Abstract

Freedom of the will is intrinsically valuable in deliberation and action, and it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Free will is not a sufficient condition for the latter; other abilities, and the absence of certain responsibility-undermining conditions, are also necessary. The free will requisite for moral responsibility is a self-determination in coming to have a particular intention in action. It does not consist even partly in an ability to do otherwise. ;Deliberation requires believing that one is free to choose and to act as one chooses. But deliberation does not require believing that one can perform each of the actions one is considering. Nevertheless, it is desirable in deliberation and action to determine, oneself, what ends one will pursue, and this self-determination appears to be incompatible with determinism. ;A leading compatibilist view identifies free will with a capacity to direct one's behavior by reflective practical reasoning. The freedom that agents have in akratic behavior and in some kinds of wrongdoing are especially difficult to account for on this view. A general consideration against the adequacy of this view is that an agent in a deterministic world, even if she acted with the capacity in question, would be in a thorough sense a product of the distant past. Though it might be appropriate to make moral judgements of such an agent, she would not deserve moral praise or blame. ;Incompatibilist views that simply add an element of chance to human action are also unsatisfactory. What must be secured is that generally when an agent acts, there are several different courses of action that are genuinely open to her, and she makes it happen that she performs one of these actions in particular. The most promising account of this kind of self-determination is an agent-causal view on which agents cause the orderings of reasons for which they act. It can be allowed that free actions are probabilistically caused by prior events. However, the agent causation that is required for free will is not reducible to event causation.