Freedom, Responsibility, and Luck I: The Possibility of Moral Responsibility and Literal Arguments for the Proximal Determination Requirement

Abstract

Luck-involving claims (that is, claims that involve the concept of luck itself or some other luck-related concept) play key roles in contemporary as well as historical debates over the nature and scope of metaphysically free and morally responsible action. On the contemporary scene in philosophy of action, luck-involving claims feature most prominently in arguments for the thesis that no one could be directly morally responsible for an action whose occurrence was not proximally determined — that is, logically entailed by the immediate past and laws of nature. We’ll call this thesis the Proximal Determination Requirement on directly morally responsible action. Again, the Proximal Determination Requirement says that no one could be directly morally responsible for an action whose absence was logically consistent with the immediate past and laws of nature.