A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will

Noûs 38 (3):379-406 (2004)
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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

References found in this work

Brainstorms.Daniel Dennett - 1978 - Philosophy of Science 47 (2):326-327.
An essay on free will.Peter van Inwagen & A. Phillips Griffiths - 1985 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 175 (4):557-558.
The Works of Agency: On Human Action, Will and Freedom.Hugh McCann - 1998 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

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