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There is no single version of physicalism. There is no single argument for physicalism. There is, accordingly, no standard answer concerning the implications of physicalism for the causation of human action by mental states. This chapter begins by describing a preferred version of physicalism and its implications about the connection between subjects' mental states and what they do, and thereby for the determination and predictability of our actions. This serves as a precursor for a short discussion of the implications of physicalism for the possibility of free action. The chapter also discusses an anomalous physicalism that holds it is a mistake in principle to identify the mental and the physical, in the sense of identifying mental and physical kinds. At first blush, this kind of physicalism might seem good news for those who worry about the implications of physicalism for freedom. However, it is shown that the good news is not that good.

This chapter constructs a libertarian view that grants the main moral of Frankfurt-style cases, and offers a resolution of the problem of present luck. Attention to how human beings may develop from neonates who do not even act intentionally into free, morally responsible human agents proves instructive in developing the resolution.

This chapter clarifies principles of alternative possibilities both for moral responsibility and for free action, locates the most important challenge that Frankfurt-style cases pose for libertarianism, and begins to develop an answer to that challenge.

This chapter defends a history-sensitive compatibilist view of free action and moral responsibility against various criticisms by compatibilists (including Daniel Dennett). It constructs a new argument for incompatibilism that makes vivid a problem that luck poses for compatibilism: the zygote argument. It is argued that the zygote argument is much more powerful than more familiar arguments for incompatibilism, and that, even so, compatibilism may survive the attack.

Rival conceptions of free agency can be understood as competing interpretations of the notions of self-determination and alternative possibilities, and the characteristic shape of the dialectic between compatibilists and incompatibilists can be understood in these terms. Compatibilism holds that self-determining action is action proceeding from an unencumbered will, and likewise freedom to do otherwise is dependency on the agent's will. Incompatibilists object that freedom requires not just dependency on the will but self-determination of the will. It is not clear, however, that any sense can be made of this requirement. This chapter spells out this dialectic by means of a distinction between explanatory and modal incompatibilism, concluding that if there is a coherent account of free agency, then it is compatible with a deterministic or mechanistic metaphysics. The options are compatibilism or scepticism.

Explanation is of two kinds—personal (in terms of persons, their intentions, capacities, and beliefs) and scientific (in terms of laws of nature and initial conditions). In explaining things in terms of God's action, theology uses personal explanation. God is the creator of the universe in the sense that he brings about (or permits some other being to bring about) the existence of all things apart from himself; it is irrelevant to this doctrine whether or not the universe had a beginning. God acts directly in that no outside causal factors cause or can influence how he acts; considerations of reason alone influence him; and hence he will always do what he believes that there is overriding reason to do, and never do what he believes that there is overriding reason not to do.

This chapter reflects on the many properties that David Hume assigns to moral agents and examines the interrelations of those properties. The goal is to summarize the central elements in the closely argued, and intricately articulated, moral psychology presented by Hume. A typical moral agent is, more primitively, a non-moral one. Her specifically moral desires (and so also her specifically moral affections) aside, she is an individual with non-moral desires and affections, and with a host of other physical, psychological, and social features. For Hume, what makes an individual an agent, whether non-moral or moral, makes her a free agent as well. This can be seen from a consideration of his views about freedom to act and about free action. In the Treatise of Human Nature, he distinguishes two notions of liberty or freedom, allowing the legitimacy of the first. Hume's moral agents are free agents fully subject to nature's causal laws; they are also rational agents.

This chapter defends a distinction between valuing and desiring that is important to an adequate account of free action and the nature of human agency. To account for intentional but unfree action, we must make sense of the possibility of someone's being motivated to do what she does not most want to do. This requires a contrast between two sources of motivation: evaluative judgments and mere desires. This account differs from Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical theory, since, it is argued, valuing is not a species of desiring.

This chapter lays out the doctrinal intricacies of the test. These mostly concern the crucial idea of an intervening cause. An intervening cause is described as any event (and not a state or an omission) that is causally significant in the production of some harm, that temporally intervenes between defendant's act and that harm, that is causally independent of the defendant's act, and that is either a free, informed, deliberate human action or that abnormal conjunction of natural events we call a coincidence.

The alternative hypothesis, that God is in time, is explored. Does it fare any better over problems of indexicality and divine foreknowledge? Is such a God's lack of foreknowledge of free actions simply an act of self-denial on his part? Swinburne's claims, in which a central place is given to human indeterministic freedom, are discussed. Maintaining such freedom strongly motivates the idea of God's being in time. A.N. Prior and Peter Geach argue that the future is logically indeterminate, and so now unknowable even to God. But it is hard to see how Geach, consistent with his views about the future, can nevertheless argue that God has complete control of the future, and so can be faithful to his promises.

This chapter considers two sorts of scepticism about the possibility of knowingly acting against one's practical judgment, or weakness of will. The Socratic view that weak behaviour is impossible overlooks the truth that human beings are subject to different sources of motivation: evaluative judgments and mere desires. A second kind of scepticism targets the common view that the difference between weakness and compulsion is that weak agents give into desires which they could resist. The chapter proposes a different understanding of the phenomena, according to which weakness exhibits a culpable failure of self-control. Culpability here does not presume that the agent was at the time able to resist, but only that she is open to criticism for her lack of self-control. This account allows for a distinction between weak and compulsive behaviour that is consistent both with scepticism about resistibility, and with important judgments of responsibility.

This chapter considers groups acting on trees. It examines which groups act on which spaces and, if a group does act on a space, what it says about the group. These spaces are called trees—that is, connected graphs without cycles. A group action on a tree is free if no nontrivial element of the group preserves any vertex or any edge of the tree. The chapter first presents the theorem stating that: If a group G acts freely on a tree, then G is a free group. The condition that G is free is equivalent to the condition that G acts freely on a tree. The discussion then turns to the Farey tree and shows how to construct the Farey complex using the Farey graph. The chapter concludes by describing free and non-free actions on trees. Exercises and research projects are included.