6 - REASONS EXPLANATION OF ACTION

Summary

The preceding chapter argued for incompatibilism. In this chapter, I want to rebut two arguments against incompatibilism that have been put forward from time to time. Incompatibilism can be defined this way: Any free action must be an undetermined event. A free action is one such that, until the time of its occurrence, the agent had it open to her to perform some alternative action (or to be inactive) instead. An undetermined event is one that was not nomically necessitated by the antecedent state of the world. (Hence, a determined event is one that was nomically necessitated by its antecedents.) An event was nomically necessitated by the antecedent state of the world if and only if the antecedent state together with the laws of nature determined that that event, rather than some alternative, would occur.

The most widely supported argument against incompatibilism, to which I will give by far the larger response, combines the consideration that a free action can be influenced by the agent's intentions, desires, and beliefs – can have an explanation in terms of reasons for which the agent did it – with the assumption that only a determined event can have such an explanation. My response to this argument will be to counter the assumption by offering an adeterministic or anomic account of such explanations. The other argument does not assume that reasons explanations are deterministic (nor does it assume the contradictory), but simply claims that where we have an undetermined action we do not have an agent in control of (determining) what her action is to be: We do not have an action that the agent chooses, freely or otherwise.