Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780195306422)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate.

Author: Randolph Clarke
ISBN-10: 0195306422
ISBN-13: 9780195306422
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 02/23/2006
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d