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ABSTRACT
Libertarian views of freedom claim that, although determinism would rule out our freedom, we are nevertheless free on some occasions. An odd implication of such views (to put it mildly) seems to be that indeterminism somehow enhances or contributes to our agency. But how could that be so? What does indeterminism have to offer to agency? This paper develops a novel answer, centred around the notion of explanation. In short, it is argued that, if indeterminism holds in the right places, then the best explanation of the history of the world necessarily cites facts about our agency. Along the way, alternative proposals regarding the significance of indeterminism are considered and, ultimately, rejected in favour of the one developed in this paper.
Notes
1 See Hobart [Citation1934], van Inwagen [Citation1983: ch. 4], and Mele [Citation2006] for the traditional ‘problem of luck’ formulation. See Franklin [Citation2011, Citation2018: ch. 6] for the ‘problem of enhanced control’ formulation. See List [Citation2019: ch. 4] for a slightly distinct formulation, focused on the notions of ‘attributability’ and authorship’.
2 See O’Connor [Citation2000, Citation2005, Citation2009] and Pereboom [Citation2001, Citation2014], among others.
3 See Franklin [Citation2018: ch. 6].
4 See Reid [Citation1778/1969], Chisholm [Citation1966], Clarke [Citation1993, Citation2003], O’Connor [Citation2000, Citation2005, Citation2009], and Pereboom [Citation2001, Citation2014].
5 Classic, albeit distinct, formulations of this worry can be found in Broad [Citation1952] and Davidson [Citation1971].
6 O’Connor [Citation2000], Clarke [Citation2003], and Pereboom [Citation2004] are particularly illuminating.
7 See Markosian [Citation1999, Citation2012], Clarke [Citation2003], and Nelkin [Citation2011].
8 Tim O’Connor [Citation2005, Citation2009] aims to give such an argument.
9 See Franklin [Citation2018: 71–2].
10 ‘Thank you’ to an anonymous referee at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for helping me to be clear on this issue.
11 But see Franklin [Citation2018: ch. 3] for further details.
12 This definition might have some counterintuitive implications for cases of overdetermination as well as of causal loops, but I’ll set aside such cases.
13 The case is quite tricky, though, because it seems to involve an explanatory loop: although Adam’s decision not to use the time machine explains the initial conditions, those same initial conditions seem to explain (at least ancestrally) his decision, given the truth of determinism. It might seem, then, that an explanation that cited only the initial conditions would have just as much predictive power and scope as one that instead cited the state of the world at the time of Adam’s decision, which would imply that both the initial conditions and Adam’s decision are eliminable! I’ll leave aside this complication.
14 ‘Thank you’ to two anonymous referees at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for raising this objection.
15 I have in mind authors such as Rescher [Citation1970], van Fraassen [Citation1980], and (arguably) Woodward [Citation2003].
16 Railton’s and Salmon’s views have spawned a fairly large literature. For a recent discussion, see Bradley [Citation2020].
17 Klein [Citation2014], in turn, modified these examples from Hilary Putnam [Citation1975].
18 Thank you to an anonymous referee at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for helping me to see this.
19 Thank you to Taylor Cyr, Luca Ferrero, John Martin Fischer, Adam Harmer, Michael Nelson, Erich Reck, and Carolina Sartorio for comments on previous drafts. A special thank you to the anonymous referees, Associate Editor, and Editor at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for insightful comments and suggestions.