Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism 189One resource Nelkin develops that distinguishes her view from Wolf ’s is her
appeal to agent causation. With it, she argues that an agent can be a genuine
source of her actions, and this defeats a familiar “disappearing agent” objection
(to be discussed in Chapter 10) that indeterministic or instead deterministic
event- causes of actions exclude the agent as a contributor to her own actions.
What of the Manipulation Argument (Section 7.4)? Consider Wolf ’s example
set out above of the swimmer who could not but help the drowning child.
Suppose that this swimmer was manipulated in a manner similar to the agent
Plum in, say, Case 2 of Pereboom’s Four Case Argument. Here, Nelkin (2011:
55–7) takes a hardline reply and develops further McKenna’s “work backwards”
strategy (see our discussion of hardline replies and McKenna’s reply to Pere-
boom in Section 7.4). Moreover, Nelkin argues that Pereboom- like cases in
which an agent like Plum is manipulated into acting well and responding to good
reasons are not intuitive in favor of incompatibilism. So it seems Nelkin would
reason similarly about the case at hand, Wolf ’s swimmer who is unable to do
otherwise but who is so caused by way of a Pereboom- like manipulation scen-
ario. (For Pereboom’s reply, see, 2014: 102–3.)
8.6. Mele’s Action- Theory Theory
A familiar classical compatibilist view is an austere one that invokes as little as
possible beyond the basic features of agency.^4 The classical compatibilists in
Hobbes’s and Hume’s time used only blunt instruments to fashion such a view
(see Section 3.1.1). All they seemed to employ was the notion of a desire or
want, and the negative condition that it be unimpeded. But despite these sparse
resources, their strategy was a philosophically elegant one. Postulate no more
than the features of agency itself. They need be no fancier than the sort at play
with normally functioning human persons. There is little reason to imagine that
determinism is incompatible with these features. Next, to capture free agency,
append some negative conditions that secure that sometimes that basic sort of
agency can function unhindered by coercive or compulsive forces. This is
enough for free will on such a view. Add no more metaphysical constraints,
nothing further to show how it gels with determinism. Leave compatibilism at
that; simple is better.
In Autonomous Agents (1995), Alfred Mele, who is agnostic between compati-
bilism and libertarianism, develops a contemporary form of compatibilism that
shares with the classical compatibilist such a strategy of theoretical austerity.
Mele’s contemporary version drew upon a finely tuned set of conceptual tools to
capture more clearly the contours of the springs of action. He made use of philos-
ophy’s matured understanding of action theory, an understanding to which he
himself contributed (e.g., Mele, 1992). He then appended to his account of agency
as little as possible in order to generate a form of compatibilism that speaks to the
contemporary dialectic. Call his proposal The Action- Theory Theory.
In his 1995 publication, Mele did not fashion compatibilism in terms of
free will and determinism, but instead in terms of autonomy and determinism.