42 The Free Will Problem
And we might further revise F4 with F6:
- Determinism is true.
- At least some persons are morally responsible for what they do.
- Moral responsibility requires free will.
- Free will requires that an agent is able to be the initiating source of her
actions. - The ability to be the initiating source of actions is incompatible with
determinism.
So thus far, we have formulated two problems concerning free will, resulting in
F5 and F6 by attending to different facets of freedom and then considering the
relation between them and determinism. But there is a less frequently recognized
set of free will problems that arise, not from the concern that determinism is true,
but from the worry that indeterminism is true. We turn to a brief examination of
this topic.
Suppose, as would satisfy the demands of libertarians, that indeterminism is
true and that the way that it is true involves suitably located indeterministic
breaks just where free acts might arise, and that they occur at the macro- level,
high enough to be significant for choosing and acting. Such a position faces the
following challenge. If an agent’s actions are not determined by events, states,
and processes just prior to her acting as she does, then it seems that when she
acts as she does, it “just happened” that she acted that way, and that the very
same antecedent conditions prior to her acting are consistent with her acting
some other way instead. Consider an agent just prior to her free act, with all of
her preferences and reasons as factors bearing upon her future action. Imagine
her deliberating about what to decide or choose. All of this, just prior to her free
act of choosing could be just as it was, not a single thing about her would be dif-
ferent, including the content of her deliberations, and if she were not determined
to act “freely” when she acted, then there is nothing we can say about any feature
of her at all that settles that she acted as she did rather than some other way. It
was, after all, not determined by any of those conditions (along with the rest of
the state of the world and the laws of nature). Suppose, for instance, that the
person we are imagining is from Kane’s example of a businesswoman (intro-
duced in Section 1.2) considering whether to help a person being mugged or
instead rush off to an important business meeting. If there is nothing about her
that settles how she decides, then it is just luck how she winds up choosing—
mere chance. And now the worry presents itself: mere luck, mere chance does
not enhance freedom or control—it undermines it. Indeterminism, the worry
goes, is incompatible with free will.
Consider the leeway view of freedom. It might be thought that with determin-
ism out of the way and future options for a free agent open in the sense that more
than one is physically possible given the past and the laws, this would make
having leeway freedom a breeze. But that now seems too fast. Allowing that
other physical possibilities are not ruled out by the past and the laws does not