Libertarianism, luck, and action explanation

Journal of Philosophical Research 30:321-340 (2005)
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Abstract

My primary objective is to motivate the concern that leading libertarian views of free action seem unable to account for an agent’s behavior in a way that reveals an explanatorily apt connection between the agent’s prior reasons and the intentional behavior to be explained. I argue that it is this lack of a suitable reasons explanation of purportedly free decisions that underpins the objection that agents who act with the pertinent sort of libertarian freedom cannot be morally responsible for what they do because their intentional behavior is a matter of luck. The accounts scrutinized include a Kane-type event-causal view, Clarke’s account that appeals to both agent causation and event causation in the production of free action, and O’Connor’s pure agent-causal account. I conclude by discussing an advantage these libertarian accounts enjoy over compatibilist contenders: they possess a feature necessary to accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation

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Ishtiyaque Haji
University of Calgary

Citations of this work

Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
What luck is not.Jennifer Lackey - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2):255 – 267.
The Indeterministic Weightings Model of Libertarian Free Will.John Lemos - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 23 (3):137-156.

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