244 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism
10.7. Agent- Causal Libertarianism and Luck Objections
Suppose an agent is deliberating about whether to buy a chocolate ice- cream
cone or to refrain from doing so. On one attractive version of the libertarian
agent- causal view, the agent- as-substance can either settle on the action or on
the refraining. Her settling on the action is the forming of her intention to
perform it, which in this case amounts to her decision to perform it (O’Connor,
2000; cf. Mele, 1992; sometimes intentions are formed without decisions being
made; Mele, 1995). Crucially, by settling on the action, the agent- as-substance
causes the decision to perform it, and thereby settles that this decision
will occur.
One significant objection is that this agent- causal position is as vulnerable to
luck objections as event- causal libertarianism is. So, for example, Mele (1999,
2006b) and Ishtiyaque Haji (2004) contend that a luck objection has as much
force against the claim that agent- causal libertarianism provides the control
required for moral responsibility as it does against the proposal that event- causal
libertarianism yields this sort of control. One way to support this contention is
by first noting that when an agent A agent- causes decision D at time t, an event
of the following type occurs:
G: A’s causing D at t.As Mele and Haji argue, given exactly the same conditions antecedent to t as
those that precede A’s agent- causing D, and given the indeterminism of the lib-
ertarian view, G might not have occurred. So then in some other possible world,
W, the causal antecedents of G in the actual world are present, but D fails to
occur. Thus the fact that G did come about would seem to be a matter of luck.
They argue that this consideration provides reason to conclude that on the
agent- causal libertarian position, D is also not sufficiently under the control of
the agent.
The agent- causal libertarian will need to agree that given the causal con-
ditions prior to G, G and D might not have occurred. However, she will argue
that what the agent- as-substance in W does most fundamentally is to cause D,
and the proposal is that it is in the causing of D that her responsibility- conferring
control is located. The substance- causal relation is embedded in event G, and
thus G will not be what is most fundamentally caused. On Mele’s and Haji’s
objection, we imagine that only the events that occur prior to G in W also occur
in W. But the agent- causal libertarian maintains that the crucial control is not
exercised by way of these prior events, but by the agent- as-substance. If in addi-
tion to the events that precede G we specify that in both W and W the agent- as-
substance’s exercises her agent- causal power but that D occurs in W and not in
W, this will be so because the agent- as-substance causes D in W but causes the
decision to refrain from the action in W*. Thus it wouldn’t appear to be a matter
of luck that D occurs in W (Pereboom, 2014).