234 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism
The view does not involve any sort of irreducible agent causation, but it
does hold that undetermined L- free decisions are (ordinarily) causally influ-
enced by – indeed, probabilistically caused by – agent- involving events,
most notably, events having to do with the agent having certain reasons and
intentions. (2010: 67)He defines several notions in setting out this position. The paradigm case of a
free act is a torn decision, one for which the reasons and motivations that cause
it are equally balanced:
A torn decision: A decision in which the agent (a) has reasons for two or
more options and feels torn as to which set of reasons is stronger, that is, has
no conscious belief as to which option is best, given her reasons; and that
(b) decides without resolving the conflict – that is, the person has the experi-
ence of “just choosing.” (2010: 71)Balaguer does not claim that all free decisions are torn decisions, only that torn
decisions are useful as representative examples of free decisions, and, in addi-
tion, that lessons drawn from considering them transfer to cases in which a deci-
sion is not torn but yet undetermined. The characterization of a torn decision
facilitates his conception of L- freedom, that is, libertarian freedom:
If an ordinary human torn decision is wholly undetermined, then it is L- free- that is, it is not just undetermined but also appropriately nonrandom, and
the indeterminacy increases or procures the appropriate nonrandomness.
(2010: 78)
His notion of appropriate nonrandomness combines authorship and control: “In
order for a decision to be L- free, it has to be authored and controlled by the agent
in question: that is, it has to be her decision, and she has to control which option
is chosen” (2010: 83). Lastly, he defines the notion of torn- decision
indeterminism—TDW- indeterminism:
TDW- indeterminism: Some of our torn decisions are wholly undetermined
at the moment of choice, that is, the moment- of-choice probabilities of the
various reasons- based tied- for-best option match the reasons- based proba-
bilities, so that these moment- of-choice probabilities are all roughly even,
given the complete state of the world and the laws of nature, and the choice
occurs without any further input, that is, without anything else being signifi-
cantly causally relevant to which option is chosen. (2010: 78)Thus in the case of a torn TDW- indeterminist decision there is no mismatch
between the underlying probabilities for the various options at the time of the
decision and the probabilities for those options at that time based on the agent’s
consciously available reasons.