274 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views
by stable factors such as genetics, but still be lucky because there is variation in
the disposition across the relevant reference group:
An event or state of affairs occurring in the actual world that affects an
agent’s psychological traits or dispositions is non- chancy lucky for an agent
if (i) that event or state of affairs is significant for the agent; (ii) the agent
lacks direct control over that event or state of affairs; (iii) events or states of
affairs of that kind vary across the relevant reference group, and (iv) in a
large enough proportion of cases that event or state of affairs fails to occur
or be instantiated in the reference group in the way which it occurred or was
instantiated in the actual case. (Levy, 2011: 36)Levy then contends that libertarian and compatibilist accounts render actions
lucky in a sense that precludes moral responsibility. His key argument turns on
the notion of a contrastive explanation for action. For example, we might ask
about Kane’s example of the businesswoman: Why did Anne stop and help
rather than continue on to work? Levy argues that compatibilism does allow for
such contrastive explanations, but that these explanations themselves feature
luck. When the agent’s endowment settles the action, agency is infected with
non- chancy constitutive luck. On other occasions the settling of the action will
be chancy, and then chancy luck undermines responsibility. In response to the
endowment concern, we’ve seen that the compatibilist isn’t moved much just by
the prospect of endowment settling an action, and that a further vehicle such as a
manipulation argument has a better chance of engaging the two sides in
discussion.
Levy argues that libertarian accounts of free will cannot yield such contras-
tive explanations, and that this indicates that such actions are lucky in a sense
that rules out moral responsibility. The agent- causal libertarian could respond by
contending that the ability to substance- cause a decision and in the same causal
context to substance- cause a refraining from this decision instead is a funda-
mental causal power the agent- as-substance has, and that this yields contrastive
explanations (Section 10.9). Why did Anne decide to stop and help rather than
continuing on to work? Because she exercised her agent- causal power to stop
and help for moral reasons rather than exercising it to continue on to work for
prudential reasons. A concern for this suggestion is that the agent- causal libertar-
ian is trading in fundamental causal powers at the very core of her theory, which
renders the position obscure (Nelkin, 2011: 93). But the agent- causal libertarian
might resist by arguing that all fundamental causal powers are in an important
sense inexplicable just because they’re fundamental, and we wouldn’t want to
rule out all fundamental causal powers for this reason.
11.7. Tamler Sommers’ Metaskepticism
Tamler Sommers, early on a free will skeptic (e.g., 2007), now embraces a skep-
ticism at a higher level that perhaps calls into question resolute first- order free