Panicky metaphysics
Metaphysical libertarians correctly believe that we can make free choices, but they mistakenly believe that determinism and free choice are incompatible. So they deny determinism. They believe that determinism and free choice are incompatible for the same bad reasons that all incompatibilists do, some of which I’ve discussed on this blog.
In order to save free choice from what they see as the threat of determinism, libertarians need to find somewhere ‒ anywhere! ‒ to insert indeterminism into the picture. This desperate need prompts them to engage in what philosopher P. F. Strawson aptly called “obscure and panicky metaphysics.”
If any choice you make is the culmination of a series of events, there’s no stage in that series where inserting an indeterministic event would increase your freedom. Daniel Dennett once proposed that indeterminism might obtain early in the series by making it undetermined which reasons occur to you when you deliberate about what to do. But notice that indeterminism would give you no more control over which reasons occur to you than determinism does. So indeterminism at that stage wouldn’t increase your freedom. On the other hand, inserting indeterminism after you’re done deliberating turns you into a loose cannon rather than a responsible agent.
Faced with this dilemma, some libertarians say that the act of choosing isn’t the culmination of a series of events. Instead, these libertarians invent a new kind of causation: agent causation. There’s much to criticize in this brand of panicky metaphysics, but with this post already running long I’ll lodge just one objection. Agent causation is alleged to be direct causation: A causes B with no intermediate events or states separating them. In an earlier post, I noted that all necessitation is indirect because time is continuous. I don’t like using causal language, but I’d say that all causation must be indirect and for the same reason.
