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This objection, being now widely discussed as the problem of causal exclusion, has first and most prominently been raised by Jaegwon Kim in a series of articles dating back to the late 1980s. For a summary of Kim’s view on the subject, see his Mind in a Physical World. An Essay on the Mind–Body Problem and Mental Causation, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1998, and his recent Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
As Lowe is well aware, CCP is nowadays not only thought to be a problem for interactionist substance dualism, but also—and maybe even more so—for any kind of non-reductive physicalism.
Cf. Donald Davidson, “Agency”, in: Agent, Action, and Reason, ed. R Binkley et al., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971, 3–25 [reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 2001].
Lowe not only concedes the metaphysical possibility of such a coincidence, but - additionally given that “physical causation is deterministic”—even accepts its subsequent implication “that […] then there is really no scope for intentional causation” (117). He herein follows Norman Malcolm who once famously argued that a complete physical, or ‘mechanistic’, explanation of all bodily movements would simply exclude any intentional account of action, or rather, would render the very concept of action itself incoherent (cf. “The Conceivability of Mechanism”, in: Philosophical Review 77, 1968, 45–72).
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Gyr, A. Review: E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency. Int Ontology Metaphysics 10, 215–221 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-009-0048-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-009-0048-0