10 Contemporary Incompatibilism
Libertarianism
According to libertarian views, we human beings have the ability to act freely in
the sense relevant to free will. Crucial to an action’s being free in this sense is
that it not be causally determined by factors beyond the agent’s control. Recent
times have witnessed the explicit differentiation of three major versions of liber-
tarianism, the event- causal, non- causal, and agent- causal types. In this chapter,
we will present each of these views together with their problems and prospects.
10.1. Three Kinds of Libertarianism
In the event- causal libertarian view, actions, conceived as agent- involving
events—as agents acting at times—are caused solely by prior events, such as an
agent’s having a desire or a belief at a time, and some type of indeterminacy in the
production of actions by appropriate events is held to be necessary for the kind of
free will required for moral responsibility (Balaguer, 2010; Ekstrom, 2000; Frank-
lin, 2011b; Kane, 1996). On other formulations, actions are indeterministically
caused by states or property instances. This position has an ancestor in the Epicu-
rean view according to which a free decision is an indeterministically caused
swerve in the otherwise downward path of an atom (Lucretius 50 bce/1982).
In agent- causal libertarianism, free will of the sort required for moral respons-
ibility is accounted for by the existence of agents who as substances have the
power to cause actions without being causally determined to do so (Chisholm,
1964, 1976; Clarke, 1993, 2003; Griffith, 2010; Kant, 1781/1787/1987;
O’Connor, 2000, 2009; Reid, 1788; Taylor, 1966, 1974). A first crucial agent-
causal libertarian claim is that the causation involved in an agent’s acting freely
does not reduce to causation among events. What secures the failure of this
reduction is that it is the agent fundamentally as a substance that has the power
to cause decisions. A second crucial claim is that when an agent acts freely, she
is not causally determined by factors beyond her control to cause it. Determin-
ism is compatible with agent causation (Markosian, 1999; Nelkin, 2011), but
according to agent- causal libertarianism, for a decision to be free it’s necessary
that the agent not be causally determined to cause it.
A third kind of libertarianism is non- causal (Bergson, 1889/1910; Ginet,
1990, 1996, 2007; Goetz, 2008; McCann, 1998). Henri Bergson was an early