Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism 276 This sense appears to be structurally similar to legal responsibility where those who
violate the law and are legally competent, sane adults, are held to account for doing so
by others licensed or warranted with the right to so hold them.
7 Something similar is true for being praiseworthy, but set that aside here.
8 Such agents must also have abilities to understand morality properly and understand
how they do and are supposed to act.
9 Qualifications have to be made for a first time or first event. We can set that aside
here.
10 This is how Kane proceeds (e.g., 1996: 8; 2005: 5–6).
11 Again, qualifications have to be made for a first event. We can set that aside here.
12 Sometimes, mostly in non- philosophical discourse, determinism is restricted to a
certain type of causal necessitation. For instance, genetic determinism might be under-
stood as the thesis that any organism’s features and conduct are causally necessitated
solely by its genetic constitution. Or environmental determinism might be taken as the
thesis that all behavior of an animal is causally necessitated solely by previous
environmental conditioning combined with present environmental setting. These two
examples of deterministic theories are highly implausible, and determinism in discip-
lines outside of philosophy is often appropriately taken to be far- fetched since it is
often associated with such outlandish views. The mistake is to assume that determin-
ism itself is implausible just because some thesis resembling determinism is.
13 We opt here for this somewhat inelegant name, metaphysical entailment determinism,
so as not to suggest that causal determinism is not a metaphysical thesis. It certainly
is, especially when cast in terms of causal powers. We will, however, drop the middle
term in subsequent discussion.
14 To illustrate the difference between temporally relational and temporally non-
relational facts, consider this: “On December 24, 1968, in New York, NY, at precisely
12:00 midnight it was 30 degrees Fahrenheit.” If it is a fact, is a non- relational fact.
Its truth does not depend on what happens at any time other than the moment of time
specified in the statement. In contrast, “On December 24, 1968, in New York, NY, at
precisely midnight, many young children were soon to be given gifts,” if it is a fact, is
a temporally relational fact. Its truth depends upon what happens at times other than
the time specified.
15 We say “seemingly” since there is considerable controversy, originally inspired by
Hume, as to whether we should understand the laws as involving any necessity at all
rather than being merely stable regularities that play a certain role in explaining
events. This is a very large issue that we cannot take up here. But we note its import-
ance, and as we shall see, it crops up in some of the major disputes regarding the
relation between a (putatively) free agent and the laws of nature in deterministic
contexts.
16 But note the following complication. Steven Horst (2011) argues that physics, at least
as we presently find it, features no departure- free laws when they are construed as
describing actual motions. The inverse square law of gravity, for example, will only
result in exactly accurate predictions of motions if there are no other forces, such as
electromagnetism, at play. The better view, according to Horst, is to interpret the laws
as governing causal powers, which in the case of fundamental physics, are plausibly
forces. On this conception, laws do not primarily describe motion, but rather charac-
terize causal powers. We’ll return to this point and its significance in Chapter 10.
17 For our purposes, we can safely set aside issues regarding the possibility of time
travel.