Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism 237have sufficient connection with the agent for her to be morally responsible for it.
Some objections that reflect the Humean concern are called luck objections
(Clarke, 2005; Mele, 1999, 2006b), for the reason that they attempt to show that
on the libertarian view at issue whether the action occurs is a matter of luck—
good or bad—and thus it is not sufficiently in the control of the agent for her to
be morally responsible for it.
Alfred Mele and Ishtiyaque Haji advocate and develop a version of the luck
objection that targets the event causal view according to which free actions must
be proximally and indeterministically caused by appropriate agent- involving
events. Suppose that in an event- causal libertarian world W an agent A makes
decision D at t, that is, A- involving events E proximally cause decision D at t.
Because the history of D is indeterministic, there is another world, W*, which
features exactly the same events antecedent to t as those that precede E’s causing
D at t in W, but without D occurring at t. But then the fact that D did come about
then would seem to be a matter of luck. The occurrence of agent- involving
events—and only events are causally relevant—prior to t are compatible with
D’s occurrence and with D’s non- occurrence. So it would seem that D is not suf-
ficiently under the control of the agent for moral responsibility in particular.
Peter van Inwagen’s “rollback objection” (van Inwagen, 2002: 171–5) is
another version of the luck objection. Here is Balaguer’s statement of this
challenge:
Suppose that some agent S is torn between two options, A and B, and even-
tually chooses A in a torn- decision sort of way. And now suppose that God
“rolls back” the universe and “replays” the decision.... If the decision is
undetermined in the manner of TDW- indeterminism, then if God “played”
the decision 100 times, we should expect that S would choose A and B
about 50 times each. (2010: 92)Balaguer concludes that in this situation it would at least initially seem to be a
matter of chance or luck what she chose, and to the extent that this is right, it
seems that S didn’t author or control the decision. At the very least, it seems that
the element of chance or luck here diminishes S’s authorship and control. One
way of thinking about the rollback objection is that it has as its core component
the luck objection Mele and Haji develop, while the addition of the rollback
story brings out the lucky nature of the situation in a particularly forceful way.
Van Inwagen (1983: 132–4) and Mele (1999: 277) develop another kind of
story that serves to enhance the sense of luck, one involving a “randomizing”
manipulator. Here is a version of such a story (Pereboom, 2014; cf. 2001).
Imagine that Ralph’s abilities, character, and motivations are exactly like
Ralph’s. And Ralph too makes the decision to move to New York. But Ralph*
differs in that the advent of his choice involves a randomizing manipulator who
spins a dial which will land on one of two positions. The dial’s landing on
a position is the crucial indeterministic component of the neural realization
of the choice to perform the action, and it replaces the crucial indeterministic