The primary goal of this dissertation is to articulate and defend a robust commonsense libertarian theory of moral responsibility; that moral agents are the causes, and owners, of their actions, and in virtue of this it is appropriate to hold them praiseworthy or blameworthy for what they do. Here, I critique and defend two commonsense principles concerning moral responsibility - the control principle, and the principle of alternate possibilities. In recent years these principles have come under attack from philosophers seeking (...) to propose a theory of moral responsibility consistent with a deterministic worldview. The existence of moral luck would mean that the control principle is false; I argue that moral luck is impossible. Harry Frankfurt famously presents a supposed counter-example to the principle of alternate possibilities; I argue Frankfurt's case turns on an equivocation between alternate possibilities and alternate outcomes. I contend that moral responsibility requires an agent to have full control of her actions, to be the author of what she is praiseworthy or blameworthy for. This view requires indeterminism of a special kind, agent-causation, where something is an agentcause if and only if at a given time, it, and only it, determines its actions, and was not determined to act in this way by outside forces. Only agent-causes can be truly responsible for their actions because only the actions of agent-causes can be traced back to them and no further. And finally I argue we have good reason to believe we are such agent-causes. (shrink)

The disappearing agent problem is an argument in the metaphysics of agency. Proponents of the agent-causal approach argue that the rival event-causal approach fails to account for the fact that an agent is active. This paper examines an analogy between this disappearing agent problem and the exclusion problem in the metaphysics of mind. I develop the analogy between these two problems and survey existing solutions. I suggest that some solutions that have received significant attention in response to the exclusion problem (...) have seen considerably less attention in response to the disappearing agent problem. For example, one solution to the exclusion problem is to reject the exclusion assumption. Analogously, one solution to the disappearing agent problem could be to deny the claim that the agent-causal approach and the event-causal approach are mutually exclusive. Similarly, proportionality theories of causation, a solution to the exclusion problem, can be transferred to the disappearing agent problem. After establishing the plausibility of the analogy between the two problems, I examine how this latter solution in particular can be transferred from the one problem to the other. (shrink)