According to libertarian views of free will, people sometimes act freely, but this freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. While attractive to many, philosophers have long been skeptical of such views. Two concerns have been central: (i) How can a person have control over an undetermined action? Wouldn’t it just be a matter of chance that such an action occurs? (ii) How can a person’s free actions be breaks in the deterministic causal chain? As Robert Kane notes, historical ways of explaining this have typically appealed to “mysterious” (3) forms of agency—like uncaused actions or Kantian noumenal selves—that somehow stand “outside” the laws of nature. Little wonder, then, that P. F. Strawson (1962) famously dismissed libertarian views as “obscure and panicky metaphysics.”
In the face of this skepticism, Kane has arguably done more than any other philosopher in the last few decades to rehabilitate libertarian views of free will. Over a series of well-regarded publications—including a seminal earlier book, The Significance of Free Will (OUP, 1996)—Kane has tried to develop a libertarian view that is consistent with modern science and explains how undetermined action is not a matter of control-undermining chance. The Complex Tapestry of Free Will continues this project. After a helpful introductory chapter, Kane carefully develops his own libertarian view in chapters 2–5. In chapters 6–10, he compares his view to other libertarian, compatibilist, and free will skeptical views. In the final chapter, he discusses broader issues of desert and selfhood.
This is, in my estimation, an outstanding work. On the one hand, Kane’s book is extremely well-written, covers lots of ground (including engaging critiques of competitor views), and does not presuppose any expert knowledge in the area. Thus, it would be an excellent read for anyone wanting to get up to speed with contemporary debates about free will in general. But on the other hand, the book offers significant revisions to Kane’s earlier libertarian position, especially as developed in Significance. Thus, for specialists, the book will shape the agenda for future discussion of libertarianism. (Sadly, Kane passed away a few months before the book’s publication, and so he will not be able to see this future discussion. The Complex Tapestry of Free Will, however, is a wonderful illustration of his excellence and thoughtfulness as a philosopher. All of us who work on free will are indebted to his path-breaking contributions.)
A central part of Kane’s view, as he explains in chapter 2, is that not every free action must be undetermined. He concedes that people can be free with respect to actions that are causally determined by their characters. But Kane argues that at least some of the prior actions that help shape our characters cannot be causally determined. This is because if all of the actions that shape our characters were causally determined, then there would be “nothing we could have ever done differently in our entire lifetimes to make ourselves different than we are”—a “consequence,” Kane says, that is “incompatible with our being (at least to some degree) ultimately responsible for being the way we are and having the wills we do have” (13). Kane calls these character-shaping undetermined actions “self-forming actions” or SFAs.
SFAs occur “at those difficult times in life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become” (61) and our presently formed characters do not determine for us which action we will take. We may be torn between morality and self-interest, or between a short-term boost or long-term gain. In such cases, “whichever choice is made will require an effort of will or exercise of willpower to overcome the temptation to make an alternative choice” (61–62). Kane illustrates this with the case of John, who, while torn between whether to steal (since he is in desperate need of money) or refrain from doing so (since he knows it would be morally wrong), nevertheless decides to steal.
Being an SFA, “the reasons motivating the choice to steal the money merely incline John to make that choice” as opposed to causally determining it, and, thus, “effort would have to be made to overcome the still-existing resistance in his will” (62). Moreover, since John’s choice was the result of his effort together with his reasons, his choice would be made “voluntarily,” “on purpose,” and “for these inclining reasons” (63), and he would be doing what he was trying, or making an effort, to do. And this is so, Kane argues, even though his choice—as an SFA—would not be causally determined. Thus, even though John’s choice was undetermined, it would not, Kane says, be a matter of control-undermining chance. Furthermore, since the causes of his choice would be his effort and reasons, no “mysterious” forms of agency are needed to explain how a freely made undetermined choice could occur.
While this basic picture is familiar from Significance, Kane develops his view in two new ways in this work. The first concerns effort of will. Against his earlier position, critics (e.g., Mele 1998) argued that the Kanean libertarian agent is still subject to control-undermining chance. After all, had John’s effort to choose to steal failed (as was causally possible given the indeterminism) and had he then made the other choice instead, he would not have done what he was trying to do. Thus, it seems to be a matter of chance that he ended up doing what he was trying to do. In response, Kane (1999) suggested that, when making an SFA, the agent makes two efforts of will—John both tries to decide to steal and tries to decide to not steal. So, whichever decision he makes, he does what he was trying to do. But as critics (e.g., Clarke 2003) argued—and Kane now agrees (72)—it seems to be practically irrational to try to do one thing at a certain time and try to do something else at that time while knowing that one cannot do both then.
In this new work, Kane rejects his previous “doubling of efforts” proposal. He now argues (62–64; 94–96) that, while a person in an SFA only makes one effort of will at a time, should that effort fail, the alternative choice could not then be made (as Kane thought was possible in Significance.)[1] Instead, if the effort to make a certain choice fails, then “no choice at all would have been made at that time.” The person’s deliberation “would either continue until a potential reassessment of the motivating reasons led to another later effort” one way or the other, or it might “terminate without any decision being made” (64).
How does this new proposal fare? On the one hand, it seems to avoid some of the problems plaguing Kane’s two earlier accounts. It improves upon his original account in Significance in the sense that should John’s effort to choose to steal fail, it will not now be true that he could then have made the alternative decision instead. Thus, it is not true on Kane’s new view that John could make a decision, in an SFA-situation, that he was not trying to make. Kane’s new proposal also avoids the issue with his later “doubling of efforts” idea since his new view does not commit the free agent to engaging in the seemingly irrational activity of trying to do two things that he knows are incompatible.
But despite these advances, there is still a lingering concern (one suggested recently by Haji (2022)). According to Kane, since John’s successful choice to steal was not determined, then, even though he could not have then made the other choice, he could then have made no decision at all. But had he just made no decision at all then (as was causally possible), then he would not have done what he was trying to do. (After all, he was not trying to make no decision at all.) Thus, it seems to be a matter of chance that John did do what he was trying to do. And this being so, it is unclear whether he made the choice of his own free will. Thus, the criticism of Kane’s original view of effort in Significance—that it is a matter of chance that the person did what he was trying to do—seems to apply equally to his new view.
Kane’s second new proposal concerns causation. Kane is usually identified as developing an event-causal libertarian view of free will since, on his view (as it is widely understood), it is the events of John’s having reasons and making an effort that non-deterministically cause his choice. (Competitor libertarian views are the agent-causal view, on which the agent as a substance non-deterministically causes her action [so-called “agent-causation”], and the non-causal view, on which a person’s free actions need not, or perhaps cannot, be caused at all.) In this new work, however, Kane denies that his view is an event-causal one. Instead, he argues (6–8; 83–86; 155–156) that it is both event-causal and agent-causal.
As Kane explains, he (now) rejects the view that “libertarian free actions can be adequately explained merely by claiming that they are indeterministically caused in appropriate ways by beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mental states of agents” (83–84). Instead, he argues that the causation of free action “must bring in reference to agents, qua substances, understood as complex dynamical systems, exercising teleological guidance control over some of their processes” (84). Of course, it is one thing to bring in reference to agents as substances, but it is another thing to say that agents, so understood, are one of the causes of free actions. So, how should we understand Kane’s claim that his is both an event-causal and agent-causal view?
Kane contrasts his proposal with one by Randolph Clarke (2003) who argues that a person’s free actions must be caused both by the agent as a substance and by prior events of the agent. Kane, however, criticizes Clarke’s view on the grounds that “while it says that libertarian free choices are ‘co-caused’ by agents and certain mental events, it does not say that agents play a special role of causing or bringing it about that the particular mental events that co-cause the choices or actions play the co-causal roles they do” (188). By contrast, Kane argues that, on his view, it is the “agent who brings it about that the appropriate mental states or events cause the decision” (156). This suggests that the agent, qua substance, causes the mental states to cause the action, rather than the agent himself being one of the two direct causes of the action.
This is an intriguing suggestion, but I am not sure how to interpret it. Perhaps what Kane has in mind—although he does not mention it—is Dretske’s (1988) well-known distinction between structuring and triggering causes. On this interpretation, events are the triggering cause of a free action, while the agent herself is its structuring cause in the sense that she, as an agent, is causally responsible for these events causing this action.[2] Of course, details need to be filled in here. But so understood, Kane’s critique of “pure” event-causal libertarian views (including his own earlier one) is not that they omit agents as a direct co-cause of action, but that they fail to appreciate the complexity of the causal vocabulary needed to fully explain free action. This idea, to my mind, is well worth further exploration.
REFERENCES
Clarke, R. (2003). Libertarian Accounts of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haji, I. (2022). “Libertarianism and Luck.” Journal of Philosophical Theological Research, 24, 115–134.
Kane, R. (1996). The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. (1999). “Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminisim.” Journal of Philosophy, 96, 217–240.
Mele, A. (1998). “Review of Kane, The Significance of Free Will.” Journal of Philosophy, 95, 581–584.
Strawson, P. F. (1962). “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 187–211.
[1] As he wrote in that work, “[I]f moral and prudential choices are not determined in such cases, the agents might choose either way, all past circumstances remaining the same up to the moment of choice” (1996, 127). He now rejects this claim (as he explains on page146 of his new book).
[2] As Dretske explains, where C is a triggering cause of M, the structuring cause of M is what “caused C to cause M rather than something else” (42).
Reviewed by David Palmer, University of Tennessee