Compatibilists and Determinists were right about the Will,
but wrong about Freedom.

Libertarians were right about Freedom, but wrong about the Will.

The Temporal Sequence of Freedom and Determination

Given the "laws of nature" and the "fixed past" just before a decision, philosophers wonder how a free agent can have any possible alternatives. This is partly because they imagine a timeline for the decision that shrinks the decision process to a single moment.

Collapsing the decision to a single moment between the closed fixed past and the open ambiguous future makes it difficult to see the free thoughts of the mind followed by the willed and adequately determined action of the body.

But the Cogito Mind Model is not limited to a single step of generating alternative possibilities followed by a single step of determination by the will. It is better understood as a continuous process of possibilities generation by the Micro Mind (parts of the brain that leave themselves open to noise) and adequately determined choices made from time to time by the Macro Mind (the same brain parts, perhaps, but now averaging over and filtering out the noisiness that might otherwise make the determination random).

In particular, note that a special kind of decision might occur when the Macro Mind finds that none of the current options are good enough for the agent's character and values to approve. The Macro Mind then might figuratively say to the Micro Mind, "Think again!"

Many philosophers have puzzled how an agent could do otherwise in exactly the same circumstances. Since humans are intelligent organisms, and given the myriad of possible circumstances, it is impossible that an agent is ever in exactly the same circumstances. The agent's memory (stored information) of earlier similar circumstances guarantees that.

This view still makes an artificial separation between Micro Mind creative randomness and Macro Mind deliberative evaluation. These two capabilities of the mind can be going on at the same time. That can be visualized by the occasional decision to go back and think again, when the available alternatives are not good enough to satisfy the demands of the agent's character and values, or by noticing that the subconscious Micro Mind might be still generating possibilities while the Macro Mind is in the middle of its evaluations.

Finally, not all decisions in the Cogito model end with an adequately determined "de-liberation" or perhaps better we can call it simply self-determination. Many times the evaluation of the possibilities produces two or more alternatives that seem more or less of equal value.

In this case, the agent may choose randomly among those alternatives, yet have very good reasons to take responsibility for whichever one is chosen. This is related to the ancient liberty of indifference.

I like to call such a decision an undetermined liberty, because it remains undetermined at the moment of the decision. It has not been determined by the deliberations, although we can say that the agent “deliberately” chooses at random.

Undetermined liberties include Robert Kane’s Self-Forming Actions, although Kane limits his SFAs to “torn” decisions between moral and self-interested alternatives. Kane likes to say in his model that the decision is not made until the actual choice is made (at random).

Our thoughts are free and often appear to come to us. Our actions are adequately determined for moral responsibility and appear to come from us. They are up to us (Aristotle's ἐφ' ἡμῖν).

What then are the sources of alternative possibilities? To what extent are they our creations? We can distinguish three important sources, all of them capable of producing indeterministic options for thoughts and actions.

The first source is the external world that arrives through our perceptions. It is perhaps the major driving force in our lives, constantly requiring our conscious attention. Indeed, consciousness can be understood in large part as the exchange of actionable information between organism and environment. Although the indeterminisitic origin of such ideas is outside us, we can take full responsibility for them if they influence our adequately determined willed actions.

The second source of options is other persons. The unique human ability to communicate information means that alternative possibilities for our actions are being generated by our reactions to other minds. Peter Strawson's reactive attitudes come to mind.

Finally, and most importantly, our Micro Mind generates possibilities internally. These are the possibilities that truly originate within us (Aristotle's ἐν ἡμῖν).

Note that the sources of random options not only need not be internal, they need not be contemporaneous with the current decision, as long as they come to mind as alternatives. They may have been generated at much earlier times in the agent's life, and only now get reconsidered and perhaps get acted upon.

Determinists think everything that happens is strictly caused by the prior states of the world, so there is no free will or moral responsibility. Free will is an illusion. Free will is impossible. Compatibilists say it is freedom enough if we are not externally coerced. Since our will is one of the causes in the chain of causes, that is enough to make us morally responsible for our actions. Libertarians demand that there are breaks in the causal chain of determinism. These breaks can be random events in the past, random events in our deliberations immediately before decisions, or randomness in our decisions themselves. These are called "event-causal" views.

The breaks could also be caused by metaphysical powers in the agent that can start new causal chains. These are called "agent-causal or "non-causal" views. An extreme form of "substance dualism" makes the mind a different substance from the body.

The Cogito Model lies between and combines elements of Determinism and Agent-Causal Libertarianism

The Cogito Model is less libertarian than typical event-causal Libertarians and more libertarian than some recent event-causal models proposed by Compatibilists that attempt to "give Libertarians what they want."

The Cogito Model is in part an "event-causal" view that locates the breaks in the causal chain in our deliberations, These include the internal uncaused generation of new possibilities as well as external random sensory inputs.

It is less radically libertarian and more determinist than the typical models of Libertarians Robert Kane, Laura Waddell Ekstrom, and Mark Balaguer which locate randomness in the decisions themselves.

The Cogito Model is compatibilist in the sense that it is compatible with "adequate" determinism.

It is very similar to the two-stage models of Daniel Dennett and Alfred Mele. But unlike Dennett, the model needs quantum randomness and not simply computational "pseudo-randomness" to generate alternative possibilities. And unlike Mele, we believe that science has shown indeterminism to be true and determinism to be false. Mele remains an agnostic on these important questions.

Again, beyond the Dennett and Mele models, the Cogito Model proposes a specific process that avoids the single "quantum event in the brain" that gets amplified perfectly in time with our thought processes to help with free will. There are billions of quantum events in the brain every second. The miracle of the mind is that it can manage the resulting noise, averaging over these events when it needs to, utilizing them when it wants to.

Because the agent is actively controlling the process of deliberation up to the instant of the determining decision at the 'moment of choice,' the Cogito Model shares much with agent-causal views, without being metaphysical.

The "free" stage of the Cogito Model depends on thermal and quantal noise in the neural circuitry of the brain. This noise introduces errors in the storage and retrieval of information, noise that may be helpful in generating alternative possibilities for action.

The "will" stage of the Cogito Model suppresses this noise for the adequately determined process of evaluation and decision, unless the will is satisfied with a random choice in special cases of the liberty of indifference.

The Cogito Model is compatible with indeterminism suitably located and determinism appropriately limited.

It is thus "doubly compatible" with indeterminism and "adequate" determinism. This suggests what we call a Comprehensive Compatibilism.

The Cogito Model is arguably closer to the common sense or "folk" view of free will than any other free will model.

The earliest objections were the concerns of some of the inventors of two-stage models themselves. Mostly they could not see how to reconcile the randomness of indeterminism with the determinism required for responsibility. They also tended to be metaphysical dualists, so they did not have a purely physical model for free will.

Arthur Holly Compton adhered to a view that human freedom might only be visible from the inside (subjectively), that from the outside a person would be seen (objectively) as deterministic. This was a variation on Neils Bohr's dualist complementarity principle, which was popular among physicists at the time.

Karl Popper, in his collaborations with the neurobiologist John Eccles, wanted the will to involve a metaphysical interaction between the mind (or soul) and the body. This was another form of dualism. Later (1977), Popper endorsed the idea of a two-stage model with quantum indeterminacy in the first stage, and a lawful determined selection process similar to Darwinian evoltuion.

Henry Margenau wrestled with his mentor Ernst Cassirer's views on determinism and indeterminism in physics. Cassirer also had strong Kantian dualism tendencies, but in the end he insisted that only determinism could provide the causality needed as a basis for science. Margenau reluctantly accepted indeterminism as the "first step" in an explanation of human freedom and possibly providing insight into ethical problems.

In 1978, Daniel Dennett proposed a two-stage model that would "give the libertarians what they want." But he had serious reservations about his "Valerian" model, most important that he could find no place in it for quantum indeterminism.

Dennett's model for decision making started with elements from Henri Poincaré random combinations model (via Jacques Hadamard and the poet Paul Valery, at the 1936 Synthese conference in Paris exploring creativity). Dennett mentioned the amplification of a quantum event in the brain, which was first suggested by Arthur Holly Compton in 1931. Dennett had also read Karl Popper, who had criticized Compton's "massive switch amplifier." He knew Popper's analogy of free will with natural selection as a two-stage process. Dennett's decision-making model was a variation of computer scientist Herbert Simon's "generate and test" two-stage model for computer problem solving.

Dennett made an excellent case for his model as something that libertarians should want. Sadly, no libertarian saw the power in Dennett's two-stage model.

Because Dennett saw very clearly what was good about the model for Libertarians, he also could see what they might not accept.

Dennett knew that some libertarians insisted on indeterministic quantum events in the brain, but he could not understand the place for a quantum event, how exactly and when and where a quantum event in the brain could be amplified to help with decision making and not harm our control and responsibility for our actions.

As a determinist, Dennett said that a model with pseudo-random number generation in the first stage would be all that is needed. He found no value in adding true quantum randomness.

Bob Kane had independently developed the two-stage model before Dennett published Brainstorms. He had read the same sources (Compton and Popper), but he thought that something more was needed.

Basically, Kane felt that at the completion of the first stage in the model, when all the random considerations have been generated, there is a finite time, however small, during which the model assumes that the willed decision, the choice between alternative possibilities, is determined.

This is unacceptable for an incompatibilist. Libertarian free will requires that the decision not be determined, even by the agents desires and beliefs. It must remain undetermined up to the moment of choice. It is determined by the choice, says Kane.

The agent does not have complete control over the random considerations that get generated. The agent can decide to stop generating new possibilities. And if evaluation finds none satisfactory, can go back and generate more. But after the last new random option is generated, and during that time, however small, before the decision is made, Kane is concerned that the choice is already determined by the agent's character, reasons, motives, etc.

Kane is correct. In our Cogito model, the decision could be reliably (though not perfectly) predicted by a super-psychiatrist who knew everything about the agent and was aware of all the alternative possibilities. This is because the second ("will") stage evaluation and decision process is indeed adequately determined.

We agree with Kane that the second stage is determined, in the sense of adequately determined, but note that it is in no way pre-determined.

And Kane agrees that, before the first stage of the two stage model, the decision is not determined. It is at that time undetermined.

Now Kane has found a way to maintain that in some cases, the agent's decision may not be determined by anything other than the agent's choice, which can be rational (made for properly evaluated reasons), but nevertheless might have been otherwise and yet be equally rational.

He calls this "dual (or plural) rational control.

We shall see that this is an acceptable extension of the Cogito model. Let's see how it works.

To find a way around the determined second stage, without invoking metaphysical agent-causality, Kane adds event-causal randomness in the decision itself. Randolph Clarke calls such randomness "centered" in the decision, as opposed to chance located earlier in the "deliberative" stage (our first "free" stage). Kane calls this The Indeterminist Condition:

"the agent should be able to act and act otherwise (choose different possible futures), given the same past circumstances and laws of nature." ( A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, 2005, p.38)

In the Cogito model, the agent has the capacity to "act otherwise" at the start of the first, "free" stage of the two-stage model. At the beginning of the second ("will") stage, the choice and the act has been adequately determined.

But now Kane adds "something more" to the two-stage model.

There are times when the deliberation and evaluation process is not at all simple and straightforward. The agent may be seriously conflicted, especially in difficult moral decisions, which Kane says contribute to what he calls Self-forming Actions (SFAs).

In such cases, the agent has developed excellent reasons for more than one option. This conflict requires extra effort on the part of the agent to make the decision, which Kane says may generate noise in the brain's neural circuitry . This noise may make the decision random and indeterminate, although it selects from among options that are all defended by reasons.

Kane deftly sidesteps the charge of critics who the agent cannot be responsible for any decision involving randomness. In Kane's model, the agent can claim responsibility however the "torn" decision is made.

Kane's followers today, Laura Waddell Ekstrom and Mark Balaguer, for example, continue to argue for randomness directly in the decision as the only way to resolve "torn decisions." Here is Ekstrom's position, for example:

Consider an agent whose act is, in such a sense, "libertarian free." Now a duplicate agent in exactly similar circumstances governed by the same natural laws and subject to the same occurrence of considerations at the same points in the deliberative process will form exactly the same judgment concerning the best thing to do and will act accordingly. But then, given the consideration pattern that occurs (but might not have), there is no "wiggle room" for the agent in forming an evaluative judgment — it simply falls out, of necessity, from the consideration pattern. Hence such an account does not leave sufficient room for free agency.
(Ekstrom, Free Will: A Philosophical Study, 2000, p.121)

Kane's position is not without its critics. Double's objections are mostly directed at Kane's efforts to establish moral responsibility. Double develops challenges to three of Kane's requirements: the ability to have chosen otherwise, control, and rationality.

Double noted that Dennett's Valerian models introduce indeterminism in the early stages of deliberation, before the decision itself.

He therefore calls Kane's views "Non-Valerian." These allow indeterminism in the decision process itself, which means that chance is sometimes the direct cause of actions, which Double feels jeopardizes agent control.

The last is his own theory, which he calls "Delay Libertarianism." The main idea is to recognize that free will is a process that takes place over a period of time. This gives Double the opportunity to locate the indeterminism in a delay between deliberations and resultant decisions.

Double notes that the deliberations "set the stage" for whatever decision will be made - if any decision is made. He does not show how delayed indeterminism can resolve the randomness objection.

Double recognizes that the act of the will might be simply to avoid a decision, and send the problem back for more deliberations, which could involve generating more alternative possibilities, as in our Cogito Model.

But in the end, says Double, delay libertarianism fails, for the same reason as the others, the dual rational control condition.

Dual rational control is Kane's claim that the agent can do otherwise (randomly) and have the alternative (dual) action be just as rational and demonstrate just as much control as the original action. Double is right to reject this view, but unfortunately he rejects all libertarianism, titling his book The Non-Reality of Free Will.

Mele's "Modest Libertianism" is essentially the same as Dennett's "Valerian" model:

The modest indeterminism at issue allows agents ample control over their deliberation. Suppose a belief, hypothesis, or desire that is indirectly relevant to a deliberator's present practical question comes to mind during deliberation but was not deterministically caused to do so. Presumably, a normal agent would be able to assess this consideration. And upon reflection might rationally reject the belief as unwarranted, rationally judge that the hypothesis does not merit investigation, or rationally decide that the desire should be given little or no weight in his deliberation. Alternatively reflection might rationally lead him to retain the belief, to pursue the hypothesis to give the desire significant weight. That a consideration is indeterministically caused to come to mind does not entail that the agent has no control over how he responds to it. Considerations that are indeterministically caused to come to mind (like considerations that are deterministically caused to come to mind) are nothing more than input to deliberation. Their coming to mind has at most an indirect effect on what the agent decides, an effect that is mediated by the agent's assessment of them. They do not settle matters. Moreover, not only do agents have the opportunity to assess these considerations, but they also have the opportunity to search for additional relevant considerations before they decide, thereby increasing the probability that other relevant considerations will be indeterministically caused to come to mind. They have, then, at least sometimes, the opportunity to counteract instances of bad luck — for example, an indeterministically caused coming to mind of a misleading consideration or, a chance failure to notice a relevant consideration. And given a suitable indeterminism regarding what comes to mind in an assessment process, there are causally open alternative possibilities for the conclusion or outcome of that process.

Compatibilists who hold that we act freely even when we are not in control of what happens at certain specific junctures in the process leading to action are in no position to hold that an indeterministic agent's lacking control at the same junctures precludes free action. And, again, real human beings are not in control of the coming to mind of everything that comes to mind during typical processes of deliberation. If this lack of perfect proximal control does not preclude its being the case that free actions sometimes issue from typical deliberation on the assumption that we are deterministic agents, it also does not preclude this on the assumption that we are indeterministic agents.

Now, even if garden-variety compatibilists can be led to see that the problem of luck is surmountable by a libertarian, how are theorists of other kinds likely to respond to the libertarian position that I have been sketching? There are, of course, philosophers who contend that moral responsibility and freedom are illusions and that we lack these properties whether our universe is deterministic or indeterministic — for example, Richard Double and Galen Strawson.

Modest libertarians can also anticipate trouble from traditional libertarians, who want more than the modest indeterminism that I have described can offer. Clarke, who has done as much as anyone to develop an agent-causal libertarian view, criticizes event-causal libertarianism on the grounds that it adds no "positive" power of control to compatibilist control but simply places compatibilist control in an indeterministic setting. Of course, given that combining compatibilist control with indeterminism in a certain psychological sphere was my explicit strategy in constructing a modest libertarian position, I do not see this as an objection. In any case, traditional libertarians need to show that what they want is coherent.
(Free Will and Luck, p.9)

Mele is correct that his model will not satisfy Libertarians wanting more, whether "agent-causal" libertarians like Timothy O'Connor or "event-causal" libertarians Robert Kane wanting randomness in their decisions.

Clarke defines new terms in his Libertarian Accounts of Free Will for Double's "Valerian" and "Non-Valerian." He calls Dennett's model "deliberative," since randomness internal to the mind is limited to the deliberations. And he calls Kane's model "centered," by which he means that Kane's (quantum) randomness is in the center of the decision itself.

Clarke accepts the Kane and Ekstrom views that if the agent's decision simply results from indeterministic events in the deliberation phase that that could not be what he calls "directly free." Clarke calls this deliberative freedom "indirect." "Indirectly free" is a reasonable description for our Cogito Model, which limits indeterminism to the "free" deliberation stage and has a limited but "adequate" determinism in the "will" stage.

Although Clarke says that a "centered event-causal libertarian view provides a conceptually adequate account of free will," he doubts that it can provide for moral responsibility. He says that

An event-causal libertarian view secures ultimate control, which no compatibilist account provides. But the secured ultimacy is wholly negative: it is just (on a centered view) a matter of the absence of any determining cause of a directly free action. The active control that is exercised on such a view is just the same as that exercised on an event-causal compatibilist account.

It is a bit puzzling to see how the active control of a libertarian decision based on quantum randomness is "just the same as that exercised" on a compatibilist account, unless it means, as Double argued, no control at all. So it may be worth quoting Clarke at length.

Dennett requires only that the coming to mind of certain beliefs be undetermined; Mele maintains that (in combination with the satisfaction of compatibilist requirements) this would suffice, as would the undetermined coming to mind of certain desires.

Likewise, on Ekstrom's view, we have undetermined actions — the formations of preferences — among the causes of free decisions. But she does not require that these preference-formations either be or result from free actions. Nor can she require this. Any free action, she holds, must be preceded by a preference-formation. An infinite regress would be generated if these preference-formations had to either be or result from free actions. And a similar regress would result if Dennett or Mele required that the undetermined comings-to-mind, attendings, or makings of judgments that figure in their accounts had to either be or result from free actions.

Thus, given the basic features of these views, all three must allow that an action can be free even if it is causally determined and none of its causes, direct or indirect, is a free action by that agent. Setting aside the authors currently under discussion, it appears that all libertarians disallow such a thing. What might be the basis for this virtual unanimity?

When an agent acts with direct freedom — freedom that is not derived from the freedom of any earlier action— she is able to do other than what she, in fact, does. Incompatibilists (libertarians included) maintain that, if events prior to one's birth (indirectly) causally determine all of one's actions, then one is never able to do other than perform the actions that one actually performs, for one is never able to prevent either those earlier events or the obtaining of the laws of nature.

Clarke now claims that even prior events thought up freely by the agent during deliberations will "determine" the agent's decision. This is roughly what the Cogito Model claims. After indeterminism in the "free" deliberation stage, we need "adequate" determinism in the "will" stage to insure that our actions are consistent with our character and values (including Kane's SFAs), with our habits and (Ekstrom's) preferences, and with our current feelings and desires.

Clarke oddly attempts to equate events prior to our births with events in our deliberations, claiming that they are equally determinist. He says,

If this is correct, then a time-indexed version of the same claim is correct, too. If events that have occurred by time t causally determine some subsequent action, then the agent is not able at t to do other than perform that action, for one is not able at t to prevent either events that have occurred by t or the obtaining of the laws of nature. An incompatibilist will judge, then, that, on Dennett's and Mele's views, it is allowed that once the agent has made an evaluative judgment, she is not able to do other than make the decision that she will, in fact, make, and that, on Ekstrom's view, it is allowed that once the preference is formed, again the agent is not able to avoid making the decision that she will, in fact, make. If direct freedom requires that, until an action is performed, the agent be able to do otherwise, then these views do not secure the direct freedom of such decisions.

Mele confronts this line of thinking head-on. Some libertarians, he acknowledges, do hold that a decision is directly free only if, until it is made, the agent is able to do other than make that decision, where this is taken to require that, until the action occurs, there is a chance that it will not occur. But such a position, Mele charges, is "mere dogmatism" (1995a: 218). It generates the problem of control that he (along with Dennett and Ekstrom) seeks to evade, and hence libertarians would do well to reject this position.

There is, however, a decisive reason for libertarians not to reject this position, a reason that stems from the common belief — one held by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike — that, in acting freely, agents make a difference, by exercises of active control, to how things go. The difference is made, on this common conception, in the performance of a directly free action itself, not in the occurrence of some event prior to the action, even if that prior event is an agent-involving occurrence causation of the action by which importantly connects the agent, as a person, to her action. On a libertarian understanding of this difference-making, some things that happen had a chance of not happening, and some things that do not happen had a chance of happening, and in performing directly free actions, agents make the difference. If an agent is, in the very performance of a free action, to make a difference in this libertarian way, then that action itself must not be causally determined by its immediate antecedents. In order to secure this libertarian variety of difference-making, an account must locate openness and freedom-level active control in the same event — the free action itself — rather separate these two as do deliberative libertarian views.

On the views of Dennett, Ekstrom, and Mele, agents might be said to make a difference between what happens but might not have and what does not happen but might have, but such a difference is made in the occurrence of something nonactive or unfree prior to the action that is said to be free, not in the performance of the allegedly free action itself. Failure to secure for directly free actions this libertarian variety of difference-making constitutes a fundamental inadequacy of deliberative libertarian accounts of free action.
(Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, p.63-4)

To see that the Cogito Model allows the agent to make a real difference, we need only extend the process of decision to include everything from the start of free deliberations to the moment of willed choice The agent is justified saying "I could have done otherwise," "This action was up to me," and "I am the originator of my actions and the author of my life."

Clarke goes on to consider his "centered" event-causal view, and initially claims that it provides an adequate account of free will, but his "adequate" is damning with faint praise.

If merely narrow incompatibilism is correct, then an unadorned, centered event-causal libertarian view provides a conceptually adequate account of free will. Such a view provides adequately for fully rational free action and for the rational explanation — simple, as well as contrastive — of free action. The indeterminism required by such a view does not diminish the active control that is exercised when one acts. Given incompatibilism of this variety, a libertarian account of this type secures both the openness of alternatives and the exercise of active control that are required for free will.

It is thus unnecessary to restrict indeterminism, as deliberative accounts do, to locations earlier in the processes leading to free actions. Indeed, so restricting indeterminism undermines the adequacy of an event-causal view. Any adequate libertarian account must locate the openness of alternatives and freedom-level active control in the same event — in a directly free action itself. For this reason, an adequate event-causal view must require that a directly free action be nondeterministically caused by its immediate causal antecedents

If, on the other hand, broad incompatibilism is correct, then no event-causal account is adequate. An event-causal libertarian view secures ultimate control, which no compatibilist account provides. But the secured ultimacy is wholly negative: it is just (on a centered view) a matter of the absence of any determining cause of a directly free action. The active control that is exercised on such a view is just the same as that exercised on an event-causal compatibilist account.

This sort of libertarian view fails to secure the agent's exercise of any further positive powers to causally influence which of the alternative courses of events that are open will become actual. For this reason, if moral responsibility is precluded by determinism, the freedom required for responsibility is not secured by any event-causal libertarian account. (ibid., pp.219-20)

So for Clarke all libertarian accounts fail if broad incompatiblism is true(viz. if determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility, if semicompatibilism is not true).

Luck is only a problem for moral responsibility. Some critics have mistakenly made it an objection to libertarian free will.

Since the world contains irreducible chance, many unintended consequences of our actions are out of our control.

Unfortunately, much of what happens in the real world contains a good deal of luck. Luck gives rise to many of the moral dilemmas that lead to moral skepticism.

Whether determinist, compatibilist, semicompatibilist, or libertarian, it seems unreasonable to hold persons responsible for the unintended and unforeseeable consequences of their actions, good or bad. In many moral and legal systems, it the person's intentions that matter first and foremost.

Nevertheless, we are often held responsible for actions that were intended as good, but that had bad consequences. Similarly, we occasionally are praised for actions that were either neutral or possibly blameworthy, but which had good consequences.

Some thinkers are critical of any free will model that involves chance, because the apparent randomness of decisions would make such free will unintelligible. They say our actions would be a matter of luck. This is the Luck Objection to free will.

In his 1979 essay "Moral Luck," Nagel is pessimistic about finding morally responsible agents in a world that views agents externally, reducing them to happenings, to sequences of events, following natural laws, whether deterministic or indeterministic. Free will and moral responsibility seem to be mere illusions.

Moral judgment of a person is judgment not of what happens to him, but of him. It does not say merely that a certain event or state of affairs is fortunate or unfortunate or even terrible. It is not an evaluation of a state of the world, or of an individual as part of the world. We are not thinking just that it would be better if he were different, or did not exist, or had not done some of the things he has done. We are judging him, rather than his existence or characteristics. The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events.

What, however, do we have in mind that a person, must be to be the object of these moral attitudes? While the concept of agency is easily undermined, it is very difficult to give it a positive characterization. That is familiar from the literature on Free Will.

We cannot simply take an external evaluative view of ourselves - of what we most essentially are and what we do. And this remains true even when we have seen that we are not responsible for our own existence, or our nature, or the choices we have to make, or the circumstances that give our acts the consequences they have. Those acts remain ours and we remain ourselves, despite the persuasiveness of the reasons that seem to argue us out of existence.

It is this internal view that we extend to others in moral judgment - when we judge them rather than their desirability or utility. We extend to others the refusal to limit ourselves to external evaluation, and we accord to them selves like our own. But in both cases this comes up against the brutal inclusion of humans and everything about them in a world from which they cannot be separated and of which they are nothing but contents. The external view forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgment shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

Nagel presents the standard two-part argument against free will

The same thing is revealed in the appearance that determinism obliterates responsibility. Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening. This explains why the absence of determinism is no more hospitable to the concept of agency than is its presence — a point that has been noticed often. Either way the act is viewed externally, as part of the course of events.

The problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an account of the internal conception of agency and its special connection with the moral attitudes as opposed to other types of value. I do not have such an account. The degree to which the problem has a solution can be determined only by seeing whether in some degree the incompatibility between this conception and the various ways in which we do not control what we do is only apparent. I have nothing to offer on that topic either. But it is not enough to say merely that our basic moral attitudes toward ourselves and others are determined by what is actual; for they are also threatened by the sources of that actuality, and by the external view of action which forces itself on us when we see how everything we do belongs to a world that we have not created.
(Moral Luck, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, p.37-38)

I entirely agree with [Nagel] that the involvement of morality with luck is not something that can simply be accepted without calling our moral conceptions into question. That was part of my original point; I have tried to state it more directly in the present version of this paper. A difference between Nagel and myself is that I am more sceptical about our moral conceptions than he is.

Scepticism about the freedom of morality from luck cannot leave the concept of morality where it was, any more than it can remain undisturbed by scepticism about the very closely related image we have of there being a moral order, within which our actions have a significance which may not be accorded to them by mere social recognition. These forms of scepticism will leave us with a concept of morality, but one less important, certainly, than ours is usually taken to be; and that will not be ours, since one thing that is particularly important about ours is how important it is taken to be.

Mele says there is a problem about luck for Libertarians

Agents' control is the yardstick by which the bearing of luck on their freedom and moral responsibility is measured. When luck (good or bad) is problematic, that is because it seems significantly to impede agents' control over themselves or to highlight important gaps or shortcomings in such control. It may seem that to the extent that it is causally open whether or not, for example, an agent intends in accordance with his considered judgment about what it is best to do, he lacks some control over what he intends, and it may be claimed that a positive deterministic connection between considered best judgment and intention would be more conducive to freedom and moral responsibility.

This last claim will be regarded as a nonstarter by anyone who holds that freedom and moral responsibility require agential control and that determinism is incompatible with such control. Sometimes it is claimed that agents do not control anything at all if determinism is true. That claim is false.

As soon as any agent...judges it best to A, objective probabilities for the various decisions open to the agent are set, and the probability of a decision to A is very high. Larger probabilities get a correspondingly larger segment of a tiny indeterministic neural roulette wheel in the agent's head than do smaller probabilities. A tiny neural ball bounces along the wheel; its landing in a particular segment is the agent's making the corresponding decision. When the ball lands in the segment for a decision to A, its doing so is not just a matter of luck. After all, the design is such that the probability of that happening is very high. But the ball's landing there is partly a matter of luck.

All libertarians who hold that A's being a free action depends on its being the case that, at the time, the agent was able to do otherwise freely then should tell us what it could possibly be about an agent who freely A-ed at t in virtue of which it is true that, in another world with the same past and laws of nature, he freely does something else at t. Of course, they can say that the answer is "free will." But what they need to explain then is how free will, as they understand it, can be a feature of agents — or, more fully, how this can be so where free will, on their account of it, really does answer the question. To do this, of course, they must provide an account of free will — one that can be tested for adequacy in this connection.
(Free Will and Luck, p.7-9)

Free will is a prerequisite for responsibility. Whether a free action involves moral responsibility is a question for the ethicists.

But in any case, to the extent that luck is involved in an agent's free actions, that is a problem for moral responsibility, which we can separate from the problem of free will.

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Chapter 4.2 - The History of the Free Will Problem	Chapter 4.4 - The Physics of Free Will
Part Three - Value	Part Five - Problems

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