Free Will as Etiological Self-Sufficiency

To argue for the pessimism that free will is impossible in a deterministic world, a powerful way has been to invoke a case in which a behavior has a cause that is intuitively excusing and the cause is deterministic, beyond the agent’s control, and opaque to the agent. The pessimist then argues: '(i) The agent in such a case is not fully responsible for the behavior. And (ii) if our world is deterministic, every behavior in it must also have a cause with the above characteristics. Therefore, we could not be fully responsible for our behavior in a deterministic world.' I do not dispute premises (i) and (ii) but contend that the conclusion does not follow. For if the behavior is right, the agent can be free in it and fully responsible for it even if it has a causal lineage of the said kind. In fact, if the behavior is wrong, the agent cannot be fully free in it whether or not it has such a lineage. This asymmetry follows from my conception of free action, which is in terms of a feature present in every intentional action: when someone is acting in a certain way intentionally, they thereby understand why they are so acting not as a fact they discover. Furthermore, if what they so understand is in a specific sense sufficient to explain why they are acting in the given way rather than not in that way, then they bear free will in the behavior. What the above etiological sufficiency takes is for the behavior to be an unimpeded manifestation of the agent’s power of reason and for this power to be fully developed for considerations relevant to the practical situation. One feature that distinguishes this view from those of other free will optimists is the upshot that fully free action occurs much less commonly than it is allowed by those views. It also follows from the present view that, since an action is unfree in every way it is wrong, blame and resentment cannot be justified in a way in which recognition and gratitude can be