ABSTRACT
In his comment on my chapter, Ed McKenna raises two main points. The first follows from the definition of intentional human agency that I adopt. According to McKenna, my definition of intentional human agency as “the potential for human… agents to have always acted differently in any given set of circumstances” (p. 197) implies that I hold the Libertarian conception of free will. 1 However, this particular view of free will is controversial among philosophers and there exist a number of alternative, competing conceptions with the currently dominant one being that of “soft determinism.” Given this, McKenna argues that it is important to offer more justification for my definition of intentional human agency. Meanwhile, the second point raised by McKenna is that the Libertarian conception of free will is inconsistent with the possibility of the scientific explanation of action. This is because, with the Libertarian conception, choices, “by definition, cannot be explained by reasons.” According to McKenna, the open systems–ceteris paribus (OS-CP) approach to modeling that I advocate seeks to circumvent this problem by maintaining “that most human choices can be explained by reasons, hence can be studied scientifically, but that there can also be situations in which the Libertarian viewpoint holds.” The OS-CP approach does this by arguing that decisions by agents are made not in a vacuum, but in the context of an institutional framework. During periods of (relative) stability, this framework provides agents with reasons to act in a way that reproduces the institutional framework. Nevertheless, situations can arise in which free choice reasserts itself, thereby leading to institutional change. However, in McKenna’s opinion, this raises three questions of the OS-CP approach:
“if it is really true that agents can always act differently, then why do we find long intervals of time during which they almost always choose to act ‘in the same way?”’
“How is it that institutions, at least temporarily, constrain free choice in a manner that is consistent with the reproducibility of the social system?”
“And, why is this constraint only temporary?”
