Agency,Agent-causation And Libertarianism

This paper aims to outline general characteristics of the problem of free will in contemporary analytic philosophy,discuss compatibilist and libertarian accounts of free will and eventually defend a specific libertarian account of Free Will,that is,an agent-causal account.To accomplish the goals outlined above,this paper is divided into three parts in general.The first part consists of first two chapters which are mainly attempts of setting out the basic conceptual structure and contain several preliminary discussions.Chapter 1defines,illuminates or clarifies on three important concepts: determinism,free will and moral responsibility.Chapter 2 mainly discusses the famous Consequence Argument and concludes that the argument fails to establish an incompatibilist conclusion as expected.The main argumentive purpose of the second part is to undermine compatibilism and reach the conclusion that compatibilism is inconvincible.This part includes Chapter 3and Chapter 4.Chapter 3 mainly discusses several relevant issues concerning an allegedly supporting argument of compatibilism,i.e.,the Frankfurt-style cases.The final conclusion is that although Frankfurt-style cases are conceptually possible,we cannot directly draw a compatibilist conclusion from them.Furthermore,a libertarian account,if understood properly,is compatible with the main lesson of Frankfurt-style cases.Chapter 4 mainly discusses a type of arguments against compatibilism,i.e.,the manipulation argument.By considering two different compatibilist approaches of accounting for this challenge,this paper concludes that it is extremely difficult for compatibilist accounts of free will to solve the problem brought forward by manipulation arguments.The third part of this paper consists of several discussions concerning contemporary libertarianism and a conclusive summary of this paper based on the discussed in previous chapters.Chapter 5 discusses three libertarian theories in the leading position,and attempts to show that event-causal and non-causal theories fail to account for the fact that a free action is an effect of the agent’s exertion of her power;and agent-causal theories has confronted with the problem of reason-explanations of free actions.However,by offering a new perspective on the problem of luck which is a general problem confronting libertarian accounts of free will,this paper concludes that Timothy O’Connor’s account has relative advantages over other libertarian accounts.In Chapter 6,based on discussions,arguments and main conclusions from previous chapters,this paper attempts to portrait a naturalistic world view within the framework of agent-causal theory,and addresses the issue of our free agency.