10 Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism
as intention, choice, decision, desire, and reason, which are common to both
sides of the divide.
Philosophers in the Humean tradition often opt to understand free will just in
terms of acting freely (Ayer, 1954; Schlick, 1939). Others (e.g., Frankfurt, 1971;
Kane, 1996) hold that important distinctions are lost if the discussion is restricted
to freedom of action, and that a distinct notion of free will needs to be invoked.
The general thesis, shared by those who wish to distinguish free will from free
action, is that free action is merely a matter of being unhindered in doing what
one wants, in, for example, moving one’s body as one prefers. Free will, by con-
trast, is a matter of being in control of or free with respect to the intentions,
choices, decisions, reasons, or desires that are the causal antecedents of how one
acts and moves one’s body.
Some philosophers are happy to agree that there is such a thing as the will,
but they nevertheless tend to reduce this notion to mental states such as desires.
Harry Frankfurt (1971), for instance, identifies the will with the desire that is (or
would be if left unhindered) effective in leading an agent to action. To be free
with respect to one’s will, then, is to be free with respect to the desires that lead
to one’s actions. Kane (1996) proposes a more complex account of the will,
which we will not set out in detail here. But the ingredients constituting it are,
for the most part, those involved in one’s forming and sustaining intentions. To
be free with respect to one’s will, in Kane’s view, is essentially to be free with
respect to the intentions, choices, and decisions that issue in one’s actions. For
both Frankfurt and Kane, then, it’s important to invoke the notion of free will in
addition to free action, but free will is then accounted for solely in terms of
familiar sorts of mental states, without reference to an irreducible mental causal
power to voluntarily produce action.
For the most part, the side one takes on the existence of mental causal powers
makes no difference to the core issues in the debate about free will and moral
responsibility. One exception is the issue of agent causation, which, according to
most of its advocates, does require the notion of a causal power. But Kane, for
instance, sets out the case of a businesswoman late for an important professional
meeting who, uncertain about what to do, must decide between stopping to help
a person who has just been assaulted, or instead proceeding on to her meeting
(Kane, 1996: 126). We can raise the important questions about the business-
woman’s freedom without ruling on the issue of the existence of the will as a
causal power. For we can ask about whether in choosing as she does, she satis-
fies the strongest control condition necessary for being morally responsible for
her decision. We can also ask about whether she was able to decide otherwise.
And we can ask about whether she was ultimately settling her ends or purposes
in deciding to render aid instead of heading off to her meeting. Finally, it seems
that, for those who want to preserve talk of the will, as Kane himself does, we
can describe this case as one in which the agent exercises her will in deciding as
she does. But we can also just as easily describe the case as one in which the
agent acts freely by performing the mental act of deciding in one way rather than
the other.