UC San Diego

Taking things at face value, we are free and responsible agents. That is to say, sometimes we act in ways that merit praise and blame. I believe that the theory that best makes sense of this fact—supposing that it is one—is the agent-causal theory of free will. At the heart of the agent-causal theory is the idea that agents are directly causally involved in the production of their free actions; we cannot wholly account for the agent’s causal role in free will by referring to, as has been typically thought, things going on inside the agent’s head. For much of the last century, most writers have neglected to take the theory seriously, often outright dismissing it. I argue that this neglect has not been justified. There is more to be said for the view than critics have previously realized. Furthermore, probing these criticisms and honing the agent-causal theory helps to shed light on a number of important issues for the free will dialectic.

The aim of this project is two-fold: first, it aims to address substantive objections traditionally leveraged against agent causation, and, second, it aims to begin to develop the agent-causal view in ways that make the view more plausible. Chapter 1 starts by introducing the background and framework that will be in place for the rest of the discussion. Chapter 2 addresses a long-standing concern about agent causation, which says that the commitment to substance causation is too ontologically demanding. I argue that agent causation does not necessarily require substance causation and is in fact compatible with certain event-causal frameworks. Chapter 3 addresses an empirical objection which says that agent causation conflicts with what we know about the laws of physics. I argue that the objection overstates the empirical evidence against agent causation. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the positive project of elucidating under-discussed aspects of agent causation. Chapter 4 examines how best to account for acting on a reason within an agent-causalist framework. It is argued that the most plausible account involves taking the relation of acting on a reason as a primitive. And Chapter 5 then considers what a reasons-responsive account of agent causation might look like. It is argued that a straightforward integration between agent causation and the standard reasons-responsive account is implausible. Nonetheless, the failure of integration reveals a general problem for reasons-responsive accounts, suggesting that the most plausible account of reasons-responsiveness will be non-modal.