26 Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism
Second, on a more restricted way of understanding decisions, they involve inten-
tionally settling uncertainty about what to do—say whether to buy a car or which car
to buy. On this understanding, it is not true that every intentional action has a decision
as one of its causal antecedents or component parts. Why? Because not every inten-
tional action involves a circumstance in which its agent is uncertain about what to do.
Indeed, most agents most of the time do most of what they do intentionally with no
(conscious) uncertainty about what to do.
Third, on the familiar, less restricted way of thinking about decisions, it seems
implausible to regard them as actions in their own right, since it would commit one to
multiplying the number of actions an agent performs when thinking about the full
extension of intentional actions. Every intentional action, such as the hitting of a base-
ball, would also include the act of deciding to hit the baseball. On the more restricted
way of thinking about decisions, it is more plausible to regard them as acts—mental
acts—that then give rise to intentions to perform further acts: for example, Joan
decides to buy the car and then drives back to the dealership to buy it. Her deciding
generated an intention to buy, and this latter intention then played the role of cause in
her driving to the dealership (the driving itself being a distinct act from the act of
deciding).
Fourth, it is commonplace to use the words “choice” and “decision” interchange-
ably, and there seems to be little harm in doing so. But we note that there does appear
to be a subtle difference between their ordinary meanings. Choices seem to be
between options. One chooses the red car over the green one. Decisions seem not to
have to be between options. One decides to buy a car. This suggests that choices are a
special class of decisions, and that not every decision is a choice but that every choice
is a decision.
Fifth, on either the permissive or the restrictive model of choices and decisions,
they occur at the initial moments of free actions, and if they have causal antecedents,
those antecedents involve items that are themselves not part of what would constitute
or be free action. They would instead be generators of it. This is likely the key to why
they occupy special attention in work on free will.
4 There is a familiar way of using the expression “moral responsibility” that is apt to
mislead the introductory student. One sense of “moral responsibility,” different from
the one we shall focus upon here, functions as synonymous with “moral obligation,”
as when it is said that Fred has a moral responsibility to tend to Francine, meaning
that he has an obligation to tend to her. To see that this is not the relevant sense of
moral responsibility, imagine that Fred is blameworthy for failing in his obligation to
tend to Francine. If he did so freely and knowingly, then in another sense, the sense
we are interested in, he would be morally responsible (and blameworthy) for failing
in his obligations (responsibility in the other sense). The general lesson here is not to
be tricked into associating claims about what a person is morally responsible for (in
the sense we are interested in here) with claims about what a person’s moral obliga-
tions are. It is worth bearing in mind that a person might be morally responsible in our
intended sense because of complying with or failing to comply with what her moral
obligations are (responsibilities in the other sense). So there might be an important
connection between the two. Still, they are different.
5 Typically, writers drop the modifier “moral” from discussions of praiseworthiness
and blameworthiness, and praise and blame when context makes clear that the
subject concerns moral responsibility rather than some other variety, such as legal
responsibility.