Abstract

Deliberative libertarian accounts allow that basic free actions may be causally determined by their immediate causal antecedents; indeterminism is required only at earlier points in the processes leading to free actions. Accounts of this type proposed by Daniel Dennett, Laura Ekstrom, and Alfred Mele are examined here. Given the assumption of incompatibilism, deliberative accounts fail to provide for the sort of difference-making that is distinctive of free action. Further, they fail to evade the problem of diminished control that they are meant to evade.