Libertarian defense of free will

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Signed (student author) Signed (faculty advisor) Date accepted [...]... freely It misses entirely, however, the peculiar content of what is implicit in the idea of an agent whose w l is free, " (1971), p 331 In actuality, Frankfivt claims, freedom of action and will are so sharply il distinguishable that it is possible for a person deprived of the freedom to do what they want to do, for a paralyzed person, for instance, to enjoy freedom of the will represent the kind of. .. network of desires and psychological elements constitutes her self, while her deeper desires, because they 14 Frankfurt emphasizes psychological as opposed to mere physical freedom because physical barriers constrain one's freedom of action, not one's freedom of will The notion that a person's freedom is "a matter of doing what one wants to do does capture at least part of what is implicit in the idea of. .. with Wolf that the three processes necessary for free action are recognition of desire-independent reasons, acting out of such reasons, and self-conceiving according to See Frankfurt, Harry "Freedom of the Will and the Colncept of a Person" (1971); Wolf, Susan (1990), "Sanity and the Metaphysics of "Asymmetrical Freedom7'(1980), Freedom within R e a s ~ g Responsibility" (1987) such reasons Unlike Wolf,... the nature of event-causality, its source can in fact be traced back to the necessitating effects 15 I do not address the distinction Frankfurt draws bletween free willing and free acting here as it is not relevant to the argument at hand l6 Frankfurt (1971), p 333 17 "It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will, " Frankfurt... product of its given structure, the notion of normativity, of what sort of response would be appropriate for all members of entity type x, collapses Given one particular member of that set at a particular moment in time, there is not a range of reasons that could inform a set of possible decisions because the only "reason" or cause that is available to inform the "decision" or effect that will come... ideally free agent on this view is one who is caused by normative reasons to behave in rational ways Because this view claims that freedom would be preserved neither by strong PAP nor by the chance for acts to arise from the individual psychology of the agent, I will refer to it as mechanistic The second view of the role of agent control and the one taken by supporters of weak PAP is that a free action... the neo-Humean notion of self incompatible with free will The insistence on the operation of desires as event-causal and the rejection of strong PAP makes matters worse When Frankfurt posits an agent who, according to her deep desires, approves of a particular action, he neglects to address the sense in which her feelling of approval is itself necessitated Every step in the process of self-modification... agent as the actual cause of the ensuing action The deliberative process will be one of identifying and weighing various reasons for one action or another; it will consist of a process we might call practical reasoning Richard Double, for example, argues that [The most rational part] of our decision making is the deterministic part, e.g., our consideration of the pros and cons of various options, strategies,... the principle of the authorship of the action by the agent's deep self In order to make this picture of thle wholly free agent clear, though, we must establish what Frankfurt considers the agent, as the source of action, to be, along with what he means by a hierarchy of desires We must also understand by what process and on what basis he believes agents can undergo this sort of affirmation of desires... arbitrariness, I must emphasize, relate to Frankfwt's rejection of strong PAP Because Frankfurt is intent on freeing the agent's will from surface-level psychological constraints such that her acts have their source in the volitions of her deep self, he must address the formation of the agent's deep self, the source of its content If he fails to do so, he will not have shown why there is a difference in significance . <2;;t&L A LIBERTARIAN DEFENSE OF FREE WILL by D. CAROLINE ANDERSON Professor Melissa Barry, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor. Free Will (2001). 3 Randolph Clarke's "Toward a Credible Agent-Causal ,4ccount of Free Will& quot; (1993) is an example of the former. Robert Kane's The Sidficance of Free Will. that I examine the current framing of the free- will debate and attempt to show why this framing ought to be abandoned. Traditionally, the question of free will is framed causally: First, it