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The Introduction gives a brief overview over the structure of the book and its central topic, how to solve the so-called problem of human agency. This problems concerns the question how different commitments which are all essential to our self-understanding as human agents can be reconciled with each other. The introduction lays out both the author's suggested answer to this problem and his criticism of rival approaches, both of which are outlined in the following chapter summaries.

Although Buddhist texts don’t explicitly discuss the problem of free will, they stake out a number of theoretical views that commit them to a certain answer to this problem. Buddhist texts clearly present both the universal causality and predictability in principle forms of determinism, and they reject the agent causation necessary for most forms of libertarianism. They also reject the appropriateness and reasonableness of participant reactive attitudes such as anger and resentment. Although having, or appearing to have, some of these attitudes might sometimes be helpful, feeling them always involves delusion. As a result, we should understand the entire Indian Buddhist tradition as committed to hard determinism. Some have objected that hard determinism denounces attitudes that we are in fact unable to abandon. But through meditation practice, Buddhists hold that we can eliminate anger and resentment, resulting in a better, gentler way to live that is also more theoretically defensible.

This chapter builds upon the account of agent causation developed in the preceding chapter in order to draw an initial sketch of the view of rational human action favoured in the book — a view which falls midway between volitionism and classical agent causalism, while simultaneously endorsing libertarianism with regard to the question of free will and externalism concerning the nature of reasons for action.

In Chapter 9, I draw together my conclusions about free will and responsibility, suggesting that conscious input is efficacious in deciding what to do and carrying it into effect, as well as in deciding what to believe. I distinguish my position from other views generally favourable to free will, including views that free will is compatible with determinism, and views that suggest it is a special kind of causation, called agent-causation, that gives us free will; and I show how my position answers the ‘luck swallows everything’ argument against responsibility.

This chapter starts by analysing the concept of desert along lines suggested by Joel Feinberg. It then argues that this concept is applicable to us only if we have ultimate responsibility, i.e., responsibility for all conditions in virtue of which we have direct responsibility, but that we are not ultimately responsible for anything. It rebuts the attempt by Robert Nozick to block this regress argument against desert by an appeal to rights to our own bodily and psychological resources, as they are conceived in the rights-tradition of John Locke. It also contends that it would be of no avail to assume indeterminism: attributions of desert are undermined irrespective of whether determinism or indeterminism is true. Finally, it rejects the idea that we can have ultimate responsibility because we exercise a special sort of causation, agent-causation, which is irreducible to ordinary causation between events.

This chapter critically examines recent work on free will and moral responsibility by Randolph Clarke, Robert Kane, and Timothy O’Connor, in an attempt to clarify issues about control and luck that are central to the debate between libertarians (agent causationists and others) and their critics. It is argued that present luck, that is, luck at the time of action, poses an as yet unresolved problem for libertarianism.

This chapter considers animal agency. Using the work of developmental psychologists, it is argued that agency is a highly robust and distinctive concept that ought to be accorded a central role in our basic categorization of entities—a role which has not generally been properly recognized for what it is. The concept of agency is an outgrowth, it is suggested, of the concept of animacy—and it is argued that the concept applies unproblematically to many animals. The absence of the concept of an agent from most accounts of folk psychology is discussed and criticized, and Nichols’ work on the idea that the concept of agent causation might be part of our basic cognitive endowment is considered. The difficult question of how it is to be decided which animals are to be accounted agents, and why, is tackled, making use of some aspects of Dennett’s work on the intentional stance

In this chapter, it is explained in what sense the book’s view of agency is, and in what sense it is not, a version of agent causationism. The chapter responds to certain criticisms of agent causationism and it is argued against some critics of agent causationism (e.g. Clarke) that there need be nothing problematic or incoherent about the very idea of substance causation. It is conceded, however, that there is a very difficult issue to be faced about how the causation of effects by a complex, highly organized agent such as an animal could fail to reduce to causation of effects by the parts of that same animal. The second part of the chapter contains a discussion of the phenomenon of top-down causation, in which it is suggested that the key to the solution of this problem may lie with the idea of coincidence.

The concept of agent causation is introduced and queried through an examination of the account given by the eighteenth‐century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, and the more recent accounts of Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. With Reid, the author emphasizes that an exertion of active power is not prior to or logically independent of the intention that is the agent's immediate effect. Against Taylor, he argues that an exertion of active power cannot itself be causally produced. Finally, contra Chisholm, once we recognize that an agent's exertion of active power is intrinsically a direct exercise of control, there is no need to further explain how the agent controls this event itself.

This chapter develops the basic metaphysics of agent causation. The author analyzes causal notions generally in terms of the notion of ’causal power’ or ’causal capacity.’ The difference between event (or broadly mechanistic) causation and agent (or personal) causation concerns the way in which causal capacities are exercised. With event causation, the capacity to generate a particular effect (in some cases, from a range of possible effects) is exercised ’as a matter of course’: having the capacity in the right circumstances directly gives rise to what is either its unique characteristic effect or one of the effects within its characteristic range. By contrast, having the properties that subserve an agent‐causal capacity doesn’t produce an effect; rather, it enables the agent to freely determine an effect (within a circumscribed range).