Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism 233proponent of this sort of position. In his view, although actions occur in time, the
temporal properties of conscious agency do not resolve into the kinds of magni-
tudes required for the applicability of causal laws. An attempt to theorize scien-
tifically about conscious agency will inevitably involve invoking physical
concepts that do not in fact apply to it, but are merely metaphorical, and as a
result causal theories of conscious agency are only metaphorical as well. More
generally, the mental is sui generis, and as it really is, it is not subject to scient-
ific theorizing, and is not causal in nature. This non- causality, on Bergson’s
account, makes room for actions to be free. Contemporary non- causal theorists,
such as Carl Ginet, Hugh McCann, and Stewart Goetz, don’t tell a similar story
about how it might be that certain actions have non- causal account, although
their views might nonetheless have their roots in the nineteenth- century project
to distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences, and in this way
to insulate distinctively human features of reality from the natural scientific
conception.
Among philosophers with broadly naturalist sympathies—that is, those
attracted to a scientific view of the world—event- causal libertarianism is usually
regarded as the most attractive of these three positions. The notion of an
uncaused event and the idea of a substance- cause seem non- naturalistic to many
participants in the debate. We’ll begin with the event- causal view, set out the
most influential family of objections against it, and then see whether the non-
causal and agent- causal libertarian alternatives are viable.
10.2. Two Event- Causal Libertarian Accounts
We will now examine two prominent versions of event- causal libertarianism.
The first is Mark Balaguer’s (2010) elegantly simple account, and the second is
Robert Kane’s (1996) more complex story.
Note first that event- causal libertarian accounts differ with respect to the point
in the causal history of an action at which causal determination must be absent.
Chris Franklin (2011b) argues that the causal relation between the events that
proximally cause the agent’s decision and that decision must be indeterministic
for the decision to be free. More specifically, the correct place to situate the inde-
terminism is between the non- actional mental states that potentially lead to
action, such as the beliefs and desires that constitute the agent’s reasons, on the
one hand and decision and overt action on the other (2011b: 202). The intuitive
idea is that for non- derivatively free actions, the agent’s freedom consists in the
action’s being up to her once the reasons have been considered. Other sorts of
event- causal libertarianisms, such as the “Valerian” libertarianism that Mele
once proposed, locate the indeterminacy prior to the moment of choice, for
example in the considerations that come to the agent’s mind. One concern for
that type of view is that the agent is evidently not in control of this kind of
indeterminacy.
In his Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (2010), Mark Balaguer
develops a position of the sort Franklin specifies: