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This chapter examines what is arguably the most influential rebutting objection in the current literature, an objection that appeals to Benjamin Libet's studies concerning the neural basis of agency. Although Libet himself stopped short of endorsing free will scepticism on the basis of his results, other theorists have not been so cautious, and his work is often said to show that we lack free will. It is argued that Libet's findings show no such thing. However, Libet's experiments do raise a number of interesting and important questions for accounts of free will. In particular, Libet's experiments raise challenging questions about the analysis of the concept of free will. In order to determine whether brain science supports free will scepticism we need not only to understand the relevant brain science, we also need to understand just what the common-sense or folk notion of free will commits us to. The latter requirement may be as difficult to meet as the former one is.

This chapter is a commentary on the others, concentrating on themes that link many of them. It provides conceptual background on free will, distinguishes among distinct philosophical positions on the topic (including compatibilist and incompatibilist positions), discusses determinism and laws of nature, connects free will to consciousness, critically examines Benjamin Libet's work on free will and consciousness, and considers the light that Daniel Wegner's contribution to the volume sheds on the “the illusion of conscious will” and free will.

This chapter analyzes how Libet's experiments bear on criminal and moral responsibility. More specifically, it addresses the question of whether Libet has demonstrated that the consciously willed bodily movement, the centerpiece of our notions of criminal and moral responsibility, is an illusion. It suggests that the gatekeeper role for conscious will, which Libet allows, does not require any revision of traditional notions of moral and criminal responsibility.

This chapter examines the neuroscientific challenges stemming from the kind of experiments begun in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet and his associates. It argues that Libet's work is philosophically challenged rather than challenging. According to Libet's own characterizations of his challenges to the folk psychology: “If the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it.” Three things run together in the phrase, “conscious free will”: firstly, maybe a conscious will is initiating action, but it isn't a free will doing the work; secondly, maybe there is consciousness and freedom at the time of action initiation, but there is no will doing any action initiation; and thirdly, maybe there is a free will operating to initiate actions, but there is no consciousness of that will or its operations at the time it is initiating actions. The chapter shows that Libet elided these three distinct challenges together.

This chapter reviews Libet's main claims, and the implications he drew from them about free will and responsibility. It considers first whether, on the supposition that the claims are correct, the empirical interpretations that Libet and many since have gleaned from his data really are warranted. It then addresses whether his empirical claims really have the implications he thinks they have for free will. It is argued that neither Libet's data nor the reasoning that follows strongly support the fairly radical claims about free will that many have supposed.

Benjamin Libet contends both that “the brain ‘decides’ to initiate or, at least, prepare to initiate [certain actions] before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place” and that “if the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it.” He also contends that once we become conscious of our proximal decisions, we can exercise free will in vetoing them. This chapter provides some conceptual and empirical background and then discusses three major problems regarding Libet's findings.

The real question that Libet's experiments raise is whether our conscious wills cause the willed actions. What is at issue is the effects rather than the causes of conscious will. The question is whether conscious will is impotent, not whether it is free. If conscious will is impotent, then we cannot control our actions by means of conscious will, and this disability might reduce our freedom of action. Libet's experiments raises or sharpens this new question. By raising a new issue in a new way, Libet's work made (and continues to make) many people rethink their assumptions. The assumptions at stake are both normative and descriptive. The relevant normative assumption is, roughly, that causation by conscious will is necessary for responsibility. The descriptive assumption that Libet questions is, again roughly, that conscious will causes the willed action. This chapter addresses these assumptions in turn. It concludes that Libet's experiments do not undermine responsibility in general, but they do illuminate some particular cases as well as common standards of responsibility.

Benjamin Libet claims to have discovered that conscious intentions to “act now” are never among the causes of corresponding intentional actions and that all free will can do is to veto conscious intentions to act. This chapter's thesis is that this claim is false.

This chapter explains the meaning and explores the historical sources of the voluntary act requirement in law. It argues that in many ways, even incorporating Libet's discoveries, there is no reason to think that defendants generally fail to match the picture we find in the law. It suggests how further empirical work can help us to develop clarity on the question.

This chapter argues that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s data do not justify his assertion that “the brain ‘decides’ to initiate [certain actions] before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place,” and do not justify associated worries about free will. The data are examined in light of some recent findings about reaction times, and some familiar distinctions in the philosophy of action, for example, the distinction between decisions and desires (or urges).

This chapter defends two theses: first, Benjamin Libet's data do not justify his assertion that “the brain ‘decides’ to initiate [certain actions] before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place”; second, an alternative interpretation of his findings is better supported by the data. Libet's data are examined in light of findings about reaction times and some familiar distinctions: for example, the distinction between potential causes of intentions and intentions themselves.

This chapter presents a classic essay in which Benjamin Libet lays out his basic experimental results and draws philosophical lessons regarding free will and responsibility. He argues that the existence of free will is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and nondeterminist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does). Such a view would at least allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws. Such a permissive option has also been advocated by the neurobiologist Roger Sperry.

This chapter focuses on the phenomenal character of agentive experience—i.e., what it is like to experience oneself as the conscious author of one's behavior. Experiences with this distinctive kind of “what-it's-like-ness,” have representational content—i.e., they represent oneself, to oneself, as willfully generating one's actions. This chapter argues that the representational content of act-commencement experience, as determined by the phenomenal character of such experience, is quite compatible with the possibility that action-triggering neural activity in the motor cortex is already occurring at a point in time prior to the onset of the experience of conscious act-commencement; hence, even if one were to grant that the work of Libet and others really does establish that the acts experienced as willfully produced are causally initiated by brain-events that occur prior to the experienced onset of act-commencement, this presumptive fact would not show that the experience of conscious will is an illusion.

Whereas the traditional free will debate focused on the free part of “free will”—with an emphasis on alternative possibilities and the ability to do otherwise—many of the new threats from psychology pose potential problems for the will part as well. This chapter attempts to shed some light on the nature of these potential psychological threats. It first sets the stage by explaining and clarifying some key terms and exploring some of the key issues from the free will debate. It then examines several potential threats to free will collectively referred to as the Threat of Shrinking Agency. In piecing this general threat together, it discusses the work of several prominent psychologists including Jonathan Bargh, Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and others. The goal is not to argue that these threats actually do undermine free will and responsibility, but simply to trace the boundaries of the potential threats examined and show that they are not dependent on other potential threats such as determinism, mechanism, reductionism, and the like.

Libet's data show that EEG readiness potentials begin before the urge to move is consciously felt. This result has been widely interpreted as showing that spontaneous voluntary movements are initiated preconsciously. This chapter reports two new findings relevant to this conclusion. First, the question of whether readiness potentials (RPs) are precursors of movement per se or merely indicators of general readiness has always been moot. On the basis of both new experimental evidence and an inspection of the literature, it is argued that Libet's type II RPs 1 are neither necessary nor sufficient for spontaneous voluntary movement. Secondly, it argues that RPs often do not occur at all before movements initiated as a result of decisions, as opposed to spontaneous urges. When RPs do occur before decision-based movements, they are much shorter than urge-related RPs, and usually start at the same time as or slightly after the reported decision times. Thus, even if this third, shorter type of RP could be considered to relate specifically to movement rather than to general readiness, movements resulting from conscious decisions (as opposed to spontaneous urges) are unlikely to be initiated preconsciously.

This chapter examines the concepts that inform the recent experimental studies of intentional action. Drawing on a distinction between unconscious urge and conscious decision, it argues that the neural activity reported by Benjamin Libet may represent an urge to move rather than a decision to do so, and that the decision to move might be made only when the subject becomes conscious of the urge. In this case, Libet’s experiments do not threaten free will. The chapter describes two competing theories about the nature of free will and suggests that Libet’s results do not support his contention that “the brain decides to initiate or, at least, to prepare to initiate the act before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place”.

This chapter describes an experiment designed to time the thought (T) of movement without relying on introspective data or retrospective reconstruction. It shows that T occurred later than observable brain events linked to action. The results also suggest that there is not enough time to veto action after willing becomes conscious, contrary to Libet's way of saving free will.