Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism 9between different sorts of control over action, one involving the ability to do
otherwise, and another that does not. Once these different notions of control are
specified, they then proceed to ask which sort is required for moral responsib-
ility. We do not object to this manner of proceeding. Note that our proposed def-
inition of free will is relatively friendly to Fischer and Ravizza’s strategy, since
we define free will in terms of one sort of control—the strongest kind required
for moral responsibility. As a general word of caution, when reading the works
of those involved in the debate about free will, it will be helpful to keep in mind
that these authors define free will differently, or instead avoid use of the term
altogether, but that they nevertheless can be understood as involved in a substan-
tive and not merely a verbal debate.^2
1.2. The Will in Free Will
A further issue concerns the notion of a will. One would think, just given the
expression “free will” itself, that those who use it assume that there is such a power
or faculty as the will, and when considering whether we have free will, they are
asking whether that power can be regarded as free. But, perhaps surprisingly,
many contemporary philosophers working on this topic reject the notion of a will
as something that exists in its own right. Many philosophers who disagree about
how to define “free will” agree that there is no reason to think that there is more to
claims about free will than merely what is involved in attending to free action.
Recall Ginet’s remark above that by freedom of will is meant freedom of action
(Ginet, 1990: 90). This is a sentiment shared by numerous writers (e.g., Haji, 2009:
18; McKenna, 2008d; Mele, 2006b: 17; van Inwagen, 1983: 8). Why?
Some writers report that they do not know what is meant by those who do
take the term “will” to refer (e.g., Mele, 2006b: 17). Others take its meaning to
be clear but wish to deny commitment to what the term “will” initially appears
to pick out, namely a distinctive mental causal power involved in generating
action (e.g., van Inwagen, 1983: 8). Their worry is that taking the notion of a
will commits one to mental causal powers, which are recruited to account for
various abilities that minds have. If the will were understood as a mental causal
power, it would be a feature of persons that plays the special role of voluntarily
generating actions. We could then ask whether it is free or not, or, to be more
cautious, whether a person is free with respect to how that power is exercised.
David Hume (1748) famously hoped to dispense with the notion of a causal
power, or more precisely a causal power that does not reduce to regularities or
counterfactual dependencies, and many philosophers, particularly in the analytic
tradition in the first half of the twentieth century, adopted this view. Since then,
the notion of an irreducible causal power has been resurrected, and now many
philosophers currently accept mental causal powers of this sort (Boyd, 1980;
Fodor, 1987). Fortunately, this division does not undermine the possibility of a
substantive debate about the main issues at stake in the controversy about free
will and moral responsibility, since those issues need not be formulated in terms
of the will as a causal power. Instead, they can be cast in terms of notions such