A coherent, naturalistic, and plausible formulation of libertarian free will

Noûs 36 (3):379-406 (2002)
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Abstract

Let libertarianism be the view that humans are capable of making decisions that are simultaneously undetermined and appropriately non-random. It’s often argued that this view is incoherent because indeterminacy entails randomness (of some appropriate kind). I argue here that the truth is just the opposite: the right kind of indeterminacy in our decisions actually entails appropriate non-randomness, so that libertarianism is coherent, and the question of whether it’s true reduces to the wide-open empirical question of whether certain of our decisions (which I characterize here) are undetermined at the moment of choice. Moreover, the version of libertarianism developed here is entirely naturalistic and event-causal.

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Mark Balaguer
California State University, Los Angeles

Citations of this work

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Utilitarian epistemology.Steve Petersen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1173-1184.
Don’t panic: Self-authorship without obscure metaphysics1.Adina L. Roskies - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):323-342.
“Free will” is vague.Santiago Amaya - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):7-21.

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References found in this work

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Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Leviathan.Thomas Hobbes - 1651 - Harmondsworth,: Penguin Books. Edited by C. B. Macpherson.
Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.Daniel C. Dennett (ed.) - 1978 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books.
An Essay on Free Will.Peter Van Inwagen - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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