Agency, Responsibility and Indeterminism: Reflections on Libertarian
Approaches to Free Will 

Robert Kane

In writings over the past twenty years I have sought to answer four questions about free will: Is it compatible or incompatible with determinism? (the Compatibility Question); What kind of free will is worth wanting, and why is it worth wanting? (the Significance Question); Can a free will that is incompatible with determinism be made intelligible? (the Intelligibility Question); where and how, if at all, might such a free will exist in the natural order? (the Existence Question). Most recent philosophical debate about free will has focused on the Compatibility  Question, with some (but far less) discussion of the other three questions. I have tried to right this balance by giving extended treatment to all four questions in my work. Moreover I've tried to point debate on all four in new directions. In this paper I discuss some of these new directions First, on Compatibility and Significance, much of the debate in modern times has been about the importance of alternative possibilities (AP) or the power to do otherwise and whether this power is or is not compatible with determinism. I have argued for two decades that one cannot settle issues about Compatibility and Significance by focusing on AP alone. One must also bring in another historically significant but too often neglected criterion of free will, namely, ultimate responsibility (UR). I discuss the ways in which this changes the contours of debates about Compatibility and Significance; and I discuss the often subtle relations between UR and AP. On the Intelligibility and Existence questions, I have sought to give an intelligible account of incompatibilist or libertarian free will that would show how it could in principle be realized in the natural order without appeals to any special forms of agency or causation, such as nonevent or nonoccurrent agent-causation, noumenal agency, immaterial selves, or the like that are common in other past and prevailing libertarian accounts of free agency. I consider the more important recent approaches to libertarian free will and defend my own against them. In order to do this, I introduced a number of further ideas, such as will-setting, plurality conditions, dual efforts of will, and others that are too- often neglected in free will debates, but are essential I believe to their resolution.