Abstract
Dwayne Moore (2021) argues that libertarians about free will who are reductive physicalists cannot make proper sense of free will. In doing so, he presents what he calls “the physical indeterminism luck objection” to libertarian free will. He goes on to consider three different contemporary naturalistic approaches to libertarian free will (LFW) – those of Christopher Franklin, Mark Balaguer, and Robert Kane – and argues that if understood as reductive physicalist views they all fall prey to this objection. While it’s not entirely clear that Kane is a reductive physicalist, it is clear that he would reject any kind of eliminative materialism or eliminative physicalism (Kane 1996, 147). Regardless, in this essay I argue that even if Kane’s view is a kind of reductive physicalist view, it is immune to the arguments made in Moore’s essay.
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Notes
A referee notes that Moore does not feel that compatibilist standards of free will can make adequate sense of active control over choices made. [See Moore (2021), pp.10–12.] Thus, Moore may protest that Kane’s appeal to compatibilist standards to establish control over efforts of will is inadequate. I will take up this issue at the end of the next section on “the problem of active control,” as the discussion there provides more detail on Kane’s view about the grounds of our control over SFAs.
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Lemos, J. Kane and the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection: A Reply to Moore. Philosophia 50, 2597–2615 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00514-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00514-y