Contemporary Incompatibilism: Libertarianism 255proposal, moral responsibility requires difference- making in the sense that the
actual sequence leading to the action makes an agent responsible for that action
only if the absence of that actual sequence would not have made the agent
responsible for the action. More generally, she proposes (Sartorio, 2016) that
moral responsibility is a causal notion, and that causes make a difference to their
effects in that they make a causal contribution to their effects not matched by
any contribution that their absences would. Similarly, the advocate of determin-
istic agent causation can propose:
(S- AC) An agent settles whether an action occurs only if she agent- causes
it, where the absence of her agent- causing the action would not have caused
that action. (Pereboom, 2015b)Stated in terms of David Lewis’s (1973) semantics for counterfactuals, an agent
settles whether an action occurs only if she agent- causes it, and in the closest
possible worlds in which she does not agent- cause the action, the absence of the
agent- causing would not have caused that action. (S- AC) does not require that
the agent be able to do otherwise, and thus it can be satisfied by an agent even if
she is causally determined to act as she does.
10.12. Non- Causal Theories
Perhaps the difficulties we’ve noted for libertarian views can be avoided if one
denied that free agency is governed by any sort of causal law, whether determin-
istic or probabilistic. This would be the case if free agency wasn’t causal at all.
We noted earlier that on Bergson’s view, the mental is sui generis, and, as it
really is, it is not subject to scientific theorizing, and so it is indeed not causal in
nature. Considerations of this type gave rise to the conviction that neither agents
nor reasons can be causes, and this thought is part of what motivates con-
temporary non- causal theories. More generally, the second half of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth witnessed an attempt to distinguish the
human and natural sciences, and a non- causal view of agency was one feature of
this attempt. It’s not clear whether more recent non- causalists have this aim in
mind. But a common contemporary theme is that a non- causal view is a particu-
larly promising way to account for free will.
Recent non- causal theories of agency, such as those developed by Carl Ginet
(1990), Hugh McCann (1998), and Stewart Goetz (2008), feature specific and
different accounts of how it might be that certain actions could be free. On
Ginet’s theory, for a basic action—one which does not consist in one or more
mental events causing other mental events—to be free, it must have an agent as
a subject, it must be uncaused, and it must have an actish phenomenological feel.
McCann requires that it must be uncaused and intrinsically and fundamentally
intentional. In Goetz’s conception, it must be uncaused and meet a teleological
requirement, and because McCann’s intrinsic intentionality is teleological as
well, these views are similar in an important respect.