Farewell to the luck (and Mind) argument

Abstract

In this paper I seek to defend libertarianism about free will and moral responsibility against two well-known arguments: the luck argument and the Mind argument. Both of these arguments purport to show that indeterminism is incompatible with the degree of control necessary for free will and moral responsibility. I begin the discussion by elaborating these arguments, clarifying important features of my preferred version of libertarianism-features that will be central to an adequate response to the arguments-and showing why a strategy of reconciliation (often referred to as ''deliberative libertarianism'') will not work. I then consider four formulations of the luck argument and find them all wanting. This discussion will place us in a favorable position to understand why the Mind argument also fails.

The demand for contrastive explanations

“…I believe that there are successful arguments of this sort already in the literature (see especially Franklin 2011and relatedly Mele 2006, 2017. There is also a significant controversy about whether contrastive explanations require determinism at all (Hitchcock 1996(Hitchcock , 1999, and this can also be used to cast doubt on whether the demand for contrastive explanations can be used to ground any version of the Luck Objection (Franklin 2011). I wish to outline a different sort of worry.…”

“…Clearly the barrier to meeting that condition is our finitude, as opposed to indeterminism (Franklin 2011).…”

The Most Persuasive Frankfurt Example, and What It Shows: Or Why Determinism Is Not the Greatest Threat to Moral Responsibility

“…(Even if the reasons that occur to Al are not deterministically generated, Al still cannot be deemed responsible for which reasons [and their weights] appear to him (Franklin, 2011). Indeed, indeterminism just makes how such reasons appear to the agent a matter of occurrent luck rather than, as with determinism, causal luck (Schlasser, 2014)).…”

Reason, Responsibility, and Free Will: Reply to My Critics

“…Christopher Franklin (2011) attributes to me what he calls the ''ensurance formulation'' of the luck argument. He states that its core idea is that if an agent performs an undetermined action u at t, then she could not have ensured or guaranteed that she u-ed rather than w-ed at t; indeterminism prevents agents from having the power to guarantee a particular outcome: agents try their best, but they cannot ensure what they will do.…”