Luck and Libertarianism

In Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 41-83 (2011)
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Abstract

This chapter turns to an assessment of event-causal and agent-causal accounts of libertarian free will, in the light of the account of luck developed in Chapter 2. It shows that the standard luck object — according to which the actions of libertarian agents are too lucky to count as genuinely free — is powerful against event-causal libertarianism as represented by Robert Kane's theory. It then turns to agent-causal libertarianism. Proponents of this kind of libertarianism hold that the exercise of the agent-causal power is intrinsically an exercise of control; the chapter argues that the power cannot be exercised for reasons, and that because this is true, the control claim fails. Finally, ways of amending libertarian accounts of free will to protect it against luck are suggested.

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Neil Levy
Macquarie University

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