Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck
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Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck Robert J. Hartman1 Received: 2 March 2018 / Accepted: 19 November 2018 © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck. Libertarianism is the view that free will is incompatible with causal determinism and that human beings at least sometimes act freely.1 A prominent family of libertarian views that Randolph Clarke (2000, p. 23) identifies as “action-centered” are distinguished by the claim that an agent acts freely only if she has alternative possibilities open to her at the moment of choice. Daniel Dennett (1984) has famously offered alleged counterexamples to actioncentered libertarianism. For example, Martin Luther refuses to recant his theological views by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther spoke truly, he lacked alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, but, intuitively, he 1
See Mickelson (forthcoming) for an explication of various complexities in this standard definition.
* Robert J. Hartman [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
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is morally responsible for his action.2 Thus, there are cases with respect to which action-centered libertarians appear to be committed to three jointly inconsistent claims: (i) Luther is morally responsible for the action, (ii) Luther’s being morally responsible for the action requires that it is a free action, and (iii) Luther does not act freely because he could not have done otherwise at the moment of choice. Action-centered libertarians (hereafter, libertarians) can respond in two basic ways. On the one hand, they can deny (i). That is, they can deny the intuition that Luther acts freely and morally responsibly.3 On the other hand, they can deny (ii) or (iii). In other words, they can accommodate the intuition that Luther is at least mo
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