ABSTRACT
If we grant the disputed premise, then it seems plausible to conclude that an agent whose decisions and actions occur by way of natural causation cannot be responsible for them. Following Hume, however, opponents of libertarianism have consistently claimed that an uncaused decision or action would have no explanation for its occurrence. Accordingly, we would have to treat it as a random or accidental event-one that befalls the agent more or less as a matter of luck and for which, again, he cannot rightly be held responsible (Hume 1970 [1788]: II, III, II; Ayer 1954; Mele 2006). This, together with the argument of the previous paragraph, raises the possibility that we are not responsible for our deeds whether they are caused or not (cf. Strawson 1994; Pereboom 2001). Traditional libertarians are therefore faced with the task of answering the Humean challenge by showing that the agent of a decision or action that is not the product of natural causation may nevertheless be legitimately answerable for it. For this there are three main options. First, we may argue that despite what was traditionally supposed, not all causation is deterministic, so that the doings of an agent who enjoys libertarian freedom can be caused yet not determined. One possibility here is that although the decision or volition is itself deterministically caused, some event pertinent to responsibility that precedes it is not; or, it may be that the causation of the decision or volitional activity is itself not deterministic, but only statistical or probabilistic. The supposed advantage in both cases is that the agent will have had legitimate alternatives even though what he does may be causally explained, thus satisfying the demands of
both sides of the dispute. The second option for dealing with the Humean challenge is to adopt a concept of agent causation, according to which it is the agent himself, not antecedent events and conditions, who causes his decisions and actions. This is held to refute the determinist’s charge that a free decision or act must be random, while retaining the libertarian’s requirement that the deed did not come about by way of the sort of causation that prevails on the billiard table. Finally, the libertarian may take the position that the intrinsic features of active willing are such that decisions and actions cannot be random in any sense damaging to responsibility, and he may add that although acts of will are caused neither by their agents nor by other events, they are still explainable teleologically in terms of the agent’s reasons. This is the position that has come to be known as non-causal libertarianism.
