Abstract

This chapter lays out a view of freedom according to which the following two claims are true: first, acting freely is, at least partly, a matter of being sensitive to reasons; second, acting freely is exclusively a function of having a certain kind of actual causal history. It is notoriously difficult to reconcile claims of this type. For being sensitive to reasons appears to be a modal property of agents, one that agents possess by virtue of their capacity to react to reasons in _other_ possible worlds, and this seems to clash with the idea that acting freely is just a function of _actual_ causal histories. The chapter argues that the reconciliation can be achieved by focusing on the absences of certain reasons, and the role that those absences play in the actual causal history of the agent’s behavior.