In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role (...) – “both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument”. In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will... (shrink)

To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...) when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation. What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. (shrink)

For a half - century, I have been developing a view of free will that is incompatible with determinism and, in the process, attempting to answer the Intelligibility Question about such a free will: Can one make sense of an incompatibilist or libertarian free will without reducing it to mere chance, or mystery, and can such a free will be reconciled with modern views of the cosmos and human beings? In this paper, I discuss recent refinements to my earlier writings (...) on such a view, refinements developed in recent years in response to the large critical literature on my views in the past several decades. My view has usually been designated an event-causal view of libertarian free will and distinguished from non-causal and agent-causal libertarian views. But I was never happy with this designation of my view as “event-causal” and did not use it myself in earlier writings. In this paper, I explain why I now reject it altogether. I have come to believe that to avoid numerous misunderstandings in current debates about free will, we must distinguish four different kinds of libertarian theories, not merely three: in addition to non-causal, agent-causal, and event-causal theories, we need to add a fourth kind, which might be called an agent-causal/event-causal theory. My view has always been of this fourth kind. It represents what I call in the title of this paper the “fourth way forward” for making sense of an incompatibilist free will. (shrink)