Abstract
Neil Levy mounts two arguments against Robert Kane’s influential libertarian theory. According to the first, because Kanean self-forming actions are undetermined, there can be no contrastive explanation for why agents choose as they do rather than otherwise, in which case how they choose appears to be a matter of luck. According to the second, if one grants Kane the claim that agents are responsible for their undetermined choices in virtue of the fact that they made efforts of will to choose them, the fact that agents engage in dual efforts of will leads to an implausible doubling of the agent’s responsibility. We defend Kane from both objections. We argue against the first by clarifying the nature of contrastive explanation in the context of Kane’s theory and we argue against the second by showing that the kind of doubling of responsibility implied by an agent’s dual efforts of will is, in fact, innocuous.
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Notes
For a fuller discussion of this point, see Campbell (2017).
We are grateful to the referees for this journal for raising these concerns.
One might worry that Kane doesn’t have the resources to make sense of this distinction. After all, he does say his view requires “efforts and tryings as we ordinarily experience them when we are aware of resistance to our mental or physical activities” (Kane, 1998, 28). This can suggest that efforts of will during SFAs are, like the efforts made when we face resistance to a physical activity, efforts to do. When I make an effort to pry open a sealed box, I am making an effort to do something: to open the box. However, in a preceding passage and elsewhere Kane makes it clear that the efforts made during an SFA need to be understood more narrowly. He describes this effort in terms of what he calls the “striving will.” According to Kane, this is the effort agents make to overcome the resistance to choices that come from their own wills (Ibid., p. 27), or are efforts on the part of agents “to get their ends or purposes sorted out” (Ibid., p. 126). Because the agent has a divided will in an SFA, the dual efforts or tryings are really efforts to overcome the obstacles to choosing created by the opposing sets of reasons, desires, and values of the agent. Hence, the efforts are states or processes that, according to Kane, precede the formulation of intention (Ibid., p. 27) and so are—at least in our view—better understood as efforts to choose as opposed to efforts to perform an overt action (i.e., the action the agent is trying to choose). If we are mistaken in our interpretation of Kane on this point, we would suggest this modification as a friendly amendment to his theory.
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Campbell, N., Kadkhodapour, J. Contrastive Explanation, Efforts of Will, and Dual Responsibility. Acta Anal 37, 415–430 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00498-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00498-6