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In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a
novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a
combination of libertarianism-the view that humans sometimes act
freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of
nondeterministic processes-and agency reductionism-the view that
the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted
by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and
beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a
dominant theory that has similar aims, put forth by well-known
philosopher Robert Kane. Many philosophers contend that
event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists
when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom
and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken.
Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians
need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add
indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human
action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model
of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and
the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains:
toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of
agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto
unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with
indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or
compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self
and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem
proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism
untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism.
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