Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism 241

could have the required leeway for alternative actions. For Kane the second
component is grounded in a more fundamental requirement about the origination
of action:

(Q) If the action did have such a sufficient reason for which the agent was

not responsible, then the action, or the agent’s will to perform it, would have

its source in something that the agent played no role in producing... ulti-

mately responsible agents must not only be the sources of their actions, but

also of the will to perform the actions. (1996: 73)

But this requirement yields a threat to Kane’s position. First, (Q) has the con-
sequence that agents cannot be responsible for decisions that are undetermined
because they are not produced by anything at all, since then agents clearly cannot
be the source of the will to perform them. Between decisions that are undeter-
mined because they are not produced by anything at all, and those that are caus-
ally determined by factors beyond the agent’s control, lies a range of decisions
for which factors beyond the agent’s control contribute to their production but
do not determine them, while there is nothing that supplements the causal contri-
bution of these factors to produce them. By analogy, according to the standard
interpretation of quantum mechanics, antecedent events causally influence which
quantum event will occur from among a range of possibilities by fixing the prob-
abilities governing this range, but these antecedent events do not causally deter-
mine which of these possible quantum events will occur. Similarly, antecedent
events might influence which decision an agent will make without determining
any particular decision. However, the concern is that if there are factors beyond
the agent’s control that influence a decision’s production without causally deter-
mining it, while there is nothing that supplements the contribution of these
factors to produce the decision, then its production features only a combination
of the first two types of responsibility- undermining factors. If causal factors
beyond an agent’s control, instead of causally determining a single decision,
simply leave open more than one possibility, and the agent plays no further role
in determining which possibility is realized, then it would seem that we have no
more reason to think she has the control required to be morally responsible than
in the deterministic case (Pereboom, 2001).
In response to this type of objection, Kane argues that in one respect the inde-
terminism in his event- causal libertarianism diminishes control, but that indeter-
minism is required to enhance it in another respect: “indeterminism is
functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to [the businesswoman’s] realizing one of
her purposes—a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will
which has to be overcome by effort” (2007: 178; 2015). Adding in the indeter-
minism in the way he specifies enhances control because it provides for plural
voluntary control:

The ability to bring about whichever of the options they will, when they will

to do so, for the reasons they will to do so, on purpose rather than by