical issues, a further task is to offer a credible semantics that shows
how we can make ability- to-do- otherwise claims consistent with claims about
the causal determination of all actions. Another project draws upon these
resources to identify the point where the Consequence Argument and others like
it fail.
Some compatibilists, for example, Oisin Deery (2015), Terry Horgan (2015),
and Eddy Nahmias et al. (2004), have joined to the preceding project the further
recommendation of attending to the phenomenology of agency. They argue that