The Disappearing Agent

PEREBOOM - Review of Alfred R. Mele’s Aspects of Agency (2018)

Pereboom, D. 2018. Review of Alfred R. Mele’s Aspects of Agency: Decisions, Abilities,

Explanations, and Free Will. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 27. Available online:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/aspects-of-agency-decisions-abilities-explanations-and-free-will/.

➔ Statement of the Objection: “Suppose that a decision is made in a deliberative

context in which the agent's moral motivations favor deciding to A, her prudential
motivations favor her deciding to not-A, and the strengths of these motivations are in
equipoise. A and not-A are the options she is considering. The potentially causally
relevant events, typically belief- or desire-involving events, thus render the
occurrence of each of these decisions equiprobable. But then the potentially
causally relevant events do not settle which decision occurs, that is, whether the
decision to A or the decision to not-A occurs. Since, given event-causal
libertarianism, only events are causally relevant, nothing settles which decision
occurs. Thus it can't be the agent or anything about the agent that settles which
decision occurs, and she therefore lacks the control required for moral responsibility
for it. (Pereboom e.g., 2014, 2017)” (PEREBOOM, 2018)
➔ What it is to settle something: “An agent settles which option for action occurs just
in case she determines, not necessarily causally, which action occurs, and she makes
the difference as to which action occurs. (Pereboom 2017)” (PEREBOOM, 2018)
◆ Determine: “to settle whether to A or to not-A, or equivalently, which of A
and not-A occurs, is to determine, not necessarily causally, which of these
options occurs” (PEREBOOM, 2018);
◆ Decision Making;
◆ “Settling, in the context of the disappearing agent argument, is an exercise of
control. and for the event-causal libertarian exercise of control is a causal
matter” (PEREBOOM, 2018)
➔ “Mele argues, plausibly, that on event-causal libertarian views it remains correct to
say that agents, and not events, decide and make decisions. "[Sam] has and exercises
the ability or power to sink free throws, and he sinks many of them. His intentions,
beliefs, skills, and the like do not sink free throws -- alone or in combination with one
another. And that is no surprise, because they are not able to sink free throws" (164).
To be sure, retaining ordinary agent talk is legitimate for the event-causal libertarian.
The view is not committed to linguistic reform. But it is committed to the
metaphysical thesis that all causation is event-causation. Regarding Mele's contention
that Sam's "intentions, beliefs, skills, and the like do not sink free throws," it's not
open to the event-causal libertarian to affirm that in the sinking of a free throw Sam is
a causal influence distinct from Sam-involving events. What's at issue here isn't how
we ordinarily speak, but rather the commitments of an event-causal theory of action.
And in the equipoise scenario there are no event causes of the agent's decision state,
 or of the agent's deciding, that settle whether it occurs. Mele's suggestion resembles
an account of settling recently proposed by Randolph Clarke (2017). On Clarke's
account, the making of the decision by S at t to A settles whether the decision is made
then. He writes: "by 'the making of the decision', what is meant is simply the
occurrence of the mental action of deciding. If such a mental action occurs, then a
making of a decision takes place; the latter is nothing more and nothing less than -- it
is -- the former." (Clarke 2017). Clarke's thought is that the occurrence of the mental
action of deciding settles which decision occurs in the sense of making a certain
proposition about the decision true (2017, and from correspondence). Now I agree
that such a use of 'settling' is fine linguistically. But settling, in the context of the
disappearing agent argument, is an exercise of control, and for the event-causal
libertarian exercise of control is a causal matter. However, on Clarke's proposal,
settling is the making-true relation, which is not a causal relation (Pereboom 2017).
Given Mele's resolute causalism, such non-causal accounts of settling are ruled out.”
(PEREBOOM, 2018)
➔ “Another option left open for me is that settling is secured by event-causal
determination or near-determination (allowing for a small probability of failure)
of decisions by other agent-involving events, which would facilitate settling if it
turns out that all causation is event-causation.” (PEREBOOM, 2018)

PEREBOOM - A Defense of Free Will Skepticism: Replies to

Commentaries by Victor Tadros, Saul Smilansky, Michael McKenna, and
Alfred R. Mele on Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2017)

Pereboom, D. 2017. A Defense of Free Will Skepticism: Replies to Commentaries by Victor

Tadros, Saul Smilansky, Michael McKenna, and Alfred R. Mele on Free Will, Agency, and
Meaning in Life.Criminal Law and Philosophy, v. 11, i. 3, pp. 617–636, 2017.

➔ “In Springs of Action (1992: 158–159), he writes: ‘in deciding to A, one settles upon
A-ing (or upon trying to A), and one enters a state—a decision state—of being settled
upon A-ing (or upon trying to A)’” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 630)
➔ “To settle which action to perform is to determine, not necessarily causally,
which of one’s options for action to perform. And now, as Mele’s exposition
specifies, one settles (or at least one can settle) whether the decision to A
(conceived of as a decision state) occurs by settling or determining whether to A
or not-A. This is at least typically the case: one settles whether a decision to A
occurs by settling upon A” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 630);
➔ “An agent settles which of one’s options for action occurs just in case she determines,
not necessarily causally, which action occurs, and she makes the difference as to
which action occurs” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 630);
◆ This is possible in Frankfurt Cases: “causes of action in Frankfurt cases,
despite the agent being unable to do otherwise, still make a difference to their
 effects in that the effects wouldn’t have been caused by the absence of their
causes” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 630);
● “An agent settles whether an action occurs if it is caused by certain
reasons of hers, where the absence of those reasons would not have
caused that action” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 631).
➔ Should the relevant sort of settling or control in decision be interpreted as involving
complete control? (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 631);
◆ “A smallish probability of such a failure is consistent with settling, and
with the control in deciding that’s at issue in this debate—in my view, the
control required for the agent’s basic-desert moral responsibility for the
decision” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 631);
◆ “But suppose I also maintained that a 50% probability of such a failure
renders the agent’s control insufficient. Do we now have in place a barrier
to whether the notion of settling in play can be understood? An analogous
concern has familiarly been raised for the notion of knowledge. Just as one
might propose that settling involves complete control, one might propose that
knowledge involves certainty” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 631).
● It’s an imprecise term.
➔ “On my construal of event-causal libertarianism, control is a causal matter; since
settling which decision occurs would be the key control relation for securing
moral responsibility in paradigmatic cases, such settling must be a causal matter.
In addition, the event-causal libertarian claims that all causation is causation by
events. My claim is that, given these commitment of event-causal libertarianism,
the theory lacks the resources to explain how the agent can settle which decision
occurs in the equipoise situation. I contend that we understand what it means to
make such a claim about settling, and that Mele himself provides us with an account
that provides us with this understanding. It may be that in certain cases in which
what the agent does to settle which decision occurs is compatible with a smallish
probability that it does not occur, the agent nevertheless settles that the decision
occurs as required by moral responsibility for it in the basic-desert sense. I claim
that the relevant antecedently occurring agent-involving events don’t settle which
decision occurs in cases in which the probabilities are not in equipoise but are
significant on both sides, where the relevant boundary between smallish and
significant is vague” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 632);
➔ “At this point, the event-causal libertarian might contend that causation by appropriate
agent-involving events in the equipoise case is sufficient for settling which decision
occurs. After all, the agent is involved in each of the two competing sets of
antecedent events, so, no matter which decision results, she herself will have
settled which one occurs. Mele would agree that which decision occurs is a matter of
luck, but would question the claim that the action is not free in the sense required for
attribution of basic-desert responsibility. Just as for the hard line response against
the manipulation argument, I doubt that there is a rationally coercive response
to this line. Like the manipulation argument, the disappearing agent argument
involves fishing for an intuition. In the manipulation argument, it’s for the
 intuition of non-responsibility in a manipulation case; in the disappearing agent
argument, it’s for the intuition that the agent does not settle which decision
occurs in the equipoise case, supposing that settling is a causal matter, and thus
the agent is not morally responsible in the basic-desert sense. If the opponent
does not have this intuition, then the argument fails as a way to engage her, and
another medium for negotiating the dispute would have to be found. Mele may
be in this camp, and, if so, I have no rationally coercive way of showing him that
he’s mistaken. Still, others have the non-settling intuition, as I do, and this is
required for the argument to engage them” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 632)
➔ “Mele intimates that it is mistaken to contend that the event-causal libertarian can
allow only events antecedent to a decision to settle whether a decision occurs. He
objects to my formulation of the concern insofar as it employs the future tense ‘will
occur’” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 632)
◆ “This formulation suggests that settling would result from events that occur at
least in part antecedently to the decision, and not by events that occur only
simultaneously with the decision, which Mele thinks should be permitted for
the event-causal libertarian. As I said, in my discussion of event-causal
libertarians, I’m assuming that they are committed to the claim that
control in action is a causal matter. It’s the non-causalists who hold that
control in action is non-causal. If the locus of moral responsibility is an
agent’s decision, and if control is a causal matter, then it would seem that
control in settling which decision occurs would be a function of how the
decision is caused. On event-causal libertarianism, only events can be
causes, so control in settling which decision occurs would, then, be a
matter of the causing of the decision by events, and some of these would
be agent-involving events. The agent-involving events would at least
typically be belief-events and desire-events. And, in the usual case, if a
decision is caused by beliefs and desires, the beliefs and the desires would
exist for at least a short time prior to the decision. Thus it would make
sense to describe such a case as one in which the occurrence of such events
do or do not settle whether the decision will occur. At the same time, I have
no convincing argument against the claim that it’s possible for a decision to be
caused by belief-events and desire-events that occur precisely at the time of
the decision and not at earlier times. Such simultaneous event causation is
controversial but sometimes endorsed. But I’m happy to accommodate Mele’s
recommendation and eliminate the apparent futurity requirement”
(PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 633).
➔ Talking about Agent’s in ECL: “On the assumption that event-causal libertarianism is
committed to a broadly causal theory of action, and to the claim that all causes of
actions are events, this position is committed to the thesis that all causal
influences on action are most fundamentally event causal, and thus explicable in
exclusively event-causal terms. So what is Mele claiming when he says that Sam’s
‘intentions, beliefs, skills, and the like do not sink free throws’? He can’t mean that in
the sinking of a free throw Sam is a causal influence distinct from Sam-involving
 events and states. It of course sounds odd to say that a collection of events or states
sinks a free throw, and we don’t talk this way. But the event-causal libertarian must
affirm that what grounds the truth of the claim ‘Sam sank the free throw’ is that a
collection of events, a number of them Sam-involving, caused a further event, the
ball’s going through the hoop. What’s at issue here isn’t how we’re used to
speaking, but the metaphysical commitments of an event-causal theory of action”
(PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 634)
➔ “I maintain that the disappearing agent argument successfully targets the semantic
position according to which claims such as ‘‘Sam sank the free throw’’ are true, but
the causal relations that make them true are solely event-causal relations. I also
believe that it is successful against the metaphysical position that all substance-causal
relations reduce to event-causal relations. But let me note that I do not claim that the
argument successfully targets a position according to which agents as substances are
causes, and such substance causation does not reduce to causation by events, but is
instead (non-reductively) constituted by or grounded in causation solely by events at
more basic levels. (I tentatively affirm a deterministic version of an agent-causal
picture of this non-reductive sort (2015)). Such a view endorses the metaphysical
thesis that there is unreduced causation by agents fundamentally as substances, and
thus denies that all causation is event-causation, a claim essential to the views the
disappearing agent argument is designed to undercut” (PEREBOOM, 2017, p. 634)

PEREBOOM - Responsibility, Agency, and the Disappearing Agent

Objection (2017)

Pereboom, D. 2017. Responsibility, Agency, and the Disappearing Agent Objection..

Available online: https://books.openedition.org/cdf/4942#text
➔ “In event-causal libertarianism, actions, conceived as agent-involving events – as
agents acting at times – are caused solely by prior events, such as an agent’s having
a desire or a belief at a time, and some type of indeterminacy in the production of
actions by appropriate events is held to be necessary for the action to be free in the
sense required for moral responsibility (e.g., Kane 1996; Ekstrom 2000; Balaguer
2010; Franklin 2011)” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
➔ “In my view, the notion of moral responsibility at stake in the free will debate is
the one that involves basic desert” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ “For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in the basic desert sense
is for the action to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be
blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would
deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary.
The desert at issue here is basic in the sense that the agent, to be morally
responsible, would deserve to be blamed or praised just because she has
performed the action, given sensitivity to its moral status; and not, for
 example, in virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations.
(Pereboom 2014, 2001; cf. Feinberg 1970)” (PEREBOOM, 2017).
➔ “In theories that I will classify as within the event-causal libertarian camp, actions are
indeterministically caused by states or property instances” (PEREBOOM, 2017).
➔ Agent-Causal Libertarianism and Non-Causal Libertarianism does not fall to the
disappearing agent argument (PEREBOOM, 2017);
➔ Disappearing Agents: “Suppose that a decision is made in a deliberative context in
which the agent’s moral motivations favor deciding to A, her prudential motivations
favor her deciding to not-A, and the strengths of these motivations are in equipoise. A
and not-A are the options she is considering. The potentially causally relevant events
thus render the occurrence of each of these decisions equiprobable. But then the
potentially causally relevant events do not settle which decision occurs, that is,
whether the decision to A or the decision to not-A occurs. Since, given event-causal
libertarianism, only events are causally relevant, nothing settles which decision
occurs. Thus it can’t be the agent or anything about the agent that settles which
decision occurs, and she therefore lacks the control required for moral responsibility
for it. (Pereboom 2004, 2014, 2017; cf. O’Connor 2008; Griffith 2010)”
(PEREBOOM, 2017).
➔ “The concern is that because event-causal libertarian agents do not have the
power to settle which decision occurs, they cannot have the role in action that
secures the control that moral responsibility demands. I use the equipoise situation
only as a paradigm case. Event causal libertarians generally accept freedom of choice
in non-equipoise situations. The concern about settling arises in such contexts as
well.” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
➔ Settling: “An agent settles which option for action occurs just in case she determines,
not necessarily causally, which action occurs, and she makes the difference as to
which action occurs” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ Determining: “to settle is to determine, not necessarily causally, which of
these options occurs” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ Difference Making: “the agent making the difference as to which option for
action occurs” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
● Is this compatible with the agent’s being causally determined to act by
factors beyond her control?
○ “In a deterministic context it’s still often true that if the agent’s
reasons had been different, she would have acted
differently. Thus it’s open to the determinist to invoke a
reasons-responsive notion of difference making”
(PEREBOOM, 2017).
● Is difference making possible in Frankfurt Cases?
○ “Carolina Sartorio (2013) persuasively argues that causes of
action in Frankfurt cases still make a difference to their effects
in that the effects wouldn’t have been caused by the absence
of their causes. In the non-actual alternative scenario this
 absence must be supplemented by the intervention for the
action to occur” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ “For an agent to settle which option for action occurs is for her to exercise a
crucial sort of control in action, the sort on which our being morally
responsible in this sense would have to depend” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ “For the event-causal libertarian, control is exclusively causal matter. For such
an event-causalist, then, settling will be a causal matter, and plausibly both
the determination and difference-making aspects of settling will be causal as
well” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ Sufficient Condition for Settling: “(S-EC) An agent settles whether an action
occurs if it is caused by certain reasons of hers, where the absence of those
reasons would not have caused that action” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ “To settle which option for action occurs is an exercise of control in action,
and its characteristics are determination and difference making”
(PEREBOOM, 2017).

Deflationary Responses

➔ Balaguer: it is the agent who does the choosing - consciously, intentionally and
purposefully. It is she who does the just-choosing (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ Balaguer 2010, 2014.
➔ Clarke:
◆ Pereboom: “on an event-causal libertarian picture, the relevant causal
conditions antecedent to the decision, i.e., the occurrence of certain
agent-involving events, do not settle whether the decision will occur
(Pereboom 2014, 32)” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ Clarke → “The Rejoinder: the making of the decision by S at t to A settles
whether the decision is made then” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
● “Settling happens exactly when the decision is made” (PEREBOOM,
2017) → Franklin 2014, Clarke 2017.
● “After all, that matter is not settled by anything prior to t (for the
decision is not determined by anything prior to t); and nothing more
than the making of the decision at t is needed to settle the matter
then. Further, since it is S who makes the decision, S, in making that
decision, settles at t whether that decision is made then. For given
that nothing prior to t settles whether that decision is made then, S
need not do anything more than decide at t to A in order to settle
at t whether that decision is made then. An event-causal libertarian
theory, then, has the resources to satisfy the settling requirement SR”
(PEREBOOM, 2017).
○ “(SR) If an agent S freely decides at time t to A, then S settles
at t whether that decision is made then” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
● “To clarify, by ‘the making of the decision’, what is meant is simply
the occurrence of the mental action of deciding. If such a mental
 action occurs, then a making of a decision takes place; the latter is
nothing more and nothing less than—it is—the former. (Clarke 2017)”
(PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ Pereboom:
● Confusion between the meanings of settling:
○ Clarke: “the occurrence of the mental action of deciding settles
which decision occurs in the sense of making a certain
proposition about the decision true” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
○ This is not what Pereboom means by settling: “settling, as I
use the term in the context of the disappearing agent argument,
is an exercise of control, and the event-causal libertarian is
committed to this exercise of control being a causal matter”
(PEREBOOM, 2017);
● What does it mean to say “the making of the decision by S at t to
A”?
○ “The making of the decision by S would consist in the causing
of the event S’s deciding to A at t by S-involving events, say
(desire) E1 and (belief) E2. In Balaguer’s example, Ralph’s
just-deciding is caused by, say, his desiring to star on Broadway
and his believing that moving to New York will facilitate this
aim. But given indeterminism and equipoise, there will be
other events, E3 and E4, set to cause the alternative
action-event, S’s deciding to B at t, in Ralph’s case, deciding to
stay in Mayberry, with the same antecedent probability.
However, at this point there is nothing left to settle whether
S’s deciding to A at t by contrast with S’s deciding to B at t
occurs. Only E1-E2 and E3-E4 are candidates for this role,
but they don’t settle which decision-event occurs. This is the
disappearing agent argument, and so far we’ve encountered no
convincing event-causal libertarian response.” (PEREBOOM,
2017);
➔ Different Directions:
◆ Reinterpreting Agent-Causality:
● Part 1:
● “On one variety of the agent-causal view, decisions are
agent-causings, which in turn might be analyzed as activations
of an agent-causal power” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
● “On this picture, which decision occurs is not settled by the
agent causing it, but instead by virtue of its being an
agent-causing” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
● Adapting to Event-Causality: “the decision is an event-causing,
and we can plausibly claim that its occurrence is settled by
virtue of its being identical to the event-causing”
(PEREBOOM, 2017);
 ● Problem: these views are non-causal;
◆ “His conception of the agent-causal position doesn’t
really preserve the specification that control is a causal
matter. In this conception, the agent does not cause her
causings, and thus the relation between the agent and
the decision is in fact non-causal” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
● Part 2:
○ “In agent causing my raising my arm at t1 I also bring about the
event my agent-causing my raising my arm at ti - that is, I also
bring about my deciding to raise my arm at t1. Since bring
about just is causing, I thus also cause my decision”
(PEREBOOM, 2017);
○ Event Causalism: “S can exercise control over action A by
virtue of S-involving events causing A. S’s deciding to A at t1
would in such cases be identical to the complex event
S-involving events causing A at t1. In causing A at t1, the
S-involving events bring about, and thus cause, the event
S-involving events causing A at t1, which is S’s deciding to
A at t1” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ Problem: “Given motivational equipoise, the
S-involving events don’t settle whether A occurs,
and thus don’t settle whether the decision to A
occurs. In this analogy, the causes of the decision are
inherited from the action, and since the causes of the
action don’t settle whether the action occurs, they don’t
settle whether the decision occurs either”
(PEREBOOM, 2017).
◆ Non-Causalism: one might just specify that “the making of the decision by S
at t to A” is to be interpreted non-causally;
● Problem: “This option might be considered on its own merits, but it is
at odds with the view that control exercised in settling is a causal
matter, a commitment of event-causal libertarianism, at least as it’s
usually set out.” (PEREBOOM, 2017).

Agent versus Event Causation

➔ “Mele (2015) argues, plausibly, that on event-causal libertarian views it remains

correct to say that agents, and not events, decide and make decisions” (PEREBOOM,
2017);
➔ “To be sure, retaining ordinary agent talk is legitimate for the event-causal libertarian.
The view is not committed to linguistic reform. But it is committed to the
metaphysical thesis that all causation is event-causation” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
 ◆ However, it is not open to an event-causal theorist to hold that in, for
example, the sinking of a free throw the agent is a causal influence distinct
from agent-involving events (PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ “An event causalist might endorse the semantic position according to which
‘Sam sunk the free throw’ can be true, but the causal relations that ground its
truth are solely event-causal relations (Bishop 1989). I maintain that the
disappearing agent argument succeeds against an event-causal
libertarianism that endorses this semantic position. For given equipoise,
once the event-causal relations that ground the truth of the ordinary
agent talk are specified, the settling problem becomes evident.”
(PEREBOOM, 2017)
◆ “I do not claim, however, that the argument successfully targets a position
according to which Sam is a substance cause of his action, while such
substance-causation does not reduce to causation by events, but is nevertheless
constituted by or grounded in causation solely by events (cf. Clarke 2017).
Such a position endorses the metaphysical thesis that there is unreduced
causation by agents fundamentally as substances, and thus denies that all
causation is event-causation, a provision essential to the views the
disappearing agent argument is designed to target. Thus by ‘causation
fundamentally as a substance’ I do not mean to exclude substance causation
wholly grounded in or constituted by event-causation, as long as it does not
reduce to event-causation” (PEREBOOM, 2017)

The Disappearing Agent Argument for Agency

➔ Pereboom is open to the claim that the disappearing agent argument extends to a
successful objection to event-causal theories of actions generally;
➔ This event-causal accounts “cannot account for the settling role in action that the
agent intuitively can have in situations of rational equipoise” (PEREBOOM, 2017)

Deterministic Agent Causation

➔ “If agent causation is required to solve the disappearing agent problem for
event-causal libertarianism, now it appears to be required to solve a disappearing
agent problem that arises for the event-causal theory of agency more generally”
(PEREBOOM, 2017);
➔ Pereboom can adopt a deterministic account of agent causation: “As on the libertarian
version, agency (or at least full-blooded agency) is accounted for by the existence of
agents who as substances have the power to cause actions. But by contrast with the
libertarian counterpart, in the exercise of their agent-causal power agents are in
general causally determined by factors beyond their control” (PEREBOOM, 2017)
➔ “I don’t believe, however, that the disappearing agent argument that aims at
event-causal theories of action generally is as strong as the one that targets only
event-causal libertarianism. This is because the more general argument requires
 an equipoise situation, while the less general one does not. Event-causal
libertarians agree that agents have freedom of choice in non-equipoise situations,
and the settling problem arises in such cases as well.” (PEREBOOM, 2017)

The No-Enhanced Control Objection

➔ Pereboom: “If factors beyond the agent’s control, rather than determining a single
decision, instead simply leave open which decision will occur, and the agent has no
greater role in the production of the decision than she does in the deterministic
context, then there is no more reason to think that she is morally responsible than
there is in the deterministic context. So it appears that the event-causal libertarian can
supplement the deterministic context only with the relaxation of the causal net.
(Pereboom 2007, 195)” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
➔ Pereboom changed his mind: “Given that I allow for deterministic agent causation,
and that I am open to the possibility that indeterministic agent causation does secure
the sort of free will required for moral responsibility, then relative to deterministic
agent causation mere relaxing of the causal net may indeed precipitate the sort of
control required for moral responsibility. So I cannot accept the general principle that
mere relaxation of the causal net cannot enhance control in the relevant way, a
principle essential to the “no enhanced control” objection.” (PEREBOOM, 2017)

Present Luck Objection

➔ “Given exactly the same conditions antecedent to t1 as those that precede S’s decision
in the actual world, S’s deciding to A at t1 might not have occurred” (PEREBOOM,
2017)
➔ Problem: “As Mele (1999, 2006) and Haji (2004) emphasize, given the same history
antecedent to t1 as those that precede G, and given the indeterminism of the
agent-causal libertarian view, G might not have occurred. Thus there is a non-actual
possible world, W*, that shares a history up to t1 with the actual world, W, but while
G occurs in W, it fails to occur in W*. But is the fact that G occurred merely a matter
of responsibility-undermining luck?” (PEREBOOM, 2017);
◆ But, in agent-causal libertarianism: “If in addition to the events that precede G
we hold fixed in W and W* the agent-as-substance’s exercise of her
agent-causal power, G will occur in W and not in W*, but only because the
agent-as-substance causes the action A in W but not in W*. For this reason, it
isn’t a matter of responsibility-undermining luck that G occurs in W.”
(PEREBOOM, 2017)
● “This last claim is indeed controversial (Clarke 2010), but I find it
compelling. Thus in my view, present luck does not, in general,
preclude the control required for moral responsibility.” (PEREBOOM,
2017)
➔ “But event-causal determinists can hold that situations in which motivating reasons
don’t causally determine scarcely ever arise, if at all, and if they do, the agent can
 deploy a psychological device functionally similar to the throw of the dice, instead of
settling by just choosing. Thus event-causal determinism remains a viable option”
(PEREBOOM, 2017)

Pereboom, D. 2001. Living without Free Will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 81
Pereboom, D. 2017. “A Defense of Free Will Skepticism: Replies to Victor Tadros, Saul Smilansky, Michael
McKenna, and Alfred Mele on my Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life,” Criminal Law and Philosophy,
DOI:10.1007/s11572-017-9412-2.

PEREBOOM - The Disappearing Agent Objection To Event-Causal

Libertarianism (2014)

Pereboom, D. The Disappearing Agent Objection To Event-Causal Libertarianism.

Philosophical Studies, v. 169, i. 1, pp. 59-69, 2014.

➔ “The objection is not that agents have no causal role in producing decisions, but that
agents have insufficient causal role for the control that moral responsibility
demands” (PEREBOOM, 2014, p. 61);
◆ “What needs to be added to the event-causal libertarian account is
involvement of the agent in the production of her decisions that would
enhance her control so that she can settle which decision occurs, and thereby
be the source of her decisions in a way that allows for moral responsibility.
The agent-causal libertarian’s proposal is to reintroduce the agent as a
cause, not merely as involved in events, but rather fundamentally as a
substance. If the agent were reintroduced merely as involved in events,
the DA argument could be reiterated with undiminished effect”
(PEREBOOM, 2014, p. 61).
➔ Pereboom attacks Balaguer’s View (PEREBOOM, 2014, pp. 62-63):
◆ Given that the account is event-causal libertarian, it’s crucial to see how this
story is to be told in event-causal terms. Reference to agents being causally
influenced by reasons, or agents causing decisions, is to be recast in terms of
causation among events.
◆ Here are the relevant events:
● E1: Ralph’s desiring at t1–tn to play for the Giants,
● E2: Ralph’s desiring at t1–tn to star on Broadway,
● E3: Ralph’s desiring at t1–tn to marry Robbi Anna,
● E4: Ralph’s desiring at t1–tn to manage the local Der Wienerschnitzel,
● E5: Ralph’s deciding at tn to move to New York,
● E6: Ralph’s deciding at tn to stay in Mayberry. In the actual situation,
● E1 and E2 probabilistically cause E5.
◆ The DA objection counts against the supposition that this account secures the
control required for moral responsibility. Intuitively, this sort of control
requires the agent to settle which of the options for decision actually occurs,
 and the event-causal libertarian view does not seem to allow for this in the
case of torn decisions. For on this picture, given the causal influence of
E1–E4, nothing settles whether it will be E5 or E6 that occurs. Thus the
agent does not settle whether E5 or E6 occurs. The objection concludes that
event-causal torn decisions cannot, in Balaguer’s terminology, be
appropriately nonrandom, and the indeterminacy in question cannot
increase or procure the appropriate nonrandomness, for the reason that
appropriate control is missing: Ralph does not control which option is
chosen (2009, p. 83). Moreover, authorship is missing if this sort of control
is required for authorship.
➔ Balaguer’s Response: it is Ralph who decides;
◆ Two Ways to Construct the Claim:
● Pure-Event Causal: ‘Ralph decides to move to New York is to be
analyzed as: Ralph-involving events E1-E2 probabilistically cause
Ralph-involving event E5.” (PEREBOOM, 2014, p. 64);
○ “On this option, the objection that Ralph has insufficient
control over which decision is made retains all of its original
force. Balaguer claims: ‘‘if the just-choosing were done by
anything other than the agent, the she would lose authorship
and control.’’ (2007, p. 97). But the concern is that if the
just-choosing is what gets Ralph the control, and, in the
spirit of event-causal libertarianism, control is a causal
matter, then it seems that what is being specified is that a
causal relation obtains between Ralph himself and the
decision. However, the event-causal libertarian allows only
causal relations among events, and not a fundamental
causal relation between agent and event.” (PEREBOOM,
2014, p. 64)
● Non-Causal: “Ralph decides to move to New York specifies a
non-causal relation between Ralph and a decision, perhaps the relation
of being-the-subject-of.” (PEREBOOM, 2014, p. 64).
➔ Kane focusing on the phenomenology of the decision making process: “But any
incompatibilist has reason to be wary of this response, since a compatibilist could as
easily appeal to this same sort of phenomenological consideration in response to the
objection that agents cannot be responsible for causally determined actions (Pereboom
2001, 2007). A compatibilist might argue that if an agent experienced her causally
determined decision as resulting from an outside determining force, she would have
good reason to believe that she was not making choice for which she was morally
responsible. If, by contrast, a causally determined decision were experienced as
voluntary and resulting from the agent’s effort of will, she would have a strong reason
to believe she was morally responsible for it.” (PEREBOOM, 2014, p. 65)
 PEREBOOM - Is Our Conception of Agent-Causation Coherent? (2004)

Pereboom, D. Is Our Conception of Agent-Causation Coherent?. Philosophical Topics, v. 32,

n. 1/2, pp. 275-286, 2004.

➔ Disappearing Agent: “To illustrate, consider Kane's example of a businesswoman

who has the option of deciding to stop to assist an assault victim, whereupon she
would be late for work, or not deciding to stop, which would allow her to make it to
work on time. For simplicity, suppose the relevant antecedent conditions are, against
stopping, Grace's desiring at t not to annoy her irascible boss , and Grace's believing
at t that if she is late for work her boss will give her a difficult timer, and for stopping,
Grace's desiring at t to help people in trouble, and Grace's belief that she can be
effective in helping the assault victim. Suppose the motivational force of each of these
pairs of conditions for Grace is more or less equal. On the event-causal libertarian
view, given that these antecedent conditions are in place, both Grace's deciding
to stop and her not deciding to stop remain possible outcomes, and let us assume,
each are still significantly probable outcomes. Suppose she decides to stop. With
these antecedent conditions in place, there is nothing else - in particular, not
Grace herself - to settle whether her decision to stop occurs. If at this point Grace
cannot settle whether the decision occurs, she would appear to lack the control
required for moral responsibility for the decision. This might be called ‘the problem
of the disappearing agent’ - in the event-causal libertarian view, there is no provision
in the theory that allows the agent to exercise control at this crucial point, and this is
why she would lack the control required for moral responsibility. True, Grace is the
subject of her decision to stop, but 'being the subject of is not a causal relation, and,
intuitively, the control that must be exercised would have to be causal (although this
claim is not uncontroversial)” (PEREBOOM, 2004, p. 276)
◆ “If one these antecedent conditions are in place it remains unsettled whether
this causal relation will come to be, and Grace has no further role in
determining whether it does, then, intuitively, she will not be morally
responsible for the decision” (PEREBOOM, 2004, p. 276)

CARUSO - Rejecting Retributivism (2021)

CARUSO, G. D. Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

➔ Disappearing Agent: “The core concern is that because event-causal libertarian

agents lack the power to settle which decision occurs, they lack the role in action
necessary to secure the control that basic desert moral responsibility requires”
(CARUSO, 2021, p. 45);
 ◆ Pereboom’s Statement of the Objection: “Suppose that a decision is made in
a deliberative context in which the agent’s moral motivations favor deciding to
A, her prudential motivations favor her deciding to not-A, and the strength(s)
of these motivations are in equipoise. A and non-A are the options she is
considering. The potentially causally relevant events, typically beliefor
desire-involving events, thus render the occurrence of each of these decisions
equiprobable. But then the potentially causally relevant events do not settle
which decision occurs, that is, whether the decision to A or the decision to
not-A occurs. Since, given event-causal libertarianism, only events are
causally relevant, nothing settles which decision occurs. Thus it can’t be the
agent or anything about the agent that settles which decision occurs, and she
therefore lacks the control required for moral responsibility for it. (Pereboom
2018; see also 2014a, 2017)” (CARUSO, 2021, p. 45);
● The objection about settling equally arises in non-equipoise situations
as well.
➔ “Imagine, for example, that Farah is torn between two courses of action: (a) attending
an important meeting at work tomorrow morning or (b) calling in sick and spending
the day with a friend who is in town for just one day. She has good reasons for doing
(a) but she also has good reasons for doing (b). Whatever she ends up doing, we can
say that it was intentionally endorsed and that she had “reasons for doing it.”
Consistent with Kane’s account, we can also presuppose that Farah exerts “dual
efforts of will” by trying to choose to do each act she is contemplating. But if
indeterminacy is genuinely involved in the agential causal sequence, then it really is a
matter of luck which action she ends up performing. To make vivid the lack of control
agents have over genuinely undetermined events, consider what would happen if God
rolled back the relevant stretch of history to some point prior to an
undetermined event and then allowed it to unfold once more. Since events would
not unfold in the same way on the replay as they did the first time around, since these
are genuinely undetermined, and nothing the agent does (or is) can ensure which
undetermined possibility is realized, the outcome of this sequence (in this case the
agent’s decision) is a matter of luck. Such luck, skeptics argue, is
responsibility-undermining” (CARUSO, 2021, pp. 45-46)
➔ “His [Kane’s] account leaves us unable to settle which neural network “wins” out.
And on the account of settling I favor, the ability to settle which option for action
occurs is an exercise of control in action with two main characteristics: determination
and difference making. Following Pereboom (2017), I propose, first, that to settle
whether to A or B, or equivalently, which of A or B occurs, is to determine which of
these options occurs (Pereboom 2017, 2018). But there is also more to the notion of
settling than determining whether an action or decision to act occurs. Helen Steward
(2012), for instance, has argued that settling must also involve difference making –
that is, making the difference as to which option for actions occurs. Putting the two
suggestions together, Pereboom proposes the following characterization: An agent
settles which option for action occurs just in case she determines which action occurs,
and she makes the difference as to which action occurs (2017). Since event-causal
 libertarianism lacks this ability to settle which option for action occurs, it is
unable to preserve the control in action required for basic desert moral
responsibility” (CARUSO, 2021, p. 46)
➔ “Pereboom’s objection is that the agent ‘disappears’ at the crucial juncture in the
production of the decision – that is, when its occurrence is to be settled.” (CARUSO,
2021, p. 47);
➔ “For an agent to be able to settle which option for action occurs, they must determine
and make the difference as to which action occurs. Exerting dual efforts of will does
not satisfy this level of control. Hence, even if an individual is ‘engaged’ in a
self-forming action in the manner described earlier, their choice is still a matter of
luck. The disappearing agent objection is not that individuals play no role in
which option for action occurs; rather it maintains that, given event-causal
libertarianism, only events can be causally relevant, which leaves agents unable
to settle which choice is ultimately made” (CARUSO, 2021, pp. 48-49)
➔ Mele’s Response: in event-causal views, it is the agent’s who decide.
◆ “Mele goes on to add that “in my view, an agent’s deciding to A . . . does not
depend on his having agent-causal powers and is accommodated by an
event-causal libertarian view” (2017: 165–166). He calls this thesis T and
maintains that if it is true, then “if an agent’s deciding to A in a case of the
kind in question is sufficient for his settling whether he is in one decision
state or another, such settling does not depend on agent-causal powers
and the disappearing agent objection fails” (2017: 166).” (CARUSO, 2021,
p. 52)
◆ Caruso quotes Pereboom (2018);
◆ “The problem is that event-causal libertarians, while free to retain ordinary
agent talk, are committed to refrain from ascribing causal powers to agents
separate from the causal powers of agent-involving events. Hence, it is hard to
understand what Mele means when he says that agents “have the power to
decide.” Does he mean that they as agents, and not by virtue of the events in
which they have a role, have the causal power to decide? If so, then he is
guilty of smuggling in sui generis kinds of agency and causation and his
account is no longer a pure event-causal account. If not, then it is hard to see
how his reply to the disappearing agent objection adds anything new”
(CARUSO, 2021, p. 52)

FRANKLIN - Event-Causal Libertarianism, Functional Reduction, and the

Disappearing Agent Argument (2014)

FRANKLIN, C. E.. Event-Causal Libertarianism, Functional Reduction, and the

Disappearing Agent Argument. Philosophical Studies, v. 170, pp. 413-432, 2014.

Disappearing Agent Argument (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 415)

➔ Premise 1: “On event-causal libertarianism, there is nothing about the agent that
settles which decision he makes” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 414);
➔ Premise 2: “If nothing about the agent settles which decision he makes, then the
decision he makes is a matter of luck” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 414);
➔ Premise 3: “If the decision the agent makes is a matter of luck, then he is not free
with respect to or morally responsible for the decision” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 414);
➔ Conclusion: “An agent who merely satisfies event-causal libertarianism is neither
free with respect to nor morally responsible for any of his decisions” (FRANKLIN,
2014, p. 414)

A Schema of Event-Causal Libertarianism

➔ “According to event-causalists, self-determination is to be solely analyzed in terms of,

and reduced to, states, events involving the agent - such as his desires and beliefs -
determining the action” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 414);
➔ Causal Theory of Action: “an event (a bit of behavior or a mental episode) is an
action if and only if the event is caused, in the appropriate manner, by mental states
and events involving the agent” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 416);
➔ “Free action requires the existence [of] indeterminism” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p.
416);
◆ “Most libertarians allow for the possibility of free but determined actions so
long as these actions are suitably connected to earlier free actions that are
undetermined. In this way libertarians draw a distinction between directly free
and indirectly free actions. For ease of exposition, I will focus on directly free
actions” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 416).
➔ Best Way to Integrate Indeterminism with the Causal Theory of Action: requiring
that “the causal relation that obtains between the agent’s nonactional states and events
(e.g. desires and beliefs) and free choice be nondeterministic” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p.
416).
◆ Suppose that X had a choice to do Y and Z. Suppose that in the actual world
the agent chose to do Y. Then, there is a possible world up until the moment of
choice in which the agent chooses Z. In this world, the desires and beliefs that
are actually causally efficacious (causing her choice to do Y) are causally
silent (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 416).
● “Given the presence of indeterminism, different desires and beliefs
might be causally efficacious” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 417).
➔ “Event-causal libertarianism requires, at minimum, that free choice be
nondeterministically caused, in the appropriate manner, by agent-involving
mental states and events” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 417).
➔ This is not enough:
◆ “A free agent is an agent with the power of self-determination” →
“event-causal libertarian must offer a reductive analysis of the power of
self-determination” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 417).
➔ “Our concept of a self-determining agent is (at minimum) the concept of the agent
intervening between his motivations for action and his decision concerning which
course of action to pursue” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 417)
◆ “The self-determining agent adjudicates among his rival motivations for
action, considering and weighing them, and on the basis of this
adjudication selects or chooses a particular course of action. These are the
central functions of a self-determining agent” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 418).
➔ “The moral is that there is more to self-determination than the mere causation of
events by one’s beliefs and desires. But what more must be added?” (FRANKLIN,
2014, p. 418);
➔ Functional Reduction of the Role of the Self-Determining Agent:
◆ “On such an approach we seek to reduce the activity of a self-determining
agent to a state or event (or set of states and events) that plays the
self-determining agent’s functional role. What was missing in the case of the
unwitting agent was a mental state or event (or set of mental states and events)
that played the functional role of the self-determining agent. Note that what is
targeted for reduction here is not the agent, but the agent’s role in
self-determination. Therefore, event-causal libertarians must enrich their
account of the causal etiology of free action to include a state or event (or set
of states and events) that plays the self-determining agent’s functional role”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 418).
➔ Two Things must be Done: “in seeking a functional reduction of the
self-determining agent’s role, we are seeking to locate a state or event that not only
plays his functional role, but that in so doing counts as his playing his functional role”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 418)
◆ “Simply because something plays the self-determining agent’s functional role,
it does not thereby count as the agent’s playing his functional role”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 419).
➔ “In searching for a state or event that can play the functional role of a
self-determining agent, we must locate a state that does not compete with the
self-determining agent’s playing his role, but rather, in some way, amounts to his
playing his role” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 419)
➔ He will follow “Identification Reductionism”: “while agents are not identical to any
(collection of) mental states and events, they are identified with some of these states
and events. When an agent is identified with a state or event, that state or event has
authority to speak for the agent, and because the state has authority for the agent, its
playing the self-determining agent’s functional role counts as his playing his
functional role. Just as mental properties can play a causal role if they bear an intimate
relation (such as constitution) to physical properties that play a causal role, so agents
can play a causal role if they bear an intimate relation (such as identification) to
mental events or states that play a causal role” (FRANKLIN, 2014, pp. 419-420)
◆ “An advantage of the identification reductionist route is that it allows us to
avoid questions about the nature of the self: we need not commit ourselves to
the claim that the agent is a bundle of mental states or a substance. Instead,
 identification reductionists contend that the role of the self-determining agent
(regardless of what the agent actually is) is played by states and events with
which he is identified” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 420).
◆ “Identification reductionists are committed to the existence of a state or event
that (i) plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and (ii) is such
that the agent is identified with it” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 420).
◆ “While all of these proposals have merit, I will adopt, as a working hypothesis,
Velleman’s (2000c, d, 2009) account of identification. To clarify: my aim in
employing Velleman’s account is both to give more flesh to identification
reductionism (specifically its treatment of the notion of identification) and to
illustrate the dynamics of marrying identification reductionism with
event-causal libertarianism” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 420).
● “In particular, Velleman argues that the role of the self-determining
agent is played by the desire to act for what the agent takes to be his
strongest reasons” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 421):
○ “I suggest, a la Velleman, that it [agent’s role] is played by the
desire to act in accordance with reasons.” (FRANKLIN, 2014,
p. 417)
◆ Agent’s role = agent’s functional role (FRANKLIN,
2014, p. 417)
○ “Therefore, the desire to act in accordance with what one takes
to be one’s strongest reasons appears to play the
self-determining agent’s functional role” (FRANKLIN, 2014,
p. 421).
➔ “Furthermore, this desire’s playing the self-determining agent’s functional role
appears to count as his playing his functional role because he seems to be essentially
identified with it” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 422)
◆ “The desire to act for what one takes to be the strongest reasons is not simply
one desire among many, but rather is a desire constitutive of self-determining
agency” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 422)
◆ “Therefore, not only does the desire to act in accordance with strongest
reasons seem to play the self-determining agent’s functional role, but it also
seems to be a desire with which the agent is identified” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p.
422)
● If you think this needs explanation, see 422.
➔ He will focus on the desire to act for the best reasons, because this desire may be
sufficient for performing a self-determined action, but not necessary (FRANKLIN,
2014, p. 423);
➔ “Let us suppose that on the basis of his deliberation he comes to view his desire to
refrain as providing the strongest reason for action. In this case, the motivational force
of the thief’s desires and beliefs that favor refraining will be supplemented with the
thief’s own motivational force in the form of his desire to act for what he takes to
be the best reasons and, in this way, the desire introduces a new causal influence.
The thief plays a causal role over and above the causal role played by his desires and
 beliefs for action, and this supplementation amounts to his ‘‘throwing his weight’’
behind the desires and beliefs that led to action. It is this additional participation of
the agent in action that transforms mere action into self-determined action. It is
important to realize that although freedom requires the power of
self-determination, it does not necessarily require its exercise. In the above case,
we are imagining that the thief’s decision to refrain was undetermined. For ease, let us
suppose that the thief could have decided to steal instead. In such a case the thief
would be acting weakly, since he would be acting contrary to his judgment about
what he had most reason to do. In acting weakly, the thief would act freely, but not
self-determinedly. He would not act self-determinedly because there would be no
attitude among the causes of his deciding to steal both that he is identified with
and plays his functional role. And yet he would act freely because, among other
things, he could have acted self-determinedly: he could have decided to refrain, and
had he made this alternative decision there would have been a state among the
causal antecedents of his decision that played his functional role and with which
he was identified. So free choice requires not that the agent actually exercise his
power of self-determination, but only that the agent could have exercised this power”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 423).
➔ The agent has plural voluntary control: both actions are made voluntary, on purpose
and for reasons, not merely by accidente (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 424);
◆ The agent is arguably morally responsible (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 424);
◆ “What is asymmetrical is that the thief only exercises his power of
self-determination in one case, but, as far as I can see, this need cause no
problems for event-causal libertarians nor constitute a departure from
traditional event-causal libertarian models” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 424).
➔ “One of the core functional roles of a self-determining agent is to intervene between
his desires and beliefs for action and the choice he makes on their basis. Our concept
of a self-determining agent is one in which the agent plays a causal role over and
above the causal role played by his specific desires and beliefs for action.”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 426)

Determination and Settling what to do

➔ “What is required for settling which decision one makes?” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p.
424);
➔ “The agent’s contribution in virtue of which he settles which decision is made occurs
simultaneous with his making the decision” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 425);
➔ “Why not just think that the agent’s making the decision suffices for his settling which
decision he makes?” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 425);
◆ “What makes it the case that the agent fails to settle which decision will occur
is a combination of two factors: that the decision is undetermined and that the
agent’s causal role is exhausted by the agent’s antecedent states and events. It
is this second feature that differentiates event-causal from agent-causal
 accounts, and it is this second feature that renders event-causal libertarianism
susceptible to the disappearing agent argument” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 426).
➔ “But by enriching event-causal libertarianism with a reductive theory of
selfdetermination, we acquire the needed resources to respond to Pereboom’s
objection. For, on the account I developed above, it is false that the agent’s specific
desires and beliefs for action exhaust his causal contribution. In addition, the agent
himself intervenes, or could have intervened, in virtue of the causal power of his
desire to act in accordance with what he takes to be the best reasons—a desire with
which he is identified. Consider again the story of the thief and let us suppose that his
decision to refrain from stealing was self-determined. On my account, his desire to act
in accordance with the strongest reasons combined with, and supplemented the
motivational force of, his desires and beliefs that favored this action to jointly cause
his decision to refrain from stealing. In this way, the agent does play an additional
causal role in settling on what to do. Now suppose that although the decision to
refrain was free, it was not self-determined (suppose in this case the thief judged that
it was best to steal). In that case the thief did not play an additional causal role
(although he could have), but instead let his motivational factors sort themselves out,
perhaps doing whatever he felt like at the moment of action. But even agentcausal
libertarians should not require that every instance of free action be selfdetermined. It
should be enough to require that every instance of free action is one in which the
agent could have brought his power of self-determination to bear. So the thief did play
an additional causal role beyond that of his specific desires and beliefs for action: he
also determined (or could have determined) which set of desires and beliefs he acted
on. This determination does not require the agent, qua substance, to cause his action,
but rather that a state that is functionally identical to him and with which he is
identified plays the relevant causal role” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 426)
➔ “The problem with traditional event-causal libertarians is not that they reduce the role
of the self-determining agent to states and events; the problem is with the specific
states and events they attempt to reduce his role to. Once we enrich the reductive base
to include a state with which the agent is identified and that plays his functional role,
such as the desire to act in accordance with the strongest reasons, we provide all the
resources needed to furnish the agent with the power to settle which decision he
makes. Therefore, premise (1) is false” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 427).
➔ “If the agent’s decision was solely caused by the agent’s desires and beliefs for one of
the two decisions, then there was indeed an important role that the agent failed to
play: he failed to intervene between his reasons and the making of his decision. I then
explained that this is not the story I offer. On my account, in addition to the desires
and beliefs for action playing a causal role, the desire to act in accordance with the
strongest reasons—a desire that is functionally identical to the agent and with which
he is identified—also plays, or could have played, a causal role. It is in light of this
additional causal role that the agent determines, or could have determined, and thus
settled, what he would do.” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 427);
➔ “The desire to act in accordance with the strongest reasons does not introduce a new
decision in the action-sequence, but introduces a new causal antecedent to decision.
 On the account I am espousing, the agent’s desire to act for reasons combines with
one set of desires and beliefs for action to jointly cause the decision. The decision is
undetermined and so it was possible that the agent’s other set of desires and beliefs for
action, without the additional force of his desire to act in accordance with the
strongest reasons, caused him to make a different decision. My introducing this desire
does not introduce a new and earlier decision in the action-sequence and so I am not
guilty of endlessly positing earlier decisions to forestall the original query”
(FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 428)
➔ Self-Determination does not need determination:
◆ “The notion of ‘determination’ in ‘self-determination’ is the notion of ‘settling
or resolving some issue’, such as what to do” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 429);
● “When deliberating about what to do I determine my action by causing
my choice to pursue a course of action—I settle what to do by causing
my choice. This is the sense of self-determination that seems required
for free will” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 429)
◆ The second instance trades on the meaning of ‘determination’: here
‘determination’ means something like ‘deterministically caused’. It is only this
second sense of ‘determined’ that is contrary to ‘undetermined’ (which I
assume is being used univocally to mean ‘not deterministically caused’).
➔ “On my account, the agent is robustly present during the moment of self-determined
action and makes his distinctive contribution by having his desire to act in accordance
with the strongest reasons add force to the desires and beliefs that favor the decision
he makes” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 429)
➔ “By reducing the role of the agent in action to a state with which the agent is
identified and that plays his functional role, we preserve the presence of the agent at
the moment of decision. In addition to all the motivational states that do not play the
role of the self-determining agent in action, such as beliefs and desires for particular
actions, the agent himself contributes to his decision in virtue of the desire to act for
best reasons causally contributing to his decision.” (FRANKLIN, 2014, p. 430)

MELE - On Pereboom’s Disappearing Agent Argument (2015) and Aspects

of Agency (2017)

MALE, A. R. On Pereboom’s Disappearing Agent Argument. Criminal Law and Philosophy,

v. 11, i. 3, pp. 561–574, 2015.
MELE, A. R. Aspects of Agency: Decisions, Abilities, Explanations, and Free Will. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017.

Introduction

➔ “Pereboom’s disappearing agent objection features a situation of a very specific kind.

[...] What about agents with competing motivations that are not in equipoise?
And what about agents whose competing motivations at the pertinent time do not
 include, for example, moral motivations? The objection at issue (which I quoted in
full) makes no explicit claims about decisions these agents make. Yet, if Pereboom’s
disappearing agent objection is to falsify event-causal libertarianism, it must
show that ‘event-causal libertarian agents’ who make these decisions lack ‘the
control required for basic desert moral responsibility’ for them (p. 32)” (MELE,
2015, p. 562; MELE, 2017a, p. 154);
➔ “Perhaps Pereboom would endorse the following claim: (P1) If ‘‘event-causal
libertarian agents’’ in the precise situation he describes lack ‘‘the control required for
basic desert moral responsibility’’ for their decisions because nothing settles whether
the decisions will occur (p. 32), then any event-causal libertarian agent in a
situation in which ‘‘relevant causal conditions antecedent to the decision …
render the occurrence of the decision’’ less than 100 % probable is in the same
boat regarding the absence of settling and the control at issue” (MELE, 2015, p.
562; MELE, 2017a, p. 154).
◆ Is P1 plausible?
● Problem 2: “That depends, among other things, on whether it is
plausible that an agent’s settling whether his decision to A will
occur is required for his having basic desert moral responsibility
for the decision” (MELE, 2015, p. 562; MELE, 2017a, pp. 154-155).
➔ Problem 1: “I confess to lacking a good grip on what Pereboom means by
‘‘settles’’ in the expression ‘‘settles whether the decision will occur.’’ This makes it
difficult for me to assess P1 and Pereboom’s disappearing agent objection itself”
(MELE, 2015, p. 562; MELE, 2017a, p. 155);
➔ Settling a Decision: “Presumably, a person’s settling on A-ing (in deciding to A) is
different from a person’s settling whether a decision to A will occur. I have a good
grip on settling of the former kind, I believe; but I cannot say the same about
settling of the latter kind”(MELE, 2015, p. 563; MELE, 2017a, p. 155);
➔ “Maybe settling whether one will decide to A is supposed to be such that it involves
no luck. Maybe settling whether one will decide to A requires exercising complete
(absolute, total) control over what one does or does not decide. Perhaps this is, in
Pereboom’s view, “the control required for basic desert moral responsibility” for a
decision that agents who lack settling power do not have (Pereboom 2014, p. 32)”
(MELE, 2017a, p. 158; MELE, 2015, p. 565)
➔ Problem of Direct Control:
◆ “I begin with a question about complete control that concerns free actions in
general rather than free decisions in particular. Is having complete control over
whether one will A a plausible general requirement for freely Aing? Imagine a
professional basketball player who is a superb free-throw shooter. He sinks 90
% of his shots from the foul line. He has a lot of control over whether he sinks
his free-throw attempts—certainly more than I do over whether I sink mine.
The claim that, even so, he cannot freely sink any given free-throw he
sinks because he lacks complete control over whether he sinks it sets too
high a bar for free free-throw sinking. At least, no view of free action that
 deserves to be taken seriously sets the bar that high.” (MELE, 2015, p.
566; MELE, 2017a, p. 159);
◆ “Imagine that the same player, Sam, has an indeterministic neural randomizer
installed in his head that gives him a 99.9 % chance of trying to sink any
free-throw he intends to sink and a 0.01 % chance of temporarily breaking
down instead and not trying to do anything at the time. Regarding any
free-throw he attempts, he apparently lacked complete control over whether he
would try to sink it. The claim that, for that reason, he cannot freely sink any
of his free-throws sets too high a bar” (MELE, 2015, p. 566; MELE, 2017a, p.
160).
◆ “Adjust the chances of Sam’s trying and his breaking down to 90 and 10 %,
respectively. Sam just now tried to sink a free-throw and his execution was
perfect. He scored the point. That he had a 10 % chance of temporarily
breaking down and not even trying to do what he intended to do makes Sam
strange. But an argument would be needed to persuade me that this fact
ensures that Sam did not freely sink that free-throw. I asked whether having
complete control over whether one will A is a plausible general
requirement for freely A-ing. My answer is no, and I have offered some
motivation for that answer” (MELE, 2015, p. 567; MELE, 2017a, p. 160).
➔ “What does it mean to say that a person has complete control over what he will
decide?” (MELE, 2015, p. 567; MELE, 2015, p. 160)
➔ “I asked what Pereboom means by an agent’s settling whether a decision he proceeds
to make will occur. I looked for guidance in some claims he makes about agents with
agent-causal power, and I conjectured, on the basis of those claims, that settling
whether one will decide to A is a matter of exercising complete control over whether
one will decide to A. That led me to ask what it is for an agent to have complete
control over whether he will decide to A. So far, I have not found an answer” (MELE,
2015, p. 568; MELE, 2017a, p. 161)
➔ “My interest in free action in the present article (and elsewhere) is in what I called
moral-responsibility-level free action—‘‘roughly, free action of such a kind that if all
the freedom-independent conditions for moral responsibility for a particular action
were satisfied without that sufficing for the agent’s being morally responsible for it,
the addition of the action’s being free to this set of conditions would entail that he is
morally responsible for it’’ (Mele 2006, p. 17)” (mele, 2015, P. 566; cf. MELE, 2017a,
p. 4)

Control and Settling Whether One will Decide to Al

➔ “In each of these quotations, the future tense is used. So, as Pereboom understands
agent causation, are agents who decide to A supposed to settle what they will decide
(or whether they will decide to A) before they decide to A? If so, how would they do
that? Would they agent-cause a decision (or intention) to make another decision a bit
later— a decision to A? (The former decision is a second- order decision.) Would they
agent- cause some process or other that issues a bit later in their deciding to A? I
 doubt this is the kind of thing Pereboom has in mind” (MELE, 2015, p. 569; MELE,
2017a, p. 162)
➔ “In the absence of substantial guidance about what it is for an agent to settle at t what
he decides at t, how should one proceed?” (MELE, 2015, p. 569; MELE, 2017a, p.
162)

Event and Agent Causation

➔ “According to such views [event-causal views of decision], it is agents who decide.
Agents who decide (at least when they decide) are able to decide and have the power
to decide. Proponents of event-causal theories of decision making do not view an
‘‘agent’s states, or else agent-involving events’’ as exercising the power or ability to
make decisions. This is as it should be. States and events are not able to make
decisions and therefore are not able to exercise the power or ability to make
decisions. Only agents can decide what to do. A comparison with actions of another
kind might help. Recall Sam, the superb free-throw shooter. He has and exercises the
ability or power to sink free-throws, and he sinks many of them. His intentions,
beliefs, skills, and the like do not sink free-throws—alone or in combination with one
another. And that is no surprise, because they are not able to sink free-throws. Does
one have to be an agent causationist to say these things about free-throws? Not
according to proponents of event-causal theories of action. And the same goes for
decision making. It is agents who make decisions, we say. When they do, we say that
such things as intentions, beliefs, and desires (or their physical realizers, or facts about
what agents intend, believe, and desire) play causal roles in the production of the
decisions. But we do not say that things such as these decide or make decisions. We
ascribe the decision making to the agent, just as we ascribe the free-throw sinking to
Sam” (MELE, 2015, p. 570; MELE, 2017a, p. 164).
➔ Pereboom’s Response: “He suggested that what he means by “settling” is what I
mean by it when I assert that in deciding to A one settles on A- ing.” (MELE, 2017a,
p. 165);
◆ “In this kind of scenario, Pereboom’s suggestion (qua referee), more fully
stated, is that when one is faced with, for example, a pair of options, A and B,
one settles whether one will be in a decision state of being settled on A- ing or
a decision state of being settled on B- ing simply by deciding to A or deciding
to B. Now, in my view, an agent’s deciding to A— in general and in a scenario
like this— does not depend on his having agent- causal powers and is
accommodated by an event- causal libertarian view. Call this thesis T. Suppose
that T is true. Then if an agent’s deciding to A in a case of the kind in
question is sufficient for his settling whether he is in one decision state or
another, such settling does not depend on agent- causal powers and the
disappearing agent objection fails. So suppose that T is false and, more
specifically, that both conjuncts are false. Then if Pereboom’s skepticism
about agent causation is justified (that is, the specific skepticism about it
commented on in this chapter), we should believe not only that we never
decide freely but also that we never decide at all in indeterministic cases of the
 sort at issue. Because this result— that we never decide at all in these
scenarios— is at odds with Pereboom’s report that his disappearing agent
objection does not target agency (2014, p. 32), I infer that the notion of
settling at work in my view of decision- making is not the notion of settling at
work in his disappearing agent objection” (MELE, 2017a, pp. 165-166)
◆ “If it is claimed that the agent is unable to decide what to do because he cannot
settle what decision state he enters and deciding what to do requires such
settling, we need an interpretation of settling that makes it clear why this claim
is supposed to be true” (MELE, 2017a, p. 167)

Other
➔ “If the same readers assume that settling whether one decides to A depends on
agent-causal power because such settling requires exercising complete control over
what one decides” (MELE, 2015, p. 571; MELE, 2017a, p. 167);
➔ Is Settling Necessary to Moral Responsibility? → “A key claim in Pereboom’s
disappearing agent objection is that, if neither the agent nor ‘‘anything about the agent
settles whether the decision will occur,’’ the agent lacks ‘‘the control required for
basic desert moral responsibility for it’’ (p. 32). I do not understand this claim well
enough to assess it, because, despite my efforts, I do not have a good grip on what
is meant by settling whether a decision will occur” (MELE, 2015, p. 572; MELE,
2017a, p. 167)
◆ “Depending on how settling what one decides (or will decide) is supposed to
be understood, Eve’s decision being partly a matter of luck may preclude her
having settled what she decided (or what she would decide). But does it
preclude her having decided freely and her having basic desert moral
responsibility for her decision?” (MELE, 2015, p. 572; MELE, 2017a, p.
177).
● “There was some chance that Eve would decide at t to reject the job
and some chance that she would decide then to accept it. It is likely
that there was also a chance that Eve would, at t, continue to be
unsettled about what to do and continue deliberating about the job
offer, and there might have been a chance of her mind beginning to
wander at t (among other things). Consider these chances— or
antecedent probabilities— very shortly before t. If they came out of the
blue, wholly as a matter of luck, that would be cause for worry about
Eve. But they did not. They were shaped in significant part by Eve’s
evidence gathering and her deliberation. These antecedent probabilities
were also shaped partly by Eve’s long- term preferences and values,
and these preferences and values were in turn shaped by past decisions
Eve made, by what she learned from past successes and mistakes in
decision- making, and so on.” (MELE, 2015, p. 572; MELE, 2017a, p.
177)
○ “Imagine that we are like Eve in that, sometimes, the processes
that issue in our decisions are such that it is at no time
 determined what we will decide. Even so, our values,
preferences, learning history, information gathering,
deliberation, and so on constrain the physically and
psychologically possible outcomes and shape the antecedent
probabilities of the outcomes. If we come to know that we are
like Eve in this respect and the indeterminism worries us, we
should do our best to minimize our chances of making poor
decisions by working on developing good habits of decision-
making and good habits in general. If we learn that we are like
Eve in the respect at issue, should we also infer that we never
act freely? It may be said that someone like me who believes
that Eve may decide freely and have basic desert moral
responsibility for her decision sets the bar for free action and
this sort of moral responsibility very close to where a
compatibilist sets it. This might make me worry, if there were
an argument that convinced me that compatibilism is false. But
there is no such argument.” (MELE, 2015, pp. 572-573; MELE,
2017a, p. 178)
➔ “Owing to my inadequate grip on what Pereboom means by an agent’s settling
whether a decision will occur (and on what it is to exercise complete control over
what one will decide, if that is what he means), I am not in a position to assess the
proposal that the problem posed by his disappearing agent objection is deeper
than, for example, what I called ‘‘the problem of present luck’’ (Mele 2006, p.
69). An ideal, reader-friendly version of Pereboom’s presentation of his disappearing
agent objection would include substantial guidance on what it is for an agent to
settle whether a decision will (or does) occur. Ideally, the reader would get an initial
sketch of an account of this settling that does not refer to agent causation and
then an explanation of why it is that “event- causal” libertarian agents” cannot
do anything that satisfies the account. If no sketch of decision settling is even
intelligible without reference to agent causation, a reader- friendly version of the
presentation would explain why that is so. Also if the guidance provided on settling
does not render it obvious that basic desert moral responsibility for a decision
one made depends on one’s having settled whether that decision would (or did)
occur, a reader-friendly version of the presentation would include an argument
for this thesis about settling and responsibility” (MELE, 2015, p. 573; MELE.
2017, pp. 178-179);
➔ “An account of what it is to settle whether one will (or does) decide to A may
prove illuminating. Possibly, with an account of such settling in place, we will be
able to ascertain, among other things, whether settling whether one will (or does)
decide to A is required for freely deciding to A and for basic desert moral
responsibility for one’s decision” (MELE, 2015, pp. 573-574; MELE, 2017a, p. 179)
➔ “Commenting on Griffith: “Taking our lead from this, we have an answer to my
questions about the alleged power to “determine the decision.” It is the power to
completely control which decision one makes.” (MELE, 2017a, p. 169)
➔ “In my view, even if the difference between what an agent does at t in one world and
what he does at t in another world with the same past up to t and the same laws of
nature is just a matter of luck, the agent may perform a directly free action at t in both
worlds (Mele 2006, chap. 5). This is the thesis I labeled LDF in chapter 6.” (MELE,
2017a, p. 169)
➔ “Now, anyone can say that something or other is the power to completely control
which decision one makes. An event- causal libertarian can say this about some non-
agent- causal decision- making power, and so can a noncausalist libertarian. One thing
I would like to know is how replacing event- caused decisions or uncaused decisions
with agent- caused decisions (or intentions) is supposed to make true something that
would otherwise supposedly be false— namely, that the decisions are made by
someone who exercised the power to completely control which decision he made (or
which intention he came to have). (On this sort of thing, see Mele 2006, chap. 3.)”
(MELE, 2017a, pp. 172-173)
➔ “What is complete control? And what is it for an agent to determine something?”
(MELE, 2017a, p. 173)
◆ “Suppose that the keyboard Sol is using has a randomizer on it that ensures
that there is always a small chance that a key he is trying to press will stick
and fail to make contact with the switch under it. (Recall the definition of a
key press above.) Then Sol never has complete control over whether he
presses the Q key or the P key. Suppose now that a randomizer has been
installed in Sol’s brain that ensures that there is always a small chance that his
proximal decisions to press a key— his decisions to press a specific key
straightaway— will not be followed by a corresponding attempt. Then Sol
never has complete control over whether he tries to press the Q key or tries to
press the P key (at least when no alternative route to attempt- production is in
use— that is, no route that does not include decisions). These observations
prompt the following two questions: Might Sol nevertheless freely have
pressed the Q key the last time he pressed it? Does a satisfactory account of a
person’s having complete control over whether he decides to A or decides to B
have a “no chance” clause? The correct answer to the first question, I believe,
is yes, provided that free actions are common in Sol’s world and it is possible
for agents to act freely when their options are of the kind featured in Buridan’s
ass scenarios” (MELE, 2017a, pp. 174-175)
◆ “What about the second question? According to a standard libertarian view, if
a person’s deciding to A is to be a directly free action, there was a chance,
right up to the time at which the decision was made, that he would not decide
then to A. But this alone does not obviously commit a proponent of this view
to claiming that no satisfactory account of a person’s having complete control
over whether he decides to A or decides to B can have a “no chance” clause.
One reason is that the following option is not obviously a nonstarter: having
complete control over whether one decides to A or decides to B is not
required for a directly free decision in favor of one or the other of these
courses of action.” (MELE, 2017a, p. 175)
 ● What is complete control?
○ “It can be said that having the kind of control at issue it a
matter of its being entirely up to the agent whether he decides
to A or decides to B or a matter of the agent’s having the power
to determine whether he decides (or intends) to A or decides (or
intends) to B” (MELE, 2017a, p. 175)
◆ “I would like to be told what it is for it to be entirely
up to an agent whether he decides to A or decides to
B and what it is to have the determining power at
issue” (MELE, 2017a, p. 175)

MELE - Free Will and Luck (2006)

MALE, A. R. Free Will and Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Luck and Modest Libertarianism

➔ “Not every bit of luck that an agent has in a causal stream leading to an action
precludes moral responsibility for that action” (MELE, 2006, p. 108);
➔ Modest Libertarianism: indeterministic selection of what comes to an agent’s mind
before the deterministic choice;
➔ Mele argues that, even though the difference of the actual world and a possible world
is just a matter of luck, luck does not undermine Modest Libertarianism.
◆ “Does all agent-internal psychological luck in a causal stream leading to
action preclude moral responsibility for that action? No. Today, Bill luckily
remembers where he hid a treasure map years ago: he was indeterministically
caused to remember. Bill was arrested shortly after he hid it, and he has just
completed a twenty-year prison sentence. After he retrieves and sells the
treasure, Bill gives 25 percent of the proceeds to charity” (MELE, 2006, p.
109)
◆ “In Wn, because T unluckily fails to come to mind, Beth fails to gather
additional relevant information about the small town. But it is generally
granted that very few free decisions are made in the light of complete relevant
information. So, just as it is difficult to see why T’s unluckily not coming to
mind should be believed to preclude Beth’s being morally responsible for
accepting the job, it is difficult to see why it should be believed to preclude her
freely accepting the job. Furthermore, just as Bill’s luckily remembering
where he hid the map is not at odds with his freely making the donation he
makes, T’s luckily coming to mind in the actual world is not at odds with
Beth’s freely rejecting the job offer” (MELE, 2006, p. 112)

Daring Soft Libertarianism (DSL)

➔ “They claim that present luck is entailed by an agent’s having a kind of initiatory
power that they value and that its presence in a case of action does not preclude
the action’s being freely performed or the agent’s being morally responsible for
it. The softness of their libertarianism makes their situation less treacherous than that
of conventional libertarians. Soft libertarians do not assert that free action and
moral responsibility require the falsity of determinism” (MELE, 2006, p. 113);
➔ “My daring soft libertarians especially value a power to make decisions that are not
deterministically caused—a certain initiatory power” (MELE, 2006, p. 113);
◆ They are causalists about actions;
◆ They opt for event-causal soft libertarianism;
● They avoid Kane’s theory because of the dual efforts (MELE, 2006, p.
113).
➔ “DSLs have a no-nonsense attitude toward the problem that present luck poses
for traditional libertarianism. Recall, from chapter 1 (sec. 1), the image of a tiny
indeterministic neural roulette wheel in an agent’s head. There the wheel is strictly a
decision wheel. This time it includes more than decisions. Imagine that just prior to a
certain agent’s making a decision, there is a probability that what happens next is that
he decides to A and there are probabilities of various alternative events, some of
which are decisions and some of which are not. Larger probabilities get a
correspondingly larger segment of the wheel than do smaller probabilities. A tiny
neural ball bounces along the wheel. Its landing in a particular decision segment is the
agent’s making the corresponding decision, its landing in a segment for continued
deliberation is the agent’s continuing to deliberate, and so on. When the ball lands in
the segment for a highly probable decision, its doing so is not just a matter of
luck. After all, the mechanism’s design is such that the probability of that
happening is very high. But the ball’s landing there is partly a matter of luck.
And the difference at issue at t between a world in which the ball lands there at t
and a world with the same past and laws of nature in which it lands in a segment
for something else at t is just a matter of luck” (MELE, 2006, p. 114);
➔ Basically Free Actions: “free A-ings occurring at times at which the past and the
laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing then” (MELE, 2006, p.
114);
◆ Essentially incompatibilist notions (MELE, 2006, p. 114).
➔ “As DSLs see it, extant detailed event-causal libertarian views and agent-causal views
of the production of basically free and morally responsible actions are meant to
incorporate features that distinguish them from the roulette wheel model of free and
morally responsible action and models of its kind. I call such models time-of-action
neural randomizer models. One avenue to explore in developing DSL accounts of
basically free and basically morally responsible action starts with the working
assumption that some such model does apply to agents in basic instances of free
and morally responsible action” (MELE, 2006, p. 114).
➔ Frankfurt-Cases: blocking of robust alternative possibilities, “but something very
similar is left open, the agent’s performing a free action, the proximal causes of which
 do not deterministically cause it, and the agent’s being morally responsible for that
action” (MELE, 2006, p. 115);
➔ Basically* Free Actions: “an agent freely A-s at a time at which he has at least a
nonrobust alternative possibility, the action is basically* free” (MELE, 2006, p.
115);
◆ “Basically* free A-ing differs from basically free A-ing in that the latter, but
not the former, requires that not A-ing be open to the agent at the time of
action, given the past and the laws of nature” (MELE, 2006, p. 115);
◆ “Basicness* is somewhat more inclusive than basicness: its requirement for
alternative possibilities at the time of action is weaker” (MELE, 2006, p. 115);
◆ “Because DSLs find some Frankfurt-style cases persuasive, they prefer
working with basicness*” (MELE, 2006, p. 115).
➔ Directly and Indirectly Free Actions: “it is open to libertarians to hold that an
agent’s basically free actions that are suitably related to later actions of his that are not
basically free confer freedom on those later actions and that moral responsibility can
be conferred in this way, too. DSLs take this position, and they take the same
position on basically* free and morally responsible action. They see an agent’s
being able to perform some actions whose proximal causes do not
deterministically cause the actions as a necessary condition for his having a kind
of initiatory power that they value. For them, the importance of this initiatory
power is not limited to cases in which it is exercised; it is also important insofar as the
basically* free and morally responsible actions that depend on its exercise confer an
incompatibilist kind of freedom and moral responsibility on some subsequent actions”
(MELE, 2006, p. 115);
➔ Why do DSLs value the ability to perform basically* free and morally
responsible actions?
◆ Desire to make a special kind of causal contribution to some of their actions:
“contributions that are not themselves parts of the unfolding of deterministic
chains of events that were already in progress in the distant past. Basically*
free actions are not parts of such chains. Nor are the deterministically caused
actions that DSLs would like to enable themselves to perform: the fact that
these actions are suitably influenced by past basically* free actions the agent
performed precludes their being parts of such chains” (MELE, 2006, p. 116);
◆ They want more: “DSLs view the power to perform basically* free and
morally responsible actions as a requirement for having a kind of free and
morally responsible agency that they value more highly than any
compatibilist species of agency, but they also value working to make it the
case that they are not subject to luck in an important practical sphere, even
though success in this effort would cut them off from further basically* free
and morally responsible actions in this sphere” (MELE, 2006, p. 116);
● Why do they value it more? → It’s the question of that guy on the
article?
➔ “Just as luck—though not necessarily indeterministic luck—is an essential part
of (legal) blackjack, being subject to present luck, according to DSLs, is an
 essential part of being an agent who is capable of performing basically* free
actions and actions for which he is basically* morally responsible” (MELE, 2006,
p. 117).

DSL and The Problem of Present Luck

➔ He talks about akratic actions;

➔ “As DSLs see it, the occurrence of basically* free akratic and continent actions
entails cross-world luck at the time of action, and such luck does not preclude
freedom or moral responsibility. In their view, various relevant probabilities are
grounded primarily in various features of Drew’s psychological condition at the time,
t, at which she acquires her CB in favor of switching to coffee. Relevant probabilities
include the probabilities that Drew will straightaway decide to drink another whiskey,
straightaway decide to switch to coffee, straightaway decide to exercise self-control in
support of switching to coffee, and remain undecided for a time about what to do. The
features of Drew’s psychology that partly ground or account for these
probabilities include the strengths of various desires she has at t: for example, her
desire to drink another whiskey, her desire to avoid increasing her chance of being in
an accident as she drives home and her chance of being pulled over by the police and
arrested for driving under the influence, her desire to avoid breaking the law, and her
desire to exercise self-control in support of her acting as she believes she should.
Other pertinent psychological features include, but are not limited to, Drew’s degree
of confidence at t that switching to coffee would be best and the strength of any
generic desire she may have at t to do whatever she thinks is best. DSLs point out
that these features do not come out of the blue and that they are products in part
of Drew’s past behavior. For example, it is very plausible that the strength of Drew’s
desire at t to avoid increasing the chance of an accident is influenced by her beliefs
about previous occasions on which she drove under the influence, beliefs that she
would lack if she had not engaged in this risky behavior in the past. In remarking on
Drew’s past behavior, DSLs are not overlooking the point that if luck is in play in
agents’ present basically* free and basically* morally responsible actions, this
also is true of their past actions of these kinds. DSLs maintain that agents play
an indeterministic role in shaping the probabilities that they will act continently
and that they will act akratically insofar as they play an indeterministic role in
shaping things that ground these probabilities. Many agents have a capacity for
present influence on relevant future probabilities of action, and it is often true that
their past behavior has influenced present probabilities of action. Regarding influence
of the former kind, notice that someone who has just acquired a CB in favor of A-ing
may have, in addition to a probability that he will straightaway decide to A or
nonactionally acquire an intention to A and a probability that he will straightaway
decide to pursue a tempting course of action instead, a high probability of remaining
undecided for a while. While he is undecided, there may be a chance that he will try
to bring it about that he intends to do what he believes he should. If he tries in a
 promising way to do this, he thereby increases the probability that he will A. Other
things being equal, an agent who makes such an effort at self-control has a better
chance of continently A-ing than he would if he were to make no such effort. To be
sure, if the attempt is a basically free action, then there was a chance that the
agent would not make it at that time, and if it was a basically* free action, there
might have been a chance that the agent would make it unfreely. These
observations do not undermine the claim about present influence. Past influence
on present probabilities of action is considerable. For example, the strengths of
Drew’s desire for another whiskey and her desire not to increase the risk of an
accident are likely to have been influenced by past decisions she made in similar
situations, by her reflection on the consequences of those decisions, and by decisions
about future behavior made partly on the basis of such reflection. Of course, if these
decisions are basically free actions, there was a chance, when Drew made them,
that she would not make them, and if they are basically* free actions, there
might have been a chance, when she made them, that she would not freely make
them. But these facts do not undermine the claim that they have an influence on the
strengths of present relevant desires. Part of what DSLs are driving at in their
claims about influence is that probabilities of actions—practical
probabilities—for agents are not always imposed on agents. Through their past
behavior, agents shape present practical probabilities, and in their present
behavior they shape future practical probabilities. The relationship between agents
and the probabilities of their actions is very different from the relationship between
dice and the probabilities of outcomes of tosses. In the case of dice, of course, the
probabilities of future tosses are independent of the outcomes of past tosses.
However, the probabilities of agents’ future actions are influenced by their
present and past actions” (MELE, 2006, pp. 121-122)
➔ “A similarity between modest and daring soft libertarianism merits mention. One
attractive feature of modest libertarianism is that it gives agents the opportunity
to override bad luck before the time of action. For example, if a consideration
relevant to an agent’s decision problem unluckily fails to come to mind by t, an agent
may increase the probability that it does come to mind before he reaches a decision by
engaging in further deliberation, and if a silly desire unluckily becomes salient in
consciousness (in a case in which the desire would have no effect on deliberation or
action if it were not to become salient), the agent may reflectively discount it. DSLs
emphasize another kind of opportunity that agents have regarding luck: the
opportunity to learn from events associated with their bad luck—especially from
basically* free decisions contrary to their rational CB-s. An agent who executes
such a decision—say, a decision to drive under the influence—with bad
consequences may learn from reflection on the consequences. (Of course, a drunk
driver who kills himself in a car crash has no opportunity to learn from his mistake.)
Another agent who drives under the influence against his CB but gets home safely and
without being arrested may learn from reflection on what could have happened if he
had been less fortunate. And both agents can think, effectively, about how to decrease
the probability that they will drive under the influence again. DSLs maintain that in
 the vast majority of cases of basically* free actions and actions for which agents
are basically* morally responsible, agents have some responsibility for the
relevant practical probabilities. They have, for example, some responsibility for
the chance that they will act akratically and for the chance that they will act
continently. These chances are not dictated by external forces, and they are
influenced by basically* free and morally responsible actions the agents performed in
the past. DSLs take these claims to soften worries about present luck, but they realize
that they have more work to do” (MELE, 2006, p. 123)

DSL and The Problem of Present Luck

➔ “How should DSLs respond to the claim that the influence of agents’ actions on their
present probabilities of action is of no use to DSLs because an agent’s being subject to
cross-world luck at the time of action precludes his acting freely and morally
responsibly at that time, no matter how the pertinent practical probabilities came to be
as they are?” (MELE, 2006, p. 123)
➔ “It may be objected that DSLs are not entitled to make any claims about the
influence of past basically* free actions on present probabilities of action until
they have shown that there is good reason to believe that basically* free actions
are possible. However, DSLs should reply that the point they have made thus far in
that connection is simply that we should not believe that basically* free action is
impossible on the grounds that, necessarily, indeterministic agents’ probabilities
of action are externally imposed or that indeterministic agents necessarily are
related to their present probabilities of action roughly as dice are related to
present probabilities about how they will land if tossed” (MELE, 2006, pp. 125);
➔ “Can DSL accommodate basically* free akratic actions? If indeterministically caused
actions contrary to the agent’s CB were like outcomes of tosses of dice, they might
plausibly be deemed to be only apparently akratic and actually unfree. If agents were
to house neural randomizers with unchanging probabilities of continent and
akratic action or with probabilities that change independently of what agents
learn from their mistakes and successes, they would be subject to luck in a way
that seems to preclude their being basically* morally responsible for actions
contrary to their CB-s and to preclude their performing basically* free akratic
actions. But DSLs postulate neural equipment of a kind that agents are capable
of molding through, for example, reflection and efforts of self-control. They
contend that morally responsible agency is possible and that, over time, agents can
take on increased moral responsibility for their probabilities of action in the sphere in
which CB-s clash with temptation, probabilities that evolve in ways sensitive to what
agents have learned and their efforts at self-control” (MELE, 2006, p. 125);
➔ “How does an agent come to be morally responsible for anything? This is a question
for any theorist who believes that at least some human beings are morally responsible
agents. More fully, how do we get from being neonates who are not morally
responsible for anything to being the free, morally responsible agents we are now, if
we are indeed free and morally responsible agents? I return to this question in section
 6 and point out now that one thing that is required is an S-ability to adjust our
behavior in light of what we learn from our past behavior. DSLs are claiming that this
ability includes an S-ability to mold our probabilities of akratic and continent action.”
(MELE, 2006, p. 125)
➔ If someone only acted in a way to diminish the probability of doing X, but, thanks to
present luck, does X, how can we say that this person is responsible?

Little Agents

➔ “The main question for DSL in this connection is whether it can accommodate the
possibility of a neonate’s developing into an agent capable of performing basically*
free actions for which he is basically* morally responsible” (MELE, 2006, p. 129);
➔ Degrees of Responsibility: “when normal four-year-olds snatch an appealing toy
from a younger sibling’s hands, most people take them to be morally responsible and
blameworthy for that, but not as responsible and not as blameworthy as their normal
eight-year-old siblings are for doing the same thing” (MELE, 2006, p. 129);
➔ “When he saw Tony move away from his sister and pick up something else to
play with, he praised him for his good behavior. The father was not simply trying
to reinforce the good behavior; he believed that Tony really deserved some credit
for it. Suppose now that owing to Tony’s being an indeterministic decision maker
and to his being tempted to take the toy, there was a significant chance at the
time that he would decide to take it. In another world with the same past and laws
of nature, that is what he decides to do, and he proceeds to grab the toy (with
predictable results). Does that entail that Tony has no moral responsibility at all for
deciding not to take the toy? Well, he is only a child, and if he can be morally
responsible for anything, he can be so only in ways appropriate for young
children, if moral responsibility is possible for young children. It does not seem
at all outlandish to believe that Tony would deserve, from a moral point of view,
some blame in the world in which he decides to snatch the toy and acts
accordingly—but blame appropriate to his age and the nature of his offense, of
course. If he does deserve some such blame, he has some moral responsibility for
the decision. Similarly, the father’s belief that Tony deserves some moral credit for
his good decision is far from outlandish. If he does deserve such credit, it is of a kind
appropriate to his age and the nature of his action, and he has some moral
responsibility for the decision. The difference at t (the time of Tony’s decision)
between the actual world and a world with the same past and laws in which Tony
decides at t to snatch the toy is just a matter of luck. That should be taken into account
when asking about Tony’s moral responsibility for deciding not to take the toy. Only
a relatively modest degree of moral responsibility is at issue, and the question is
whether the cross-world luck—or the luck together with other facts about the
case—entails that the degree is zero. I doubt that the knowledge that all actual
decision-making children are indeterministic decision makers like Tony would
lead us to believe that no children are morally responsible at all for any of their
decisions. Views according to which agents’ past decisions can contribute to their
 moral responsibility for their present decisions naturally lead us to wonder about the
earliest decisions for which agents are morally responsible. When we do wonder
about that, we need to keep firmly in mind how young these agents may be and
how trivial their good and bad deeds may be by comparison with the full range
of good and bad adult deeds. Tony’s making the right or the wrong decision
about the toy is not that big a deal, and that is something for theorists to bear in
mind when trying to come to a judgment about whether Tony is morally responsible
for his decision. If, when pondering whether an indeterministic decision maker
can make a first decision for which he is morally responsible, a theorist is
focusing on scenarios in which adults make decisions about important moral
matters, cross-world luck at the time of decision should strike the theorist as at
least seriously problematic on grounds associated with the worries presented in
chapter 3. But this focus is very wide of the mark” (MELE, 2006, pp. 130-131);
➔ “Tony might occasionally deserve some unpleasant words or some pleasant praise;
and, to use Strawson’s expression, ‘‘it makes sense to propose’’ that Tony has, for
some of his decisions, a degree of moral responsibility that would contribute to the
justification of these mild punishments and rewards—even if those decisions are
made at times at which the past and the laws leave open alternative courses of action,
owing to Tony’s being an indeterministic decision maker” (MELE, 2006, p. 131);
➔ “But if people are morally responsible for some things, they have to develop from
neonates into morally responsible agents, and Tony’s decision not to take the toy is a
reasonable candidate for an action for which this young agent is morally responsible”
(MELE, 2006, p. 131);
➔ “Moral responsibility is very commonly and very plausibly regarded as a matter of
degree. If young children and adults are morally responsible for some of what they do,
it is plausible, on grounds of the sort I mentioned, that young children are not nearly
as morally responsible for any of their deeds as some adults are for some of their adult
deeds. When we combine our recognition of that point with the observation that the
good and bad deeds of young children are relatively trivial in themselves, we should
be struck by the implausibility of stringent standards for deserved moral praise and
blame of young children—including standards the satisfaction of which requires the
absence of present luck. And once even a very modest degree of moral responsibility
is in the picture, DSLs can begin putting their ideas about the shaping of practical
probabilities to work” (MELE, 2006, pp. 131-132)
➔ “What DSLs say about agents’ shaping of their practical probabilities is meant to help
us understand, among other things, how we get from being little free agents like Tony
to being the mature free agents we are, if, in fact, we are free agents. The free agency
at issue is an incompatibilist kind, not a compatibilist kind to which DSLs are open,
given their softness. The process, if it is real, would seem to be very gradual, and I
will not try to trace it. DSLs claim that, other things being equal, as the frequency
of the indeterministically caused free actions of little agents increases and as the
range of kinds of situations evoking such free actions expands, the agents take on
greater moral responsibility for associated practical probabilities of theirs and
for their morally significant free actions. This, DSLs say, helps to account for the
 fact that the moral credit and blame that little free agents deserve for their
indeterministically caused free actions tend to increase over time” (MELE, 2006, p.
132)
◆ How are they responsible for the first lucky decision?
➔ “Now, given that Bob does have a history of the right sort, DSLs maintain that what
probabilities of action obtain at the time is not just a matter of luck. But probabilities
of action are one kind of thing, and the difference at noon between Bob’s cheating
then in W1 and his flipping the coin then in W2 is another. Suppose that if Bob had
performed different free actions in the past, as he could have, his probabilities of
action at noon would have been different and that, at one time, a history was open to
Bob—one including his performing relevant character-influencing basically free
actions—such that, if that history had been actual, it would have resulted in Bob’s
having, at the time, a probability of 0 of very high probability of tossing the coin, as
promised” (MELE, 2006, p. 133)
◆ “The supposition would reveal something about Bob, but it is irrelevant to the
question whether, holding fixed the actual past and the laws of nature, the
difference at noon between Bob’s cheating then, as he does in W1, and Bob’s
flipping the coin then, as he does in W2, is just a matter of luck. And again,
the actual past and the laws are held fixed when testing for basically (and
basically*) free and morally responsible action. Even if the practical
accessibility of the worlds open to Bob at the pertinent time is partly explained
by basically free actions he performed at earlier times, the cross-world
difference in Bob’s noontime actions in W1 and W2 is just a matter of luck”
(MELE, 2006, p. 133)
➔ “DSLs grant that if, in the actual world, an agent decides at t to A, whereas in
another possible world with the same laws of nature and the same past he
decides at t not to A, then the cross-world difference at t is just a matter of luck.
But they hold that the fact that the difference is just a matter of luck is
compatible with its being true that the agent decided freely and morally
responsibly at t. To be sure, hard eventcausal libertarians and agent-causationists can
make this compatibility claim, too. According to DSLs, the main problem with the
most detailed event-causal libertarian view on offer, Kane’s, is not that it is subject to
the problem of present luck but rather that its account of what agents do in cases of
basically free action for which they are basically morally responsible is
unsatisfactory” (MELE, 2006, pp. 133-134)
➔ “Modest libertarians hold that if (ML1) an agent’s A-ing satisfies a set of alleged
sufficient conditions for free action that a sophisticated compatibilist would endorse
and that many sophisticated folks who have no commitment to incompatibilism would
find very attractive, including the condition that the agent A-s on the basis of a
rational deliberative judgment that it would be best to A, and (ML2) while the agent
was deliberating, it was causally open that he would not come to the conclusion that it
would be best to A, then (ML3) the agent freely A-s. (The specific compatibilist
proposal that I offered [Mele 1995, p. 193] is summarized in ch. 7, sec. 1.) Modest
libertarianism does not include a position on the possibility of free actions that are not
 performed on the basis of a judgment about what it would be best to do. Proponents of
daring soft libertarianism substitute the following for ML2 : (DSL2) the agent’s
A-ing is a decision the proximate causes of which do not deterministically cause
it. They maintain that the combination of ML1 and DSL2 is conceptually
sufficient for the agent’s decision’s being basically* free. They maintain, as well,
that there are basically* free akratic decisions.” (MELE, 2006, p. 134)

MELE - Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians

Should Prefer My Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane’s View (2017b)

MELE, A. R. Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians Should Prefer My

Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane’s View. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements,
v. 80, pp. 29-68, 2017b.
General Topics on Libertarianism

➔ Libertarianism:
◆ It’s a “necessary condition for a directly free action that there is no time at
which it is determined (in the ‘deterministic causation’ sense of determined)
that the action will occur” (MELE, 2017b, p. 59);
◆ Positive Side: free will is actual and actually exercised by real people”
(MELE, 2017b, p. 59);
◆ Both Thesis imply that: “at least some of sometimes perform actions that are
deterministically caused by their proximal causes” (MELE, 2017b, pp. 59-60)
➔ Event-Causal: “appeal to indeterministic causation by events and states” (MELE,
2017b, p. 49);
◆ Event-Causal Libertarian Views hold “that although directly free actions are
caused, they are not deterministically caused by their proximal causes”
(MELE, 2017b, p. 59)
➔ Mele is not a libertarian, because he does not endorse incompatibilism (MELE,
2017b, p. 49);
➔ Soft Libertarian: asserts that free action and moral responsibility may be compatible
with determinism (MELE, 2017b, p. 50);
➔ Daring Libertarian: “maintains that there are free actions such a kind that it is at no
time determined that the action will occur” (MELE, 2017b, p. 50);
◆ A Daring Libertarian may or may not be a Soft Libertarian (MELE,
2017b, p. 50);
● If she is a Soft Libertarian, she adopts Daring Soft Libertarianism.
➔ Basically Free Actions: “free A-ings that occur at times at which the past (up to
those times) and the laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing” (MELE,
2017b, pp. 50-51).
◆ “An agent performs a basically free action A at a time only if there is another
possible world with the same past up to t and the same laws of nature in which
he does not do A at t” (MELE, 2017b, p. 51).
 ● Problem of Present Luck: “the cross-world difference in decisions at
t is just a matter of luck” (MELE, 2017b, p. 51).
➔ "Whether an action is self-forming or not depends on its effects on the agent’s
‘will’” (MELE, 2017b, p. 51).
Commentaries on Kane

➔ Dual efforts seem remote from ordinary experience (MELE, 2017b, p. 53);
➔ Kane’s Theory is a victim of the Problem of Present Luck: in different possible worlds
with the same laws of nature and the same past right up to the choice, different
outcomes happen - there is no difference in the efforts. The difference between both
worlds is just a matter of luck (MELE, 2017b, p. 57)
➔ “We can say, if we like, that in fully depressing the cat key, Donna made her reasons
to help cats prevail. And this claim can be counted as true, if we do not read too much
into it. But the truth of the claim is utterly compatible with the difference in the two
worlds at the time at issue being just a matter of luck” (MELE, 2017b, p. 63);
◆ “Which reasons prevail is up for grabs until he makes his choice, and the
prevailing of a collection of reasons is precisely a matter of Bob’s choosing for
those reasons – that is, his choosing for reasons RC to cheat or his choosing
for reasons RT to do the right thing. Again, in one world one set of reasons
prevails at t, and in another world a competing set of reasons prevails at t –
and there is no cross-world difference in the reasons, Bob’s efforts, or
anything else before t” (MELE, 2017b, pp. 63-64).
➔ He could not say that the agent is responsible for the contrastive fact: X is not
responsible for the fact that she Y-ed rather than Z-ed.

Daring Libertarianism

➔ Mele’s solution to the worry of Present Luck “acknowledges the presence of luck at
the time of action” (MELE, 2017b, p. 51)
➔ To assert that the difference between two worlds with the same laws of nature and the
same past right up to the choice is just a matter of luck is not the same as asserting
that the agent’s decision is not a basically free action for which the agent is morally
responsible (MELE, 2017b, p. 57);
➔ LD: “Even if the difference between what an agent decides at t in one possible world
and what he decides at t in another possible world with the same past up to t and the
same laws of nature is just a matter of luck, the agent may make a basically free
decision at t in both worlds” (MELE, 2017b, p. 58);
➔ Only One Effort: “where Kane postulates concurrent competing indeterministic
efforts to choose, I postulate an indeterministic effort to decide (or choose) what to
do. That effort can result in different decisions, holding the past and the laws of
nature fixed” (MELE, 2017b, p. 60)
◆ Decision Voluntary and Rational: “There is a possible world in which Bob’s
effort to decide what to do about the coin toss issues at t in a decision to cheat,
and in another world with the same past up to t and the same laws of nature,
 that effort issues at t in a decision to toss the coin right then. Bob has
competing reasons at the time, and the decision he makes – whether it is to
cheat or to do the right thing – is made for the reasons that favor it” (MELE,
2017b, p. 60).
● The agent has Plural Voluntary Control: the choice of Bob in one
world is voluntary (uncoerced) and intentional (knowingly and
purposefully made) - and the same is true for the choice in the other
possible world (MELE, 2017b, p. 61);
○ The choice is up to the agent: “If, as Kane says, plural
voluntary control in this connection is sufficient for the choice
the agent makes to be up to the agent, then DLV also
accommodates it sometimes being up to agents what they
choose in scenarios of the sort at issue” (MELE, 2017b, p. 61).
○ Isn’t there an additional requirement for choosing freely
that the agent was trying specifically to choose what he
chose?
◆ Choosing to A is essentially intentional. “Agents do not
need to try to choose to A nor to try to bring it about
that they choose to A in order to choose to A; and the
nature of choosing is such that, whenever they choose to
A, they intentionally do so: there are no
nonintentional choosings to A” (MALE, 2017b, p.
64).
◆ Reasons and Choices: “on DLV, agents have reasons or motives for two or
more competing choices and choose for reasons in cases of the kind at issue”
(MELE, 2017b, p. 66).
➔ The Cross World Difference is just a matter of luck: “The cross-world difference
at t in what Bob decides seems to be a matter of luck. But it does not seem to be
any more a matter of luck than a cross-world difference that I identified in a version
of Bob’s story in which he is trying to choose to cheat while also trying to choose to
do the right thing: namely, the difference between the former effort succeeding and
the latter effort succeeding” (MELE, 2017b, pp. 60-61);
◆ “When Bob’s choice-making occurs in a way that fits my DLV, the
cross-world difference in what he chooses is, in Kane’s words, ‘a matter of
luck or chance’” (MELE, 2017b, p. 61);
◆ “When an agent’s choice-making occurs in a way that fits my DLV, the
cross-world difference in what he chooses is, in Kane’s words, ‘a matter of
luck or chance’” (MELE, 2017b, p. 65).
◆ Why isn’t this a problem?
● We can look back in time - into the agent’s history (MELE, 2017b, p.
66);
● “My DLV finds in reflection on agents’ pasts a partial basis for an error
theory about why some people may view cross-world luck at the time
 of decision as incompatible with making a basically free decision”
(MELE, 2017b, p. 66)
○ “My error theory is for a limited audience – people who are
attracted to libertarianism and reject agent-causal and
non-causal libertarianism. When some such people reflect on
stories like that of Bob and the coin, they may ignore the
sources of the antecedent probabilities of Bob’s choosing to
cheat and his choosing to do the right thing. If it is imagined
that these probabilities come out of the blue, Bob may seem to
be adrift in a wave of probabilities that were imposed on him,
and, accordingly, he may seem not to have sufficient control
over what he chooses to be morally responsible for his
choices. But, as I have explained elsewhere, it is a mistake to
assume that ‘indeterministic agents’ probabilities of action are
externally imposed’ or that such agents ‘are related to their
present probabilities of action roughly as dice are related to
present probabilities about how they will land if tossed’. If it is
known that Bob’s pertinent probabilities shortly before noon
are shaped by past intentional, uncompelled behavior of his,
one may take a less dim view of Bob’s prospects for being
morally responsible for the choice he makes and his
prospects for making it freely” (MELE, 2017b, p. 66)
◆ “This is a long story that carries us all the way back to
candidates for young agents’ earliest basically free
actions, and I cannot do justice to it here” (MELE,
2017b, p. 67).
➔ There must be no time at which it is determined that one choice will be made:
“Call Bob’s reasons for cheating RC and his reasons for tossing the coin at noon RT.
In the present context, what it is for RC to win out is for Bob to choose for those
reasons; and if that happens, then, of course, Bob chooses to cheat. Now, in order for
Bob’s choice to cheat to be basically free [...] there must be no time at which it is
determined that he will choose to cheat and so no time at which it is determined that
he will choose for RC” (MELE, 2017b, p. 62).
◆ “The prevailing of a collection of reasons is precisely a matter of Bob’s
choosing for those reasons” (MELE, 2017b, pp. 63-64);
● One set of reasons prevails in one world, another in another world and
there’s no cross-world difference in the reasons and the world before
the choice (MELE, 2017b, p. 64).
➔ Is the agent responsible for the contrasting choice?
◆ “If, past intentional, uncompelled behavior of his played a significant role in
shaping his character and the antecedent probability that he would decide to
cheat, and if better behavior was open to him on many relevant occasions in
the past, behavior that would have given him a much better chance of deciding
 to do the right thing on this occasion, then maybe so. But this, as I say, is a
long story that I have spun elsewhere” (MELE, 2017b, p. 67).

MELE - Is What You Decide Ever Up to You? (2013)

MALE, A. R. Is What You Decide Ever Up to You? In: HAJI, I.; CAOUTTE, J. (Eds.) Free
Will and Moral Responsibility. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 74-97.

➔ Libertarianism: “the conjunction of a pair of theses: free action is incompatible with

determinism; and there are free actions” (MELE, 2013, p. 74)
➔ LUCK Thesis regarding the Problem of Present Luck: “even if the difference
between what an agent does at t in one world and what he does at t in another world
with the same past up to t and the same laws of nature is just a matter of luck, the
agent may act freely at t in both worlds (Mele 2006, ch. 5)” (MELE, 2013, p. 74);
➔ “Here is a toy model to consider (see Mele 2006, p. 114) – one that readers may wish
to challenge, of course. Imagine that choice-making agents have tiny indeterministic
neural roulette wheels in their heads. Just before an agent chooses to A, there is a
probability that what happens next is that he so chooses and there are probabilities of
various alternative events, some of which are choices and some of which are not.
Larger probabilities get a correspondingly larger segment of the wheel than do smaller
probabilities. A tiny neural ball bounces along the wheel. Its landing in a particular
“choice” segment is the agent’s making the corresponding choice, its landing in a
segment for continued deliberation is the agent’s continuing to deliberate, and so on.
When the ball lands in the segment for a highly probable choice, its doing so is
not just a matter of luck. After all, the mechanism’s design is such that the
probability of that happening is very high. But the ball’s landing there is partly a
matter of luck. And the difference at issue at t between a world in which the ball lands
there at t and a world with the same past and laws of nature in which it lands in a
segment for something else at t is just a matter of luck. (I can be more cautious: This
is how things are, as I use the expression “a matter of luck.” I should add that I regard
this usage as entirely ordinary.)” (MELE, 2013, p. 79).
◆ “In my view, if the pertinent difference at t between a world in which an agent
decides at t to A and a world with the same past up to t and the same laws of
nature in which he decides at t to B is just a matter of luck, then he does not
exercise what might be termed ‘complete control’ over whether he decides at t
to A or instead decides at t to B. Even so, if LUCK is true, he may make these
decisions freely.” (MELE, 2013, p. 79)
➔ “Why aren’t cross-world differences of the kind just mentioned at the time of decision
incompatible with deciding freely?” (MELE, 2013, p. 93)
◆ “I have offered an alternative solution elsewhere (Mele 2006, ch. 5), and I will
not revisit it here” (MELE, 2013, p. 93)
 NELKIN - Good Luck to Libertarians: Reflections on Al Mele’s Free Will
and Luck (2007)

NELKIN, D. K. Good Luck to Libertarians: Reflections on Al Mele’s Free Will and Luck.
Philosophical Explorations, v. 10, n. 2, pp. 173-184, 2007.

➔ “The view is a form of Daring Soft Libertarianism: ‘daring’ because it places a point
of indeterminism at the time of decision, and ‘soft’ because it does not require
indeterminism for freedom, but only for a kind of freedom particularly valuable (or
particularly valuable to some)” (NELKIN, 2007, p. 175);
➔ “It is unclear why the answer to the luck objection here is restricted to a soft variety”
(NELKIN, 2007, p. 176);
➔ “According to the Daring Soft Libertarian view developed by Mele, Drew acts freely
and is responsible for her actions, despite the existence of cross-world luck at the
moment of decision. In support of this idea, Mele reminds us that a key part of his
view is that the probabilities of Drew’s acting as she does, of her taking more time to
deliberate instead of acting when she does, and of her employing a strategy of
self-control, are themselves shaped by her own previous behaviors, her degree of
confidence in her best judgment which is itself based on her experience with her past
behaviors, and so on. In the view on offer, probability shaping ahead of time, and
learning lessons from our lucky successes and failures that can be employed to shape
future probabilities, are meant to soften worries about present luck” (NELKIN, 2007,
p. 177);
➔ Two Questions: “The first is whether we still face an objection to calling an agent’s
current actions free and responsible, no matter how the probabilities have been
shaped, if it is a matter of luck whether the agent acts in one way rather than another.
The second is whether this view has succeeded only in pushing back the problem of
present luck to the earlier probability-shaping actions of an agent” (NELKIN, 2007,
p. 177);
➔ First Question:
◆ “Here is one way of pressing this worry: consider a variant on the Drew case,
call it ‘Bad Luck Drew’. Suppose that Drew has chosen well, learned from
past experience, and she has reduced the probability of her acting akratically
to 1 percent. Still, she acts akratically, and we can give no explanation for why
she did that rather than the action she knew to be right. Why is this luck not
still troubling?” (NELKIN, 2007, p. 178)
● Two Ways Out:
○ Improbability is sufficient for absolving one of responsibility
(NELKIN, 2007, p. 178);
◆ Why would it be?
○ Improbability is not sufficient (NELKIN, 2007, p. 178).
 ➔ Second Question:
◆ “The question now is whether the existence of cross-world luck precludes
Tony’s being responsible to any degree. Mele answers: ‘I doubt that the
knowledge that all actual decision-making children are indeterministic
decision makers like Tony would lead us to believe that no children are
morally responsible at all for any of their decisions’ (p. 130). While this seems
right, the question is whether we should revise our views” (NELKIN, 2007, p.
179);
◆ “So while ‘cross-world luck at the time of decision should strike the theorist as
at least seriously problematic’ in adult cases, matters are different when we
also focus, as we should, on children. Responsibility then increases over time
as the frequency of indeterministically caused decisions and the range of
situations for choice increases. But by the time the degree of responsibility has
increased significantly, I gather, one can appeal to prior probability shaping to
justify the compatibility of cross-world luck and responsibility” (NELKIN,
2007, p. 179)
◆ “We might also ask whether Tony really is responsible if it is a matter of luck
that he acts in the way he does. Someone already worried about luck in the
adult cases would have reason to be equally worried here. Granted, the
sanctions are not as great; but in Mele’s view, sanctions are still deserved if
Tony acts badly. I wonder whether Mele’s conclusions about Tony don’t gain
in plausibility simply because we can all see the potential instrumental value
in praising and blaming Tony; but for someone who is really worried about
luck in the adult case, there would be good reason to resist the conclusion that
Tony is really deserving of blame if he acts badly” (NELKIN, 2007, p. 180)

FISCHER - Review: Alfred R. Mele: Free Will and Luck (2008)

FISCHER, J. M. Review: Alfred R. Mele: Free Will and Luck. Mind, v. 117, i. 465, pp.
195-201, 2008.

➔ Conditions prior to Sally’s choosing (forming an intention) at t2 to X at t3 do not

causally determine that she will choose at t2 to X at t3. Suppose she does in fact
choose at t2 to X at t3. It follows from indeterminism that there is a non-actual
possible world no different from the actual world up to just prior to t2 in which Sally
chooses at t2 to Y at t3 (FISCHER, 2008, p. 197);
➔ “The answer, according to Mele’s Daring Soft Libertarianism, is that Sally (the typical
human agent) can affect the probability that she will choose X rather than Y. That is,
in the normal course of human development, we typically exercise certain distinctive
human capacities for normative assessment and control of action such that we can
(over time) affect the probabilities that we will act in certain ways. Put slightly
differently: we can through the signature human capacities for normative reflection
and learning from our experiences affect our characters—our propensities toward
 different sorts of choices and behaviour. Given this, Mele contends that the problem
of luck can be addressed. It is not as if the luck goes away; rather, the luck (allegedly)
becomes less problematic. Perhaps the basic intuition here is that if we can alter the
probabilities, then what we decide is not just a matter of luck.” (FISCHER, 2008, p.
197)
➔ “But presumably a crucial component in the process of affecting the probabilities is
action, and if the problem of luck calls into question our moral responsibility for
action, how can it matter that we can affect the probabilities through our actions?
Mele must explain how we come to be morally responsible for our actions in the first
place, despite the problem of luck. He seeks to do this by explaining how young
children can first be held accountable. To simplify the story, Mele contends that Tony,
a normal child who makes a decision not to snatch his sister’s toy (maybe he is not
such a ‘normal boy’ after all!), can be held morally responsible, despite the problem
of luck (which affects Tony’s decision as much as anyone’s in an indeterministic
world). The way it works, according to Mele, is that very little is at stake in the first
instances of holding a young child responsible; given this, the problem of luck does
not imply that Tony is not morally responsible. So moral responsibility gets a foothold
in cases where not much is at stake (the level of deserved praise or blame, reward or
punishment is relatively low), and we can bootstrap to more robust moral
responsibility over time (pp. 129–33).” (FISCHER, 2008, p. 197)
➔ “First, I simply do not see how the relatively low stakes in our first attributions of
moral responsibility (or perhaps partial moral responsibility) implies that the problem
of luck need not worry us; as far as I can see, it is still there, just as menacing as ever.
It may simply be that we do not worry about it so much, since not so much is at stake;
we perhaps do not worry that a significant injustice has been done, since the sanctions
are so mild. But this does not entail that an injustice (relatively minor as it might be)
has not been done; it just makes us less likely to notice it! I just do not see how the
relative lack of severity of the sanctions can in any way diminish the worries posed by
the problem of luck” (FISCHER, 2008, pp. 197-198)
➔ “Further, I do not see how the fact that Sally can affect the probabilities that she will
choose X rather than Y solves the problem of luck. Perhaps it answers the question of
how Sally might be morally responsible for her character—for the probability (of say
90%) that she will choose at t2 do X at t3. But the question at issue is not this, but
rather it is how we can legitimately hold Sally morally responsible for choosing at t2
to X at t3, in light of the problem of luck. More carefully, one could perhaps say that
the question is how we can legitimately hold Sally morally responsible for choosing at
t2 to X at t3, given that the probability just prior to t2 was 90% that she would so
choose, and in light of the problem of luck. Once one explicitly separates the
questions of Sally’s responsibility for her character and her responsibility for her
choice (or behaviour), given her character, I do not see how the fact that she can affect
her character helps with the problem of luck” (FISCHER, 2008, p. 198)
➔ “Of course, given the probabilities, one could say that Sally’s actual choice to do X is
not entirely random or arbitrary. But of course the same point could be made by all
the proponents of the various views Mele has criticized by reference to the problem of
 luck. And one might wonder how it is legitimate or fair to hold Sally responsible for
her choice to X, since (despite all her efforts in the past to mould her character) there
are possible worlds that do not differ in any way relevant to Sally just prior to t2 in
which she chooses at t2 to Y rather than X. Some of the same arguments that Mele
invokes against Kane, O’Connor, and Clarke can presumably be turned against Mele
here—or at least I do not see exactly why not” (FISCHER, 2008, p. 198).

CLARKE - Free Will, Agent Causation, and “Disappearing Agents” (2017)

CLARKE, R. Free Will, Agent Causation, and “Disappearing Agents”. Noûs, v. 53, i. 1, pp.
1-21, 2017.

➔ “Pereboom argues that if actions are caused solely by events, then even if the causal
production of our behavior is indeterministic, this does not suffice for free will.
Event-causal libertarian theories are inadequate, then, even if the indeterminism that
they require exists. Pereboom’s argument for this claim is what he calls the
‘disappearing agent objection’” (CLARKE, 2017, pp. 5-6)
➔ “Be that as it may, a comment on Pereboom’s statement of the objection is in order
before I turn to an assessment. As he puts it, given the theory in question, nothing
settles whether the decision will occur. I do not think that he has any grounds for
rejecting a restatement in present tense: nothing settles whether the decision occurs.
Standard libertarian accounts—including standard event-causal libertarian views—
require that directly free decisions aren’t determined by anything that precedes them.
Proponents of such views, if they accept a settling requirement, will take it to require
that when an agent exercises free will in making a decision, the settling takes
place when the decision in question is made, not prior to that time. Thus, I’ll take
it that what is at issue in the objection is whether, given an event-causal libertarian
theory, the following settling requirement can be satisfied: (SR) If an agent S
freely decides at time t to A, then S settles at t whether that decision is made
then” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 7)
◆ “Freely deciding should be understood here, and in the subsequent
discussion, as exercising free will in deciding. If we construe the latter as
exercising the strongest sort of control, in the making of a decision, that is
required for basic-desert moral responsibility, then SR states the settling
requirement that Pereboom’s disappearing agent objection relies on.
Satisfaction of SR is said to be a necessary condition for exercising free will in
making a decision” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 7).
➔ “(The Rejoinder) The making of the decision by S at t to A settles at t whether
that decision is made then. After all, that matter is not settled by anything prior to t
(for the decision is not determined by anything prior to t); and nothing more than the
making of the decision at t is needed to settle the matter then. Further, since it is S
who makes the decision, S, in making that decision, settles at t whether that
decision is made then. For given that nothing prior to t settles whether that decision
 is made then, S need not do anything more than decide at t to A in order to settle
at t whether that decision is made then. An event-causal libertarian theory, then,
has the resources to satisfy the settling requirement SR” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 7)
◆ “To clarify, by ‘the making of the decision’, what is meant is simply the
occurrence of the mental action of deciding. If such a mental action occurs,
then a making of a decision takes place; the latter is nothing more and nothing
less than—it is—the former. Similarly, by ‘S makes the decision to A’, what
is meant is simply that S decides to A. There is nothing fancy hidden in the
expressions that appear in The Rejoinder. In effect, what it claims is simply
that if it is granted that an event-causal libertarian theory provides what is
needed for there to be decisions—for the makings of decisions—then it
should be accepted that such a theory provides all that is needed to satisfy
SR” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 8)
◆ “(MS) If nothing prior to t settles whether S decides at t to A, and if S decides
at t to A, then the making of that decision by S at t settles at t whether that
decision is made then; and (AS) If nothing prior to t settles whether S decides
at t to A, and if S decides at t to A, then S, in making that decision, settles at t
whether that decision is made then. Reading settles whether as fixes or
resolves conclusively the question whether, these are certainly credible
claims” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 8)

Defending against a Possible Argument

➔ Defending (S-FAC): “(S-FAC) An agent settles whether an action occurs only if (i)
she agent-causes it for certain reasons, where the absence of her agent-causing the
action for those reasons would not have caused the action, and (ii) her agent-causing
her action for those reasons is ontologically fundamental” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 9).
◆ “P1) An agent’s settling whether a certain decision is made by her is a matter
of the agent’s causing something” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 9);
◆ “P2) If an agent’s causing something is non-fundamental, grounded in
causation by events or states, then in causing that thing the agent settles
whether a certain decision is made by her only if certain prior events or
states—those whose causing something grounds the agent’s causing
something—settle whether that decision is made” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 9);
◆ “P3) But in the cases under consideration, no prior events or states settle
whether the decision in question is made, since the pre-decision history leaves
open a significant probability that the agent not make that decision”
(CLARKE, 2017, p. 10);
◆ “C) Thus, in the cases under consideration, agent causation that is
non-fundamental, grounded in causation by events or states, does not yield the
agent’s settling whether a certain decision is made by her” (CLARKE, 2017,
p. 10).
➔ Questioning P2:
 ◆ Decision as a causing (fundamentally by mental events) of the acquisition
of an intention (CLARKE, 2017, p. 10):
● Agent-Causal View of O’Connor: actions are not events caused by
agents; rather, they are agent-causings of events;
● Event-Causal View: decision is not something caused (fundamentally)
by mental events of certain kinds; rather, they are a causing
(fundamentally be mental events) of the acquisition of an intention.
○ “A causing by an event e begins when e begins. In this case,
the event causes to which an event-causal theory of action
appeals will not all precede the actions in which they figure. It
is still the case that premise P3 is correct, for it concerns only
events that precede the decision in question. Further, the
causing events that are now included in the decision do not,
simply with their occurrence, settle whether the decision
occurs. For with their occurrence it remains open that the
decision not be made. The argument to follow thus goes
through on this alternative view of the matter” (CLARKE,
2017, p. 18)
◆ “(AS) If nothing prior to t settles whether S decides at t to A, and if S decides
at t to A, then S, in making that decision, settles at t whether that decision is
made then” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 8)
◆ 1- If a decision is an agent’s causing her coming to have a certain intention
and in making the decision the agent settles whether that decision is made, “it
may be said that the agent’s settling this question is a matter of her agent
causing something, viz., her coming to have the intention in question”
(CLARKE, 2017, p. 11)
◆ 2- “Even given the supposition that the agent-causing is reducible to or
realized in event-causings, the events in question do not themselves settle
whether the decision is made. Since (in the cases under consideration)
causation by these events is indeterministic, these events might occur then and
the causings not come about, the decision not be made. Thus the events in
question don’t settle whether the decision is made” (CLARKE, 2017, p. 11)
◆ 1 and 2 imply that P2 is false.

PALMER - Event-Causal Libertarianism: Two Objections Reconsidered

(2013)

PALMER, D.. Event-Causal Libertarianism: Two Objections Reconsidered In: HAJI, I.;
CAOUTTE, J. (Eds.) Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2013, pp. 98-122.

Pereboom’s Argument
➔ “This objection rest on two crucial claims” (PALMER, 2013, p. 102):
◆ A (Power to Settle Claim)- “On event-causal libertarian views, agents lack the
‘power to settle’ whether or not their decisions occur” (PALMER, 2013, p.
107);
◆ B (Control Claim)- “If agents lack this power to settle whether or not their
decisions occur, then they do not have enough control over their decisions for
them to be free and for agents to be morally responsible for them” (PALMER,
2013, p. 107)

Answering the Objection

➔ “How should we understand the nature of this power [to settle]?” (PALMER, 2013, p.
107);
➔ Power to Settle: “An agent S ‘settles’ whether or not her decision D occurs if either:
(i) some prior event or state of which S is the subject causally determines (i.e.,
deterministically causes) D, or (ii) S causes D as a substance (where causation by a
substance is not reducible to, nor composed of, causation by prior events or states)”
(PALMER, 2013, p. 109);
➔ How should the Event-Causal Libertarian respond to the objection?
◆ Affirm A and deny B (PALMER, 2013, p. 110): “it is true that, on
event-causal libertarian views, agents lack the ‘power to settle’ whether or not
their decisions occur in the sense that, on these views, no prior events or states
causally determine whether or not the agents’ decisions occur and, on such
views, agents do not cause their decisions as substances. But having conceded
this, event-causal libertarians should insist that it is not true, as (B) says, that if
agents lack the power to settle in this sense, then they thereby do not have
enough control over their decisions for those decisions to be free and be
something for which agents can be morally responsible” (PALMER, 2013, p.
110).
➔ Pereboom and the Burden of Proof: “As I see it, the following question is what
separates the two parties (event-causal libertarians on the one hand and proponents of
the disappearing agent objection on the other): if agents lack the power to settle
whether or not their decisions occur in the sense we have specified, do they thereby
lack sufficient control over their decisions for those decisions to be free and
something for which agents can be morally responsible? Proponents of the objection
answer “yes” to this question; event-causal libertarians answer “no.” What would
break the deadlock here? In my view, what would break the deadlock is the
presentation of further considerations on both sides: further considerations to
answer “yes” in the case of proponents of the objection; and further
considerations to answer “no” in the case of event-causal libertarians. If further
considerations on both sides are what would break the deadlock, then who has
the burden of proof? As I see it, the burden of proof lies with the proponent of
the objection” (PALMER, 2013, p. 111).
➔ Isn’t the claim intuitive?
 ◆ “I think that event-causal libertarians should counter by asking people to
reflect on the following: assuming that (i) the agent’s decision was caused by
prior events or states of the right type, and (ii) there was appropriate
indeterminism in the causation of the decision by the antecedent events or
states, then the claim that (i) and (ii) are jointly sufficient for freedom and
responsibility (as the event-causal libertarian suggests) is not markedly less
intuitive than Pereboom’s claim that if agent’s lack the power to settle in his
specified sense, then they lack sufficient control for freedom and
responsibility. As I see it, agreement on this statement is all the event-causal
libertarian needs to respond to an argument from intuition from Pereboom”
(PALMER, 2013, p. 121)

KANE - Event-Causal Libertarianism: Two Objections Reconsidered

(2012)

KANE, R. Torn decisions, luck, and libertarian free will: comments on Balaguer’s free will as
an open scientific problem. Philosophical Studies, v 169, n. 1, pp. 51-58, 2012.

Pereboom’s Argument

➔ (1) ‘‘On the event-causal libertarian picture, the relevant causal conditions antecedent
to the decision—agent-involving events—…leave it open whether the decision will
[or will not] occur’’ (KANE, 2012, p. 57)
➔ (2) “The agent has no further causal role in determining whether it does [occur]”
(KANE, 2012, p. 57)
➔ (3) ‘‘Whether the decision occurs is thus not settled by any causal factor involving the
agent’’ and so ‘‘the agent lacks sufficient control over the decision for moral
responsibility’’ (KANE, 2012, p. 57).

Kane’s Response

➔ “On the view I have outlined, the conclusion (3) does not follow from the premises
(1) and (2)” (KANE, 2012, p. 57);
➔ The relevant causal conditions of (1) include, also, the agent’s efforts to bring about
each choice (KANE, 2012, p. 58);
◆ Because of this, from (1), it does not follow that ‘‘whether the decision occurs
is thus not settled by any causal factor involving the agent’’(3). “For whether
the decision occurs is settled at the moment of choice by the successful
completion of the agent’s effort to bring about that choice, which is a
‘causal factor involving the agent’” (KANE, 2012, p. 58).
➔ The agent has plural voluntary control and this is sufficient control for moral
responsibility (KANE, 2012, p. 58).
 KANE - The Agent Causation Response (2021; 2022a)

KANE, R. Making Sense of Free Will that is Incompatible with Determinism: A Fourth Way
Forward. Journal of Philosophical Theological Research, v. 23, n. 89, pp. 5-28, 2021.

KANE, R. The Problem of Free Will: A Libertarian Perspective. In: KANE, R.; SARTORIO,
C. Do we have Free Will? Routledge, 2022a, pp. 3-67.

➔ “A continuing substance (such as an agent) does not absent the ontological stage
because we describe its continuing existence - its life, if it is a living thing - including
its capacities and their exercise, in terms of states, events, and processes involving it”
(KANE, 2021, p. 14; KANE, 2022a, p. 55);
➔ “One does not have to choose between agent (or substance) causation and event
causation in describing freedom of choice and action. One can afrim both” (KANE,
2021, p. 13; KANE, 2022a, p. 55);
➔ “In the case of self-forming choices or SFAs, for example, it is true to say both that
“the agent’s deliberative activity, including her efort, caused or brought about the
choice” and to say that “the agent caused or brought about the choice.” Indeed, the
first claim entails the second” (KANE, 2021, p. 14; KANE, 2022a, p. 55)
➔ Agents as Information-Responsive Complex Dynamical Systems (KANE, 2021, p.
14; KANE, 2022a, p. 55);
◆ ““An agent’s causing an action” is to be understood as “an agent, conceived as
such an information-responsive complex dynamical system, exercising
teleological guidance control, over some of its own processes” (KANE, 2021,
p. 14; KANE, 2022a, p. 55);
◆ Complex Dynamical Systems: “systems in which emergent capacities arise
as a result of greater complexity. When the emergent capacities arise, the
systems as a whole or various subsystems of them impose novel constraints on
the behavior of their parts” (KANE, 2021, p. 14; cf. KANE, 2022a, p. 56);
● These systems exhibit Teleological Guidance Control (TGC) “when
they tend through feedback loops and error correction mechanisms to
converge on a goal (called an attractor) in the face of perturbations”
(KANE, 2021, pp. 14-15; KANE, 2022a, p. 56);
○ This control is necessary for any voluntary activity (KANE,
2021, p. 15; KANE, 2022a, p. 56).
◆ “An important consequence of understanding the agent causation involved in
free agency and free will in this way is that the causal role of the agent in
intentional actions of the kind needed for free agency and will is not
reducible to causation by mental states of the agent alone. That would
leave out the added role of the agent, qua complex dynamical system,
exercising teleological guidance control over the processes causally linking
 mental states and events to actions” (KANE, 2021, p. 15; KANE, 2022a, p.
56);
● The agent exercises TCG over the manner in which the mental states
cause the resulting events “by ‘guiding the flow of activity along
neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs,
internal states, and outputs’ and being able to alter those pathways in
response to new information” (KANE, 2021, p. 15);
● Without this control, causation by mental states would be deviant
(KANE, 2021, p. 15; KANE, 2022a, p. 56).
➔ “The agent causation involved is not reducible to event causation by mental
states and events alone for the reasons given” (KANE, 2021, p. 16; KANE, 2022a, p.
57);
➔ The exercise of this notion of agent causation essentially involves causation by
states, processes and events (KANE, 2021, p. 18);
➔ This kind of agent causation is capable of being itself caused by prior events
(KANE, 2021, p. 18)

RUNYAN - Events, agents, and settling whether and how one intervenes
(2018)

RUNYAN, J. D. Events, agents, and settling whether and how one intervenes. Philosophical
Studies, v. 173, i. 6, pp. 1629-1646, 2016

➔ Two Problems with Franklin’s Response:

◆ It cannot overcome Pereboom’s torn decision problem (RUNYAN, 2016, p.
1629);
◆ “It is implausible that an agent qua event or state simultaneously settles
whether and how she intervenes. The upshot is that events and/or states lack
an ability essential to completely fulfilling an agent’s role qua settler”
(RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1629).
● This isn’t a problem for agent-causal accounts (RUNYAN, 2016, p.
1629).
➔ The Disappearing Agent Argument: “In short, if antecedent mental events and/or
states do not settle whether our free actions or decisions occur, and our role as agents
is exhausted by causal roles played by these events or states, there is nothing about us
that settles whether certain states-of-affairs obtain on a particular occasion. Our
agential role qua settler is nowhere to be found in event-causal libertarian
accounts—or so the argument goes. The agent qua settler disappears. As a
consequence, whether our free actions occur seems to be out of our hands. Doing all
we can leaves whether our free actions occur unsettled, out of our control and a matter
of luck (Pereboom 2004; Griffith 2010; Franklin 2014). Thus, we aren’t morally
responsible for their occurrence. And this is the disappearing agent problem for
event-causal libertarianism” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1632).
➔ Franklin’s Enriched Event-Causal Libertarian Account: “Franklin maintains that
an event-causal account of an agent settling whether certain states-of-affairs obtain on
a particular occasion can be given if it is enriched by the inclusion of an event or state
that not only ‘‘plays [the agent’s] functional role’’ qua settler but ‘‘in so doing counts
as his playing his functional role’’ (2014, 418); or, that is, ‘‘amounts to his playing his
functional role’’ (419). Franklin, further, argues that the playing of a functional role
by an event or state amounts to the agent playing her functional role as long as the
agent is (a) identical to this event or state or (b) is identified with this event or state
(419), which he argues is plausible” (RUNYAN, 2016, pp. 1634-1635);
◆ “Franklin favors and develops the theory that agents are identified with, rather
than identical to, certain events or states since this allows the sidelining of
questions about the nature of the agent in question” (RUNYAN, 2016, p.
1635).
◆ Working Hypothesis: “our ‘desire to act for what [we take] to be [our]
strongest reasons’ fulfills our role of settling matters and that its doing so
counts as our fulfillment of this role ” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1635);
◆ Example of the Thief: “it is the supplementary ‘motivational force’ of the
thief’s desire to behave for what he sees as the best reasons that settles
whether he steals or refrains from stealing on the occasion in question”
(RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1636);
● “The motivational force of the thief’s desire to behave for what he
takes to be the best reasons may have not been supplied on the
occasion in question” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1636). In this case, he
would not have settled whether he stole or refrained (RUNYAN, 2016,
p. 1637).
◆ “I should clarify that Franklin is not claiming that whether an agent intervenes
is contingent upon the occurrence of a mental state or event that is sometimes
present and sometimes not. Rather, in line with Velleman’s view, Franklin
maintains that whether an agent intervenes depends on whether the
motivational force of a certain kind of desire, conceived of as an enduring
attitudinal state, is supplied. And, since he is offering a libertarian account,
whether the motivational force of this desire is supplied on any occasion
must be left undetermined, and, thus, unsettled, by antecedent causal
conditions if the desire is to fulfill the role of the agent qua settler by
supplying motivational force” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1637);
◆ “I should also point out that Franklin is careful to note that—breaking with
traditional event-causal theories—given his enriched theory, the supplying of
a motivational force by the desire to act for what one takes to be the best
reasons shouldn’t be thought of as an antecedent to the agent’s settling of
matters. Rather, in keeping with Velleman’s account (see Sect. 3), Franklin
maintains that the settling of a matter by this desire constitutes the
agent’s settling of a matter (425–429). So the moment this desire settles a
matter by supplying the requisite motivational force is also the moment the
agent settles the matter (425)” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1637)
➔ Problem 1 for Franklin’s Theory: it’s unable to respond Pereboom’s case of
motivational equipoise (RUNYAN, 2016, pp. 1637-1368);
◆ Runyan’s Response: we can postualing a different desire additional to the
desire to act on the best reasons (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1638).
➔ Problem 2: More Fundamental;
◆ “When an agent ‘‘intervenes’’ and thereby settles a matter not already settled
(423), she does so ‘‘in virtue of the power of’’ a certain state or event, with
which she is identified (426)” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1638);
◆ “When this state or event doesn’t supply the ‘‘motivational force’’ to
supplement an agent’s desires and beliefs that favor a certain way of behaving,
she doesn’t ‘intervene’ and leaves whether she behaves in this way or some
other way unsettled (423)” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1638);
◆ Thesis (i) of the Enriched Account: “an agent settles matters, which are not
already settled, via a certain state or event, with which she is identified,
supplying motivational force” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1638);
◆ Thesis (ii) of the Enriched Account (true of every ECL account): “on any
given occasion, whether the force by which an agent settles matters is supplied
is undetermined and, thus, not settled in advance (423)” (RUNYAN, 2016, p.
1638);
◆ Given (i) and (ii), we get a dilemma: “either we accept an infinite regress or
an agent doesn’t control whether she ‘intervenes’ and thereby settles a matter
on any given occasion” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1638)
● “Given (i), an agent settles a matter via a motivational force being
supplied by a certain state or event. But additionally, given (i), if the
agent is to settle whether this motivational force is supplied—and
whether she intervenes—on a certain occasion, a certain state or event
with which she is identified needs to supply a secondary motivational
force that fulfills the agent’s functional role of settling that the primary
motivational force is supplied on this occasion. The reason
is—according to (i)— agents settle matters via a state or event
supplying motivational force. The problem is to settle whether this
primary motivational force is supplied on a certain occasion, the
agent will also need to settle that this secondary motivational force
is supplied on that occasion. The reason is the agent settles whether
this primary force is supplied via this secondary force. Thus, if she
doesn’t settle whether this secondary force is supplied on the
occasion in question, she equally doesn’t settle whether this
primary force is supplied. In this case, again given (i), if the agent is
to settle that this primary force is supplied, and, thus, that she
intervenes, on a certain occasion, in addition to a secondary
motivational force, a tertiary motivational force will need to be
supplied—this one settling that the secondary motivational force is
supplied. However, for the same reasons this tertiary force is needed, a
motivational force is needed to settle that this tertiary force is supplied;
 and the same goes for this force and every subsequent force in this
ensuing series, ad infinitum, if the agent is to settle that the primary
motivational force is supplied, and, thus, that she settles whether she
intervenes and settles a matter, on a certain occasion” (RUNYAN,
2016, p. 1639)
○ “As this is implausible, an agent can’t settle whether she
intervenes and settles a matter on a certain occasion. And if an
agent can’t settle whether she intervenes on a certain occasion,
given (ii), even when doing all she can, an agent leaves whether
she intervenes on a particular occasion unsettled and a matter of
luck” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1639)
○ “We are, thus, left with the conclusion that an agent, while
doing all she can, leaves whether she intervenes and settles a
matter unsettled and up to something or someone else. She
never controls whether she intervenes. The problem is if we
never control whether we intervene, we are never morally
responsible for not intervening, or for our behavior while not
intervening. (...) Whether individuals intervene and settle
whether they do these things, or anything else, on any given
occasion is out of their hands” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1639)
○ “The thief can’t plausibly control whether he ‘‘intervenes’’ and
settles whether he refrains from stealing on any given occasion.
While, on certain occasions, he may settle whether he refrains
from stealing, the thief can’t control on which occasions these
may be. As a result, at no time does he exercise control over
whether or not he intervenes and settles that he refrains (and,
when he doesn’t intervene, he may either steal or refrain). He
is, thus, never morally responsible for whether he intervenes
and settles this matter, or, then, for not intervening—or for his
behavior (whether stealing or refraining) when not intervening.
The reason he can’t be morally responsible for his behavior
when not intervening is because, not only can he not control
whether he intervenes, when he doesn’t intervene whether he
steals or refrains is left unsettled by him and a matter of luck.
This is a problem since we often hold people morally
responsible for not intervening, and, thus, for their behavior
while not intervening” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1640).
➔ Modifying Franklin’s Account: “an agent settles matters via one of various states
or events, with which the agent is identified, supplying motivational force thereby
fulfilling the agent’s functional role qua settler” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1641);
◆ “The ability to settle whether a certain state-of-affairs obtains on a
particular occasion is an ability exercised whenever the opportunity
arises. So, quite simply, an agent settles a matter, in one way or another, every
 opportunity she gets. There is never a question about whether an agent settles
a matter given she has the opportunity to do so” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1641).
➔ A Second Dilemma: not a whether problem, but a how problem;
◆ Thesis (i’) of the Modified Account: “an agent settles matters, which are not
already settled, via one of various states or events, with which she is
identified, supplying motivational force” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1641);
◆ Thesis (ii’) of the Modified Account: “on any given occasion, which state or
event supplies the force by which an agent settles matters is undetermined and,
thus, not settled in advance” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1641);
◆ “The problem, now, becomes that, given (i’), if we are to settle how we settle a
matter, one or more of various states or events with which we are identified
needs to supply a series of motivational forces, and the supplying of each
needs to count as our settling of which subsequent motivational force is
supplied, ad infinitum; thereby settling the means by which we settle a matter.
This is implausible. So we are left to conclude that we can’t settle the
means by which we settle a matter. And since we can’t settle the means by
which we settle a matter, given (ii’), even when we do all we can, the means
by which we settle a matter and thereby intervene is left unsettled by us
and a matter of luck. It is out of our control. We are, thus, not morally
responsible for how we intervene” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1641);
◆ Thief’s Example: “we can’t justifiably hold the thief morally responsible for
how he intervenes and comes to either steal or refrain from stealing. The
problem is we regularly hold people morally responsible for how they come to
do something. For example, we generally hold people morally responsible for
whether they come to do something out of wanting what is best or wanting
what they desire most.” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1642);
● We can go beyond Runyan if we develop a thought experiment
with aliens.
➔ “Postulating that an agent’s role qua settler is fulfilled by a state or event with which
the agent can be identified leads to a dilemma concerning either: (a) an agent’s ability
to control whether she intervenes (if we postulate that the ability to settle matters isn’t
exercised every time the opportunity arises), or (b) an agent’s ability to control how
she intervenes (if we postulate that the ability to settle matters is an ability exercised
every time the opportunity arises)” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1642)
➔ “Whether and how an agent qua substance settles a matter on a particular occasion is
settled by the agent when she performs an act that may appropriately be described in
multiple ways, including in terms of her moving of her body in certain ways, as well
as in terms of her interfering in certain states-of-affairs in a certain way, on that
occasion” (RUNYAN, 2016, p. 1644)

GRIFFITH - Why Agent-Caused Actions are not Lucky (2010)

GRIFFITH, M. Why Agent-Caused Actions are not Lucky. American Philosophical
Quaterly, v. 47, i. 1, pp. 43-56, 2010

➔ “While the agent can be said to cause the ‘action’ (see Pereboom 2007c, p. 194), she
seems not to have control over the crucial element for which she is responsible: that
she has decided to A rather than to B” (GRIFFITH, 2010, p. 50)
➔ “On an event-causal picture, the relevant causal conditions antecedent to a decision -
agent-involving events, or alternatively, states of the agent - would leave it open
whether this decision will occur, and the agent has no further causal role in
determining whether it does” (GRIFFITH, 2010, p. 51) → Quoting Pereboom, 2007b,
p. 102);
◆ “The problem is that the agent is not able to control which decision is made.
The extent to which the agent is causally involved leaves this open”
(GRIFFITH, 2010, p. 51).
➔ “So the agent is such a picture does disappear to an important extent. And this
problem is not constituted by the unavailability of an explanation. It is constituted by
a lack of control. It just happens to the agent that A occurs instead of B, since the
agent has no involvement beyond those states or events that leave it causally open. So
in the end, the event-causal libertarian cannot give the agent the control she needs”
(GRIFFITH, 2010, p. 51)

ČEČ - The Disappearing Agent (2017)

ČEČ, F. The Disappearing Agent In: BERČIĆ, B (Ed) Perspectives on The Self. Rijeka:
University of Rijeka, 2017, pp. 235-253.

➔ “The event causal libertarian should reject the objection as it rests on an unacceptable
ontology and that consequently, he should bite the bullet and admit that there is some
residual arbitrariness in torn decision making” (CEC, 2017, pp. 235-236);
➔ Torn Decision (CEC, 2017, p. 238):
◆ a) the agent has a feeling of being torn between two or more options;
◆ b) the outcome is not causally determined by influences of the past (it is not a
deterministically produced event);
◆ c) the decision is probabilistically caused by agent involving events;
◆ d) the indeterministic event is part of the decision itself, it does not happen
before the process of decision making;
◆ e) the options are in a motivational equipoise: if two options are open, option
A and option B, then there is 50% chance that the agent will choose option A
and 50% chance that he’ll choose option B.
◆ f) the act of deciding has to be analyzed on the basis of a causal theory of
action.
➔ Five Responses to the Objection (CEC, 2017, p. 242):
 ◆ 1. Formulate an answer that relies on specific events or states that fulfill the
functional role of the agent. Velleman (1992) and Franklin (2014) opt for this
solution.
● As Runyan points out, Velleman’s response cannot be applied to the
case of motivational equipoise (CEC, 2017, p. 243).
◆ 2. Appeal to phenomenology by claiming that the decision is attributable to
the agent because there is a special phenomenological feeling that only the one
who decides can have. Balaguer (2010) adopts this option and perhaps Kane
(2007) can be interpreted as appealing to it.
◆ 3. Devise an enriched event-causal account which will ultimately explain why
the agent has not lost control over the decision making process.
◆ 4. Discard the disappearing agent objection as it relies on a form of control of
the decision making process available only to agent causal theories, thus
making it (1) unacceptable because of the metaphysical burden it brings along,
(2) incompatible with the concept of torn decision making, (3) incompatible
with the concept of motivational equipoise.
◆ 5. Bite the bullet and stick to the idea that something gets lost if one adheres to
event causal libertarianism.
➔ “The disappearing agent objection must rely on a different, stronger conception of
control, a kind of control that can be secured only by agent causal theories” (CEC,
2017, p. 245)
➔ “The fourth option is grounded on the presumption that the disappearing agent
objection can be rejected as it relies on a form of control available only to agent
causal theories” (CEC, 2017, p. 246)
◆ Pereboom’s Settling is inconsistent with universal determinism. Quoting
Helen Steward: “For example, if an utterly deterministic process leads via a
successive chain of causes c1…cn to effect e, then cn cannot count as having
settled that an event of any of the types that e instantiates occurs, even though
cn is essential to the occurrence of e, since it was already settled at the time
of c1’s occurrence that e would occur. An event can only settle a matter at
the time at which it occurs, if that matter is not already settled before that
time. (…) If there is ever any settling of matters in time, then universal
determinism cannot be true, since according to universal determinism,
everything is already settled at the start (whatever exactly we are to
understand by “the start”). (Steward 2012: 40)” (CEC, 2017, pp. 246-247);
◆ “The notion of settling is libertarian in its core because it requires open
futures” (CEC, 2017, p. 247);
◆ Pereboom’s and Steward’s concept of settling presuppose some kind of agent
causation, because: “… one cannot hope to analyse what it is for an agent to
act in terms merely of the causation of her bodily movements by various of her
mental states, because her action has to be a part of this story, the part that
connects those non active mental antecedents to her bodily movements. It is
the agent who has to settle the question whether those mental antecedents will
result in a movement or not. That is the way commonsense psychology tells
 the story of action, and it cannot be retold at this level of ontology without her
participation. (Steward 2012: 65)” (CEC, 2017, p. 247);
◆ “The self that is compatible with the notion of settling, the self that can settle
must be one of a non-reductive cast similar to the ones presupposed by agent
causal theories: a mover unmoved, an agent-as-substance” (CEC, 2017, p.
247)
◆ The concept of torn decision is incompatible with the concept of settling:
● In ECL, “there is no ‘I’ who does the settling” (CEC, 2017, p. 248) -
agents qua substances are inexistent;
● The concept of settling contradicts the concept of torn decisions
making: “One important characteristic of settling is that nothing
prior to the settling itself suffices for the production of the action.
Nothing prior to the raising of my arm suffices for the raising of my
arm, as Clarke invites us to think in his example. However, the
concept of torn decision making implies that the situation of
motivational equipoise is sufficient for the production of a decision.
Nothing more can be added to the picture. Therefore we have two
concepts that do not combine: according to the concept of settling
nothing prior to the act of the agent suffices for the act, while
according to the concept of torn decision making the situation of
motivational equipoise suffices for the act” (CEC, 2017, p. 248);
● Problem: how can agent-causal libertarianism save libertarianism.
ACL fails to resolve the problem of luck (CEC, 2017, p. 249).
➔ “As exposed in the previous section of the paper adhering to the standards imposed by
the concept of settling is not something that can be achieved in an event causal
ontology. Therefore the answer to the question “Should an event causal libertarian
settle?” is simple: no. An event causal libertarian should explain how a free decision
looks like, why it is attributable to an agent, explain the functional role of the agent’s
in it, how it is incorporated in other parts of his mental life, etc. He has to do so in
order to demonstrate that the residual arbitrariness isn’t an obstacle in the production
of free decisions and attribution of moral responsibility” (CEC, 2017, pp. 250-251)
◆ “He should admit if a decision making process is grounded on
probabilistically caused agent involving events then there will be some
residual arbitrariness present in the decision making process” (CEC, 2017, p.
251);
◆ “What can an indeterministic world offer? One obvious answer is that such a
world provides open futures in which an agent can create or follow novel
causal pathways. But as already seen indeterminism is a dangerous toy to play
with. Following that path does not mean that the journey will be without
perils. No wonder that Randolph Clarke spoke of it as a of horror story.
(Clarke 2011: 331” (CEC, 2017, p. 251);
◆ “There is no settling, at least not as demanding as the disappearing agent
objection requires. Consequently some residual arbitrariness will be present in
the decision making process because it rests on the idea of motivational
 equipoise which gets resolved by an agent involving indeterministic event.
The indeterminism is here to stay but to implement Balaguer’s term it will be
appropriately non-random. (Balaguer 2010: 66) It will be the agent’s own
doing” (CEC, 2017, p. 251)
● “Toying with indeterminism demands a price to be paid” (CEC, 2017,
p. 251).

BALAGUER - Replies to McKeena, Pereboom, and Kane (2014)

BALAGUER, M. Replies to McKeena, Pereboom, and Kane. Philosophical Studies, v. 169,

pp. 71-92, 2012.

➔ Torn Decision: “a decision in which the person in question has reasons for multiple
options, feels torn as to which option is best, and decides without resolving the
conflict, i.e., decides while feeling torn” (BALAGUER, 2014, p. 79);
◆ Torn Decision Wholly Undetermined (TDW-undetermined): “the actual,
objective moment-of-choice probabilities of the various reasons-based
tied-for-best options being chosen match the reasons-based probabilities (or
the phenomenological probabilities), so that these moment-of-choice
probabilities are all roughly even, given the complete state of the world and all
the laws of nature, and the choice occurs without any further causal input,
i.e., without anything else being significantly causally relevant to which option
is chosen” (BALAGUER, 2014, p. 80)
➔ If Ralph’s decision is a TDW-undetermined, we get the following results
(BALAGUER, 2014, p. 80):
◆ (A) Ralph’s choice was conscious, intentional, and purposeful, with an
actish phenomenology—in short, it was a Ralph-consciously-choosing event,
or a Ralph-consciously-doing event (we actually know all of this
independently of whether the choice was TDW-undetermined); and
◆ (B) the choice flowed out of Ralph’s conscious reasons and thought in a
nondeterministically event-causal way; and
◆ (C) nothing external to Ralph’s conscious reasons and thought had any
significant causal influence (after he moved into a torn state and was about to
make his decision) over how he chose, so that the conscious choice itself was
the event that settled which option was chosen. (If you like, we can put it
this way: The conscious choice itself was the undetermined physical event that
settled which option was chosen).
◆ “My claim is that given (A)–(C), it makes good sense to say that Ralph
authored and controlled the decision. It seems to make sense in this scenario to
say that (i) Ralph did it, and (ii) nothing made him do it. And, intuitively, this
seems to be sufficient for authorship and control” (BALAGUER, 2014, pp.
80-81).
➔ Two Kinds of Control:
 ◆ DP-Control
◆ MB-Control: control applied to TDW-undetermined (BALAGUER, 2021, p.
81);
● Balaguer does not need to argue that MB-control provides a correct
analysis of the concept of control. All he needs is this: “(*) If our torn
decisions are TDW-undetermined, then they’re authored and controlled
by us and appropriately non-random and L-free in interesting and
important ways that are worth wanting and worth arguing for and that
libertarians can hold up and say, ‘‘This gives us a noteworthy kind of
libertarian free will.’’ (Actually, what I really need here is a bit weaker
than this; all I really need is that if our torn decisions are
TDW-undetermined, then we ‘‘author’’ and ‘‘control’’ them and so on
in ways that are interesting, important, and so on; for on the view I’m
suggesting, it doesn’t matter whether MB-authorship and MB-control
provide correct analyses of the concepts of authorship and control, and
so it wouldn’t matter if they failed to be genuine referents of the
English terms ‘authorship’ and ‘control’. But I won’t bother with this
complication here.)” (BALAGUER, 2014, pp. 82-83).
○ (A)-(C) motivates (*) - “they are clearly enough to give us one
important kind of L-freedom (...) in this scenario, the event that
settles which option is chosen is the conscious decision (...) But
it seems to me that if the event that settles the matter is the
agent’s conscious decision, then, at the very least, there is a
sense in which the agent does settle it. There might be other
senses—most notably, agent causal senses—in which the agent
does not settle it; but, again, all I need is that there is one
interesting, important sense in which the agent does settle it.
And it seems to me that if the event that settles which option is
chosen is the agent’s conscious choice, then that clearly gives
us a sense in which the agent settles it” (BALAGUER, 2014, p.
83)
➔ “So that’s my main response to Pereboom: I do not need to argue that MB-control
gives us a correct analysis of the concept of control, or that the kind of L-freedom I
describe in my book is the only kind of L-freedom that anyone might care about; all I
need to argue is that if our torn decisions are TDW-undetermined, then they are L-free
and appropriately non-random and authored and controlled by us (or ‘‘authored’’ and
‘‘controlled’’ by us, as the case may be) in ways that are interesting and important and
worth wanting and that libertarians can hold up and say, ‘‘This gives us a noteworthy
kind of libertarian free will.’’ That’s all I need, and I think I have delivered it”
(BALAGUER, 2014, p. 84).
 FRANKLIN - A Minimal Libertarianism (2018)

FRANKLIN, C. E. A Minimal Libertarianism: Free Will and the Promise of Reduction.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Disappearing Agent Objection

➔ The Objection (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 174):

◆ (1) On minimal event-causal libertarianism, there is nothing about the agent
(not his abilities, opportunities, motivations, and so forth) that settles which
decision he makes.
◆ (2) If nothing about the agent settles which decision he makes, then he is not
free with respect to, or morally accountable for, the decision.
◆ (3) Therefore, an agent who merely satisfies minimal event-causal
libertarianism is neither free with respect to, nor morally accountable for, any
of his decisions.
➔ “It is clear that the Disappearing Agent Objection is not a formulation of the Luck
Argument” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 175) → Pereboom grants that ECL allows for as
much control as compatibilism - but not more control.
➔ The Disappearing Agent Objection is an instance of the problem of enhanced control?
◆ “I think this is also not quite right. A solution to the problem of enhanced
control merely requires us to show how minimal event-causal libertarianism
secures more control than compatibilism. The Disappearing Agent Objection
does not even suggest that minimal event-causal libertarianism secures no
more control than compatibilism. What the Disappearing Agent Objection
shows, at best, is that minimal event-causal libertarianism does not secure
enough control for free will and moral accountability, and that conclusion
is perfectly consistent with the claim that minimal event-causal libertarianism
secures enhanced control vis-à-vis compatibilism” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p.
175).

A Dilemma for the Disappearing Agent Objection

➔ “Either (1) is false or (2) is question-begging” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 176);

➔ “Presumably an agent’s settling which decision he makes consists in the agent’s
making a distinctive contribution to his making the decision” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p.
176);
◆ Problem 1: When must this distinctive contribution take place?
● Before the agent makes the decision:
○ “Perhaps settling which decision one makes is like this: in order
for an agent to settle which decision he makes he must make a
prior decision about what to decide” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p.
176);
 ○ Problem: this would render free will impossible.
● Simultaneously with the agent’s making the decision: “Suppose the
thief has the ability to decide to refrain from stealing, the ability to
decide to steal, and the opportunity to exercise either of these
abilities at the time of decision. This seems sufficient for him to
have the power to settle which decision he makes. He has the ability
and the opportunity to decide to steal, and if he decides to steal, then
this decision will be sufficient for his deciding to steal rather than to
refrain. He also has the ability and opportunity to decide to refrain, and
if he decides to refrain, then this decision will be sufficient for his
deciding to refrain rather than to steal. Moreover, the thief has the
power to settle which decision he makes partly because his decision is
undetermined. Given his abilities, if indeterminism is located at the
moment of basic action, he possesses the power, at the moment of
decision, to settle (or determine) what he does. He possesses this
power in virtue of possessing the ability and the opportunity to
make either decision. It is hard to see what further power the thief is
supposed to be lacking. Why not, then, just say that, given the
thief’s abilities and opportunities, his making the decision suffices
for his settling which decision he makes?” (FRANKLIN, 2018, pp.
177-178)
○ Does settling implies deterministic causation?
◆ “If we simply stipulate that an agent’s settling what he
does requires that the relevant agent- involving states
and events deterministically cause what he does, then
while (1) is trivially true, (2) is question-begging: it
simply assumes the falsity of minimal event-causal
libertarianism. Moreover, given my preceding
arguments in chapters 3–6, we have good reason to
reject (2)” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 178);
◆ Is settling requires deterministically causation, not even
agent-causal agent’s can settle free decisions
(FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 178).
○ A plausible version of the objection must allow that
undetermined decision can be settled (FRANKLIN, 2018, p.
179);
◆ “What makes it the case that the thief [or any ECL
agent] fails to settle which decision will occur is a
combination of two factors: (i) all the relevant causal
conditions leave open which decision he will make, and
(ii) his causal role is exhausted by the antecedent states
and events involving him” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 179)
◆ The force of the argument lies in (ii): “According to
agent-causal libertarianism, when an agent performs a
 directly free action, it is undetermined, up to the
moment of action, whether he will agentcause that
decision. Hence, all the antecedent causal conditions
(including not only events and states of the agent but
even the agent himself) leave open whether he will
make the decision. True, if the agent agent- causes the
decision, then the decision is guaranteed to occur.
However, it is also true on event- causal libertarianism
that if the mental states and events involving the agent
cause the decision, then the decision is guaranteed to
occur. This is because cause is a success term. My point
is that prior to the agent’s exercising his agent- causal
power to make the decision, all the relevant causal
conditions leave open whether he will make that
decision” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 179)
◆ Reading the Objection as: “According to this reading of
the objection, an agent who merely satisfies minimal
event- causal libertarianism cannot settle what he does
because his causal role is exhausted by the causal role
of the mental states and events involving him.”
(FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 180) → Dilemma:
● If Pereboom does not specify what settling
means, (1) is false. Franklin’s libertarianism has
settling: “agents have the power to settle
whether they φ or ψ if they are normatively
competent with respect to each decision, have
the ability and opportunity to φ, have the ability
and opportunity to ψ, and it is the case that
whichever decision they make will be
non-deviantly caused by apt mental states and
events involving them” (FRANKLIN, 2018, p.
180);
○ “Agents’ settling or determining which
of two causally possible decisions they
make wholly consists in the decision’s
being nondeviantly caused by apt mental
states and events involving them”
(FRANKLIN, 2018, p. 180).
● (2) assumes this account of settling is false: “it
assumes that in order for agents to settle which
of two causally possible decisions they make,
they must have some further power— a power
the exercise of which does not wholly consist in
nondeviant causation by appropriate mental
 states and events. On this horn, (2) is question-
begging. Either way, the argument fails”
(FRANKLIN, 2018, pp. 180-181);
○ “(2) assumes its conclusion. It assumes
that what is required for settling is that
exercises of agents’ powers do not
wholly consist in nondeviant causation
by appropriate mental states and events
involving them— that is, it assumes that
an essential part of minimal event- causal
libertarianism (namely, agency
reductionism) is false— and then uses
this assumption to show that minimal
event- causal libertarianism is false”
(FRANKLIN, 2018, pp. 181)
◆ In ACL, the cause of the decision (the agent) settles
which decision occurs (settles X or Y). Therefore, there
is settling in ACL. However, in ECL, thes causes of the
decision (the causally relevant events) don’t settle
which decision occurs - they don’t determine (not
necessarily causally) that the decision occurs.

In addition, neither can she be responsible for the effort that is explained by
the character, whether this explanation is deterministic or indeterministic. If
the explanation is deterministic, then there will be factors beyond the agent’s
control that determine the effort, and the agent will thereby lack moral
responsibility for the effort. If the explanation is indeterministic, given that the
agent’s free choice plays no role in producing the character, and nothing
besides the character explains the effort, there will be factors beyond the
agent’s control that make a causal contribution to the production of this effort
without determining it, while nothing supplements the contribution of these
factors to produce the effort. Then again, the agent will not be morally
responsible for the effort. (PEREBOOM, 2088 [FOUR VIEWS]