Robert Kane

On free will, responsibility and indeterminism: Responses to Clarke, Haji, and Mele

Abstract This paper responds to three critical essays on my book, The Significance of Free Will(Oxford, 1996) by Randolph Clarke, Istiyaque Haji and Alfred Mele (which essays appear in this issue and an earlier issue of this journal). This response first explains crucial features of the theory of free will of the book, including the notion of ultimate responsibility.The paper then answers objections of Haji and Mele that the occurrence of undetermined choices would be matters of luck or chance, and so could not be responsible actions. It then responds to concerns of Clarke that indeterminism provides no greater degree of control for defenders of incompatibilist free will and to concerns Clarke has about the notions of “effort” and “willing” in the book. Finally, the paper addresses objections of Haji concerning Frankfurt type‐examples and the relation of moral responsibility to the power to act otherwise, and it addresses a concern of Meles about why we should want a free will that is incompatible with d...

Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom

1. Introduction: pluralism and uncertainty 2. Openness 3. The retreat 4. The moral sphere 5. Fact and value 6. Value experiments 7. Virtues, excellences and forms of life 8. The fourth dimension 9. Aspiration 10. Wisdom 11. Objective worth 12. The Bach crystals 13. Human flourishing 14. The Faust legend and the mosaic 15. The good and the right (I): intuitionism and Kantianism 16. The good and the right (II): utilitarianism and consequentialism 17. The good and the right (III): contractualism 18. Politics, public morality and law: justice, care and virtue Bibliography Index.

Dimensions of Value and the Aims of Social Inquiry

The articles in this issue of the American Behavioral Scientist present a critique of mainstream social science and outline an alternative hermeneutic or interpretive approach to human science inquiry. This hermeneutic view (a) stresses that the cultural embeddedness of all human endeavors, including social science, prevents us from ever obtaining a strictly objective or value-neutral account of human behavior. It also (b) claims that social inquiry can lead to a better understanding of the good life or what ends are worth striving for by humans. But why does rejecting objectivity not undermine any claim to a better understanding of what is truly good or worthwhile? This article explores how both cultural or historical embeddedness and claims to understanding the good might be harmonized within a conception of four broad dimensions of human values or valuing: elementary value experiences, purposive human activity, pursuit of the excellence of various forms of life, and the human sense of what is worthy from every point of view. A number of implications of this framework for human science inquiry are discussed.

The complex tapestry of free will: striving will, indeterminism and volitional streams

The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a “complex tapestry” of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.

Patterns, acts, and self-control: Rachlin's theory

Regarding Rachlins behavioral act/pattern theory of self-control, it is argued that some cases of self-control involve pattern/ pattern conflicts rather than merely act/pattern conflicts and that – if all cases of self-control are to be accounted for – some patterns must be viewed as internal representational states of mind (plans) rather than merely as patterns of actual overt behavior.

On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will

In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kanes influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role – “both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument”. In this paper, I respond to Franklins criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.

Can a Traditional Libertarian or Incompatibilist Free Will Be Reconciled with Modern Science? Steps Toward a Positive Answer

The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the problem of free will. The unstated assumption was that if you had scientific leanings, you would naturally be a compatibilist about free will (believing it to be compatible with determinism). By contrast, if you defended a libertarian or incompatibilist free will, requiring indeterminism, you must inevitably reduce free will to mere chance or to the mystery of uncaused causes, immaterial minds, noumenal selves, or prime movers unmoved. The question I set for myself back then was how one might reconcile a traditional incompatibilist free will requiring indeterminism with modern science without reducing it to either chance or mystery. It has turned out that doing so required rethinking many facets of the traditional problem of free will from the ground up. I report on some results of this rethinking in this paper.

The Intelligibility Question for Free Will: Agency, Choice and Branching Time

In their important work, Facing the Future (Oxford 2001), Nuel Belnap and his collaborators, Michael Perloff and Ming Xu, say the following (p. 204): “We agree with Kane (1996) that ... the question whether a kind of freedom that requires indeterminism can be made intelligible deserves ... our most serious attention, and indeed we intend that this book contribute to what Kane calls ‘the intelligibility question.”’ I believe their book does contribute significantly to what I have called “the Intelligibility Question” for free will (which as I understand it is the question of how one might make intelligible a free will requiring indeterminism without reducing such a free will to either mere chance or to mystery and how one might reconcile such a free will with a modern scientific understanding of the cosmos and human beings). The theory of agency and choice in branching time that Belnap has pioneered and which is developed in detail in Facing the Future is just what is needed in my view as a logical foundation for an intelligible account of a free will requiring indeterminism, which is usually called libertarian free will. In the first two sections of this article, I explain why I think this to be the case. But the logical framework which Belnap et al. provide, though it is necessary for an intelligible account of an indeterminist or libertarian free will, is nonetheless not sufficient for such an account. In the remaining sections of the article (3–5), I then discuss what further conditions may be needed to fully address “the Intelligibility Question” for free will and I show how I have attempted to meet these further conditions in my own theory of free will, developed over the past four decades.