Libertarian Accounts of Free Will

by Randolph Clarke

Overview

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct—one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism—then no libertarian account is entirely adequate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195306422
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

University of Georgia

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Incompatibilism. 2. Active Control and Causation. 3. Event-Causal Accounts and the Problem of Explanation. 4. Deliberative Libertarian Accounts. 5. The Problem of Diminished Control. 6. The Problem of Value. 7. The Freedom of Decisions and Other Actions. 8. An Integrated Agent-Causal Account. 9. Agent Causation and Control. 10. Substance and Cause. ConclusionReferencesIndex

Editorial Reviews

"I think this is one of the best books on free will to be published in the past fifteen years, a period during which many excellent works have appeared on the subject. Clarke's critical survey of libertarian theories is an invaluable resource for philosophers interested in free will and his discussions are invariably enlightening."—Mind

"Libertarian Accounts of Free Will offers a careful, often insightful examination of the prospects for an adequate naturalist libertarian incompatibilism; the book examines, that is, theories of freedom under which free action is possible should determinism be false and should the world be as the natural sciences tell us it is. It is an excellent book that anyone interested in this topic should read."—Gideon Yaffe, The Journal of Ethics

From the Publisher