Agent-causation Libertarianism and Freedom

Abstract

Certain contemporary philosophers¹, who tend to be wedded to the a priori principle that every event has some cause, but, nevertheless, are dissatisfied with a deterministically oriented theory of responsibility, have recently attempted to revive² a theory of agency as a means of providing a satisfactory basis for moral responsibility. These attempts stem from two preliminary assumptions about such responsibility, namely:

• (i) that ascription of responsibility cannot be philosophically justified simply on the grounds that the agent could have done otherwise if he had wanted to; one must also know that there was a real possibility for him to want or choose to do otherwise (i.e., that his original choice was not the necessary effect of causal factors);

• (ii) that if the agent is the ultimate and undetermined cause of an action, then it is philosophically justified to assign responsibility for that (intentional) action to the agent.