Freedom & Self-Knowledge

Freedom of the will is a never-ending source of puzzlement for academic philosophers. At the same time, it is something deeply familiar to everyone. For the relevant concept of freedom underlies much, if not all, of our ordinary discourse and thinking about ourselves and others. However, our attempt to make sense of the world, through science and philosophy, can itself cast doubt on the validity of this conception of freedom. Are we not ourselves part of the world whose workings we study? And are we not, then, subject to the same laws of nature that we have discovered to govern that world? If so, should we not admit that our actions are simply physical events, mere links in a long chain of cause and effect? So, should we not conclude that the special perspective we take on our own actions and those of others is perfectly illusory? For a long time, this worry was phrased almost solely in terms of the problem of universal determinism. But in more recent times, many philosophers have recognized that the question whether we can somehow reconcile the familiar conception of agency with determinism may be a red herring. Free will, they argue, may be illusory even if our actions are undetermined. For if indeterminism is the absence of determination, what is it but pure randomness of the kind that does indeed exist at the subatomic level? If that is true, the ideaea that there is a special class of happenings which find their origin in human choice seems to be at least as problematic as it would be under determinism: what we regard as our choices would be nothing but random events, over which we have as little control as over the outcome of a die roll. What we end up doing would be merely accidental, and precisely not up to ourselves.
My aim in this thesis will be to show how to overcome this dichotomy between accidentality and causal necessitation. A sound account of agency, I will argue, has to take seriously the idea that in practical deliberation, we are genuinely self-determining. I will show that progress towards such an account has been hampered by the prevalence of a reductive understanding of intentional action, according to which the explanation of an action in terms of an agent's reasons is just a species of the `ordinary' form of quasi-mechanical causation we associate with the laws of nature. On that assumption, non-accidentality can consist only in something's being caused by prior states and events. Instead, I defend a less dogmatic view, on which we can distinguish a number of formally distinct kinds of causal principles, or forms of non-accidentality. One of those is the kind of responsiveness to reasons, or spontaneity, that is exhibited by intentional action. In exercising such spontaneity, I will argue, we are truly self-determining and free.