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Grounding the Luck Objection

Neal A. Tognazzini neal.tognazzini@wwu.edu

Penultimate version

Final version in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy http://philpapers.org/rec/TOGGTL

Many object to libertarianism by arguing that it manages to solve one problem of luck (the threat of determinism) only by falling prey to another (the threat from indeterminism). According to this objection, there is something freedom-undermining about the very circumstances that the libertarian thinks are required for freedom. However, it has proved difficult to articulate precisely what about these circumstances is supposed to undermine freedom—the absence of certain sorts of explanations has perhaps been the most common complaint. In this paper, however, I argue that recent work on the metaphysics of ontological dependence provides the resources for formulating the luck objection in its strongest form. Keywords: free will, indeterminism, luck, grounding

1. Introduction

In their attempt to solve a problem, libertarians acquire a problem. Both are problems

that threaten the reality of moral responsibility and, since it seems that one or the other is

foisted on us whether we like it or not, together they threaten to show that moral

responsibility is impossible. The problem that libertarians attempt to solve, of course, is

the problem posed by determinism, the thesis that the past and the laws of nature

determine a unique future. To solve it, libertarians say that determinism is false: some of

our actions — in particular, those that are free — are not determined by the past and the

laws. But if our actions aren’t determined by those things — that is, if indeterminism is

true — then they must not be determined by our own beliefs, desires, and intentions,

either, all of which are past relative to what results from them. And if even our own

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mental states don’t settle what we will do, then it starts to look like which action we end

up performing is just a matter of luck, and hence not something we do freely.

Although indeterminism is widely thought to pose a problem for libertarians,

there is very little agreement on how best to articulate that problem.1 In this paper I offer

a novel formulation of the worry that avoids problems of alternative formulations while at

the same time clarifying exactly where the libertarian needs to look for an adequate

response.

2. Searching for a Formulation

First, some terminology. For the purposes of this paper, let’s adopt a broad

understanding of the notion of entailment, so that it applies not only to statements, but

also to events or states of affairs. In this broadened sense, some event (or state of affairs)

entails another just in case it’s not metaphysically possible for the first event to occur (or

state of affairs to obtain) without the second occurring (or obtaining). And let’s say that a

relation R between events (or states of affairs) x and y is an entailment relation just in case

if xRy, then x entails y.

Now to the worry allegedly posed by indeterminism. At one point the problem

was thought to be that libertarians were committed to saying that free actions must be

uncaused.2 The thought here was that the causal relation by its very nature is an

entailment relation, so that if x causes y, then it’s not possible for x to occur without y 1 See Franklin 2011 for a compelling articulation and evaluation of various versions of the problem. What I

say in section 2 below bears some (unintentional) similarity to Franklin’s discussion.

2 See, for example, the argument against event-causal libertarianism in Chisholm 1964.

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also occurring. Since it is a consequence of determinism that past states of the world

entail future states of the world (at least if we hold fixed the laws of nature), and since the

libertarian thinks that free actions cannot be determined by previous states of the world,

the libertarian therefore thinks that free actions cannot be entailed by any previous event

or state of affairs. Hence, if we take the causal relation to be an entailment relation, the

libertarian would be committed to the view that free actions must be uncaused. But it’s

hard to see how any uncaused event could be up to anyone. Intuitively, although an

uncaused event could benefit or harm me after it occurs, whether it occurs certainly can’t

be up to me.3 So, according to this version of the problem, libertarians are committed to a

contradiction: free actions are events that couldn’t possibly be up to me.

But one thing that quantum mechanics and G. E. M. Anscombe [1971] have

taught us is that we have good reason to reject the view that the causal relation is an

entailment relation because we have good reason to reject the view that all causation is

deterministic.4 All libertarians need be committed to, therefore, is the view that free

actions must not be deterministically caused by previous states of the world, which leaves

open the possibility that they be caused non-deterministically.

Even if causation doesn’t require that the cause entail the effect, however, perhaps

explanation requires that the explanans entail the explanandum. Any plausible theory of

freedom, it seems, should have a way of saying that our free actions can be explained by

the reasons for which we perform those actions. In other words, sentences like ‘I went to

3 But see Ginet 1990 for a defence of a noncausal theory of free will.

4 For discussion, see Clarke 2003, especially chapter 3.

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the store because I noticed we were out of milk’ and ‘I raised my hand because I wanted

to ask a question’ had better be capable of expressing truths if going to the store and

raising one’s hand are going to count as free actions in at least some circumstances. But

now if previous states of the world (including facts about so-called reasons for action) fail

to entail actions, as is required by libertarianism, then it starts to look like reasons (e.g.

the desire to ask a question) can’t explain actions – at least if we accept the principle that

an explanans must entail its explanandum.

And this principle has at least something to be said in its favour: after all, if there is

a world with the proposed explanans but without the proposed explanandum, then it

looks like the alleged explanans isn’t really what made the difference, after all. It wasn’t

just my desire to ask a question that explains the fact that I raised my hand (after all,

yesterday I wanted to ask a question, too, but kept my hand down). At best, perhaps it

was that desire plus my belief that the time was appropriate for questions to be asked. Or,

more likely, what explains my raising my hand was that desire, together with that belief,

together with a number of other facts about my particular situation, many of which are

unknown to me but all of which jointly entailed my action. Without such entailment, it

looks like we couldn’t give a fully adequate answer to the question, ‘Why did I raise my

hand?’, and thus, since free action requires such an answer, my action wasn’t free. So,

perhaps the worry for the libertarian is that he can’t have both indeterminism and a fully

adequate explanation of the free action, despite his needing both.

But I’m inclined to think that we ought not to require so much from a suitable

explanans. For one thing, such a requirement would imply that the only causes that can

explain their effects are causes that determine their effects, and this seems implausible.

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When a baseball flies through a glass window, we can explain why the window broke by

pointing to the flight of the baseball even if there was some objective chance that, just

before impact, all of the atoms that compose the baseball would quantum tunnel to the

other side of the window without breaking it. For another thing, whether something

counts as a good explanation is highly context-dependent. Although the actual context

made a joke out of Willie Sutton’s apocryphal answer to ‘Why do you rob banks?’

(‘Because that’s where the money is’), we can imagine contexts in which his answer would

be a perfectly good explanation. (Indeed, what makes the joke possible is the implicit

context that Sutton intentionally ignores.) The context-dependence of explanation,

together with the indisputable claim that not every context demands an entailing

explanans, should lead us to reject the principle under consideration.

Of course, there are presumably contexts that do seem to require an entailing

explanans, and perhaps a charitable interpretation of the critic of libertarianism would

have him claiming that whenever the explanandum is an allegedly free human action, an

adequate explanans must entail the occurrence of that action. How might such a critic

argue for this more restricted claim? He might start by pointing out that free actions are,

paradigmatically, choices between two or more options, and so what we are generally

interested in is not simply an explanation of the choice that was actually made, but also

an explanation of why that choice, rather than one of the other possible choices, was made. (In

the language of the contemporary literature, this is a request for a contrastive explanation

of the allegedly free choice.) And, he might continue, anything that could possibly count

as an explanation of this ‘rather than’ fact will have to point to something that made the

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difference about which choice was made.5 Since it is part of the libertarian view that more

than one choice is compatible with the very same history and laws of nature, it looks like

there will be no such difference-maker. Thus it seems that the libertarian is unable to

provide an explanation of why a free agent chose one thing rather than another, and thus,

according to this view of the sort of explanation needed for free action, the libertarian is

unable to provide an explanation of the agent’s actual choice. Choices that fail to be

determined by the past are, therefore, unfree, and libertarianism is false.

Although this seems to be one of the more popular ways of articulating the worry,

I think there are at least three problems with it.6 First, there is reason to be suspicious of

the claim that contrastive explanations are available only for events that are determined.

Christopher Hitchcock [1999], for example, has developed a compelling account of

contrastive explanation that doesn’t have this consequence. Also, Alexander Pruss [2006:

ch. 7] has recently argued that all one needs for an adequate explanation of why p rather

than q is an explanation of p ∧ ∼q, which is rather easily had even if p fails to be

determined.7 Second, even if it should turn out that Hitchcock is wrong and that the best

account of contrastive explanation is one that precludes the possibility of contrastive

explanations for undetermined events, it’s not clear that the libertarian ought to be

5 The critic might cite David Lewis here: ‘A contrastive why-question with ‘rather’ requests information

about the features that differentiate the actual causal history from its counterfactual alternative’ [1986: 231].

Lewis goes on to say of events that fail to be determined that they do not admit of contrastive explanations.

6 For a recent version of the objection stated in terms of contrastive explanation, see Levy 2011.

7 One of Pruss’s arguments is that p ∧ ∼q expresses the same proposition as ‘p rather than q’, although the

latter conveys more via conversational implicature or some similar mechanism.

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bothered by this fact. On the contrary, libertarians could just happily accept the

consequence that there is nothing that ‘made the difference’ about which choice was

made. They are already committed to thinking that free choices must fail to be

determined, and what could be meant by difference-making here if not determining? And

finally, given the essentially pragmatic and contextual nature of explanation, it’s hard to

see why facts about which explanations can and can’t be had should be relevant to facts

about freedom. Whether free action is possible is presumably a metaphysical question,

and it’s at least not clear why its answer should be thought to hinge on pragmatic and

psychological considerations such as which explanations we find satisfying.8

There are other versions of the luck objection we could consider [van Inwagen

2000; Mele 2006], but in my view they suffer a similar fate to those already considered.9

So, although there does seem to be something in this neighbourhood that ought to worry

the libertarian, it has proven difficult to articulate exactly what it is that libertarians ought

to be worried about. In what follows, I try out a new way to articulate the core of the

worry. What I claim for my articulation is not that it is a successful objection to

libertarianism, but rather simply that it is the most promising way to articulate the luck

objection to libertarianism because it captures what is worrying to proponents of the

objection without committing them to any clearly implausible theses about the nature of

causation or explanation. An additional benefit is that the articulation I suggest below

clarifies how we might make progress in the debate about luck and libertarianism. 8 Randolph Clarke makes this point forcefully in his 2003, especially ch. 3.

9 For detailed criticisms of some of these other versions, see Ekstrom 2003, Franklin 2011, and Buchak

2013. I’m sympathetic with the criticisms put forward by these authors.

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3. A Common Structure

The various versions of the luck objection that we have considered share a common

structure. They are all instantiations of the following argument form:

1. Free actions must stand in relation R to past facts or states of the world.

2. But relation R is an entailment relation.

3. So, free actions must be entailed by past facts or states of the world.

4. If (3), then no free action can be such that, holding fixed the past and the laws,

some other action might have been performed.

5. But if no free action can be such that, holding fixed the past and the laws, some

other action might have been performed, then libertarianism is false.

6. Therefore, libertarianism is false.

Each version differs by focusing on a different relation to put in place of ‘R’: the relation

of being caused by, that of being explained by, and that of being contrastively explained by.

And in each case, we have seen that the libertarian can respond by denying one of the

first two premises. It is plausible to think that free actions must be caused by some

previous states of the world, but implausible to suppose that all causes entail their effects.

It is plausible to think that something about the past states of the world must explain an

action in order for it to be free, but implausible to suppose that an explanans must entail

its explanandum. And finally, whereas one might make a stronger case for the claim that

entailment is part and parcel of contrastive explanation (though if Hitchcock is right, the

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claim is still wrong), it’s unclear why it should be thought that free action requires such

explanation.

Displaying the general structure of the luck objection in this way helps to make

clear exactly what the opponent of libertarianism needs for a successful attack. In

particular, she needs some relation between an action and past states of the world which

is such that (1) it is plausibly thought to be required for the action to be free and (2) it is

plausibly thought to obtain only if the past states of the world entail the action in

question. Causation, explanation, and contrastive explanation all seem to founder on at

least one of these criteria. Still, one can easily get into a frame of mind according to

which it seems like there is some important relation that libertarians must do without.

What could it be?

My proposal on behalf of those who put forth the luck objection is the relation of

grounding or ontological dependence — the relation that is captured by some uses of the

phrase ‘in virtue of’, and which has only recently begun to be investigated seriously by

metaphysicians [Correia 2005; Correia and Schneider 2012]. In the remainder of this

essay, then, I want to do two things. First, I’ll attempt to clarify — though not to analyze

— the notion of grounding in general, and I’ll give some reasons for thinking that it plays

an underappreciated but significant role in some of the traditional debates about free will

and moral responsibility. And second, I’ll show how an appeal to grounding helps to

bring the luck objection into sharper focus.

4. Grounding in the Free Will Literature

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Contemporary discussions of grounding elucidate the notion by way of the Euthyphro

dilemma: ‘Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it

is being loved by the gods?’ [Cooper 2002: 12]. Both options are problematic, but for our

purposes it’s enough to note that there really are two distinct options here. It may well be

that, as a matter of fact, every pious action is also loved by the gods. Indeed, it may well

be that, as a matter of necessity, every pious action is also loved by the gods. But this gives

us nothing more than mere correlation, whereas what Socrates wants to know are the

facts about grounding. Are pious actions pious in virtue of the fact that they are loved by

the gods, or, on the other hand, do the gods love those actions in virtue of the fact that

they are pious? Which are the grounds, and which the grounded? As Jonathan Schaffer

says, in defence of the intelligibility of grounding: ‘Many of us teach this dilemma to our

first year students. They get it.’ It’s a notion that ‘[reverberates] through the history of

metaphysics’ [2009: 375]. Significantly – and there seems to be widespread agreement

about this – grounding cannot be analyzed as correlation, or necessary correlation, or

supervenience, or counterfactual dependence. It appears to be sui generis.10

Some of its basic formal properties are easy enough to articulate. It is clearly an

asymmetrical relation: at least when x and y are distinct, if x grounds y, then y cannot

ground x. (This is precisely what gives the Euthyphro dilemma its force as a dilemma.) It

also appears to be irreflexive: nothing can be grounded in itself, or obtain in virtue of

itself.11 It is also factive (if x grounds y, then both x and y exist) and hyperintensional (just 10 For an easy entry into the literature on grounding, see Correia 2008. For a nice state-of-the-debate

treatment, see Clark and Liggins 2012.

11 But see Jenkins 2011.

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because x and y exist in all the same worlds doesn’t mean they stand in the same

grounding relationships).12 Other formal properties — such as transitivity and category-

neutrality — are more controversial, and in fact I’ll return to another potentially

controversial formal feature below when we get back to the luck argument.

With this brief bit of clarification under our belts, though, perhaps we have a

strong enough grasp on the notion to see where it is at work in debates about free will

and moral responsibility. There seem to me to be many places where the notion of

grounding is relevant to those debates, but let me mention just two here.

The first place to look is at the Frankfurt-examples [Frankfurt 1969]. Thanks in

large part to the work of John Martin Fischer [1994; 2006], it is now widely accepted

that merely locating any old ‘alternative possibility’ is not sufficient to show that

Frankfurt-examples fail. Instead, in Fischer’s terminology, the alternative that opponents

of Frankfurt-examples appeal to must be robust. The mere possibility, for example, that

the agent might have failed to blush, is just not the sort of ‘alternative’ that’s at stake in

the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). This point, I maintain, is a point about

grounding.

The point of the Frankfurt-examples is to show that the ability to do otherwise is

not among the facts that ground attributions of moral responsibility; or, in other words,

when someone is morally responsible, it’s not in virtue of the fact (if it was a fact) that

they were able to do otherwise. To defuse the Frankfurt-examples, then, it’s not enough 12 Perhaps the most common example used to demonstrate the hyperintensional character of grounding is

Kit Fine’s [1994]: Socrates and his unit set exist in all the same worlds, but his unit set ontologically

depends on him in a way that he doesn’t ontologically depend on his unit set.

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merely to show that they are compatible with the existence of alternatives; one must also

show that it is in virtue of those alternatives that the agent in the Frankfurt-example is

responsible, and this is a much more difficult task.13

A second place where grounding is at work in the free will literature is in

discussions of source incompatibilism.14 Consider the difference between determinism,

on the one hand, and divine foreknowledge, on the other. When it comes to freedom,

there is something much more troubling about the thesis of determinism than there is

about the thesis that there exists an omnitemporal and essentially omniscient being. But

why? Both threats plausibly rule out the ability to do otherwise, and hence, given PAP,

moral responsibility.15 So why is one more troubling than the other?

The best answer to this question, I suggest, is one that invokes grounding. Absent

PAP, divine foreknowledge is not threatening because it seems clear that God’s

knowledge is grounded in our actions, rather than vice versa.16 In words that are

reminiscent of the Euthyphro dilemma: we don’t perform our actions because God

foreknows them; rather, our actions are known by God because we perform them. And

13 Incidentally, philosophical analyses in general — like the partial one represented by PAP — are most

perspicuously formulated as claims about grounding rather than as simple conditionals or biconditionals. In

this sense, the so-called robustness requirement is actually built into PAP from the start. For an elaboration

on this point, see Leon and Tognazzini 2010.

14 For an influential defence of source incompatibilism, see Pereboom 2001.

15 The threat that foreknowledge poses to the ability to do otherwise was articulated clearly by Nelson Pike

[1965]; for further discussion, see the essays in Fischer 1989.

16 This is an old point, made by Origen and Molina, among others.

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this seems enough — at least, apart from PAP — to assuage worries about moral

responsibility.17

But source incompatibilists tell us that matters are different when it comes to

determinism. Even if — per impossibile — determinism didn’t rule out the ability to do

otherwise, it would still threaten moral responsibility. Why? The plausible answer we

gave to the threat from divine foreknowledge — namely, that God knows what he knows

in virtue of what we do, and not vice versa — is much less plausible in the case of

determinism, because it would require us to say that the past and the laws of nature

obtain in virtue of what we do, whereas the truth seems just the opposite. (This is of

course the same phenomenon that explains why going Humean about the laws of nature

seems to lead to compatibilism [Beebee and Mele 2002].)

What we are worried about when it comes to determinism and moral

responsibility is — at least in part — that there may be some aspect of the world, other

than us, in virtue of which we do what we do. In other words, we think that moral

responsibility requires that our actions be grounded in us in some important sense.

5. Is Grounding an Entailment Relation?

Let’s return, now, to the luck objection. I’ve suggested that the threat from determinism

is in part the threat that our actions may be grounded in aspects of the world other than

relevant features of our agency. Now I’d like to suggest that the best way to interpret the

threat from indeterminism — and so, the luck objection — is as the worry that our 17 Though it is arguably not enough to assuage worries about the ability to do otherwise. For discussion, see

Fischer and Tognazzini 2014.

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actions may fail to be grounded in anything at all, even relevant features of our agency.

How might indeterminism pose such a threat?

Recall from above that in order for the luck objection to stand a chance, its

proponent needs to find some relation between an action and past states of the world

which is such that (1) it is plausibly thought to be required for the action to be free and

(2) it is plausibly thought to obtain only if the past states of the world entail the action in

question. Explanation and contrastive explanation failed the first criterion because their

contextual and epistemological aspects seem to divorce them from the central issue of

control. Causation, on the other hand, fails the second criterion because it is no longer

plausibly thought to be an entailment relation. My current suggestion — the relation of

grounding — seems more promising on both counts.

As for the connection with control, grounding is supposed to be an objective,

context-independent, metaphysical relation that either obtains or fails to obtain, no

matter who is thinking about it or what questions they happen to care about. Of course,

this by itself doesn’t automatically mean that grounding is relevant to control, but I think

our reflections above about Frankfurt-examples and source incompatibilism help to make

the connection plausible. Indeed, the very notion of something’s being up to me seems

plausibly cashed out in terms of that thing’s occurring in virtue of something about me.18

But now what about entailment? In order for it to play a role in the luck

objection, grounding must be an entailment relation. And indeed, most writers on the 18 Compare also Gary Watson’s [1987] claim that indeterminism seems problematic for libertarianism

because it appears to make available alternative possibilities only at the cost of precluding self-determination

(language that sounds closely related to that of grounding).

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subject do seem to agree that one of its formal properties is that if x grounds y, then x

entails y (in our broadened sense of ‘entails’).19 Consider, for example, the notion of

truthmaking, which is often considered to be a grounding relation. D. M. Armstrong

[2004: pp. 6-7] forcefully argues for the view that he calls Truthmaker Necessitarianism:

if some state of affairs makes p true, then any world in which that state of affairs obtains

must also be a world in which p is true. And other clear examples of grounding seem to

fit naturally with analogous principles. If pious actions are pious in virtue of being loved

by the gods, then it seems to follow that any world in which those actions are loved by

the gods will also be a world in which those actions are pious. More generally, although

grounding can’t be analyzed in terms of supervenience, it at least seems to entail

supervenience: no change in the grounded entities without a change in the grounds.

So, it looks like grounding is a pretty good candidate relation with which to construct

a promising luck objection to libertarianism. The resulting argument would look like this:

1. Free actions must be grounded in relevant past states of the agent.

2. But grounding is an entailment relation.

3. So, free actions must be entailed by relevant past states of the agent.

4. If (3), then no free action can be such that, holding fixed the past and the laws,

some other action might be have been performed.

19 See, for example, Audi 2012, Correia 2005, and Rosen 2010.

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5. But if no free action can be such that, holding fixed the past and the laws, some

other action might have been performed, then libertarianism is false.

6. Therefore, libertarianism is false.

The success of this argument will depend, of course, on a satisfactory defence of the first

two premises, a task I won’t undertake here. But I have hinted above at how such a

defence might go: I have suggested that grounding plays an underappreciated but

significant role in traditional debates about free will and responsibility, and I have briefly

presented some of the evidence for thinking that grounding is an entailment relation. My

goal has not been to show that the luck objection, so construed, succeeds or fails, but

rather to suggest that this construal is the best way to represent what seems troubling to

many about libertarianism. Indeterminism doesn’t rule out causation or explanation (or

perhaps even contrastive explanation), but it may nevertheless detach agents from their

actions in a way that spells trouble for freedom and responsibility.

6. Objections

In closing, let me consider two objections to my suggestion that the luck objection

is best articulated in terms of grounding. The first objection is that I have attributed to

the proponent of the luck objection a more radical claim than he is typically inclined to

make – in particular, I have suggested that the proponent of the luck objection is worried

that if indeterminism is true, then the actions of agents fail to be grounded in anything at

all, and especially not in the agent himself. But this might seem too strong. What

proponents of the luck objection are worried about – so the objection goes – is not

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whether our actions occur in virtue of any previous mental states at all, but rather that it

seems to be a matter of luck that our actions occur in virtue of these mental states, rather

than some alternative action occurring in virtue of those mental states – states that we

have at the same time.20

Support for thinking of the luck objection in these (perhaps more modest) terms

comes from considering the fact that some theorists have thought that appealing to agent

causation can help to solve the problem. The thought here is that if we introduce the

agent as an irreducible substance-cause of the action, then we can resist the claim that it

was just a matter of luck that an action occurred in virtue of the mental states it did,

rather than some other action occurring in virtue of some other mental states. If the agent

as substance figures directly into the story, then which action occurred in virtue of which

mental states was up to the agent, rather than luck.

But I think that this way of conceiving of the luck objection – as the worry that

it’s just a matter of luck which action occurs in virtue of which mental states – also fits

well with the basic articulation in terms of grounding that I have presented above. The

worry here is not that the agent’s action is ungrounded, but rather that the relationship

between the action and the mental states that ground it is itself ungrounded. And it is in

response to this worry that some theorists appeal to agent causation. The appeal, as I

understand it, is meant to be a way of inserting something into the story that can ground

the relation between mental states and the action those mental states cause. So, the

20 Thanks very much to an anonymous referee for pressing this objection.

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fundamental worry – that is, the worry that appealing to agent causation is supposed to

solve – has the same character as the more straightforward worry dealt with above. In

both cases, the luck objector worries that certain upshots are ungrounded in anything, not

even in the agent whose intentional activity is meant to result in those upshots.21

The second objection I want to discuss is that there is a dialectical tension

between the first two premises of the above argument: if you are a libertarian, then the

more reason I give you for thinking that grounding is an entailment relation, the more

premise (1) will start to appear question-begging. And the more I’m able to persuade you

that grounding really is what’s at issue when it comes to free will, the less I’ll be able to

persuade you that it’s an entailment relation.22 This might appear to render the above

argument hopeless, but I’m inclined to think that it just reinforces a point made forcefully

by Peter van Inwagen: that we ought to conceive of a philosophical argument as aimed at

an audience of ‘ideal agnostics’ [2006: 45], rather than at an audience of those who reject

its conclusion. On this model, defences of the first two premises above would each

21 It is, of course, a separate question whether appealing to agent causation is required, or even helpful, for

resolving these worries about grounding. In an important recent paper, Christopher Franklin [forthcoming]

argues that the event-causal libertarian can also adequately respond to these worries about the ‘disappearing

agent’, so long as she augments her account ‘to include a state with which the agent is identified and that

plays his functional role’ (p. 15). My suggestion here is that even if we can keep the agent from

disappearing on event-causal libertarianism, the luck objection will still have bite until we can explain how

an agent’s actions are grounded in him.

22 Thanks to Alfred Mele for making me aware of this dialectical tension.

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involve looking at the metaphysical ‘big picture’.23 A proponent of the above argument

would have to try, first, to convince an agnostic that the notion of grounding – the notion

that gives the Euthyphro dilemma its bite, whatever its formal properties turn out to be –

does in fact serve to synthesize and explain much of what’s been thought and said about

free will over the centuries, and second, to convince an agnostic that, given our best

metaphysical theories of the structure of the world, grounding really is most plausibly

construed as an entailment relation.

Crucially, the proponent of the above argument would have to distinguish

between various ways in which the phrase ‘in virtue of’ gets used – sometimes to indicate

explanation, sometimes to indicate grounding, sometimes to indicate causation, and so on

– and argue that it’s the one that implies entailment which is missing from the libertarian

account, but which any adequate account of free will needs. My own sense is that a strong

case could be made for this, and it would be one that attempts to unify the way in which

talk of grounding is invoked across various contexts, including the problem of freedom

and foreknowledge, the Frankfurt-examples, arguments for source incompatibilism,

arguments for Humean compatibilism, and so on.

Whether or not the argument succeeds, I think it gets closer than any previous

argument has to articulating what worries people about the viability of libertarianism.

And it also nicely illustrates that the threats from determinism and indeterminism have a

similar structure: whereas determinism threatens to ground my actions in states of the

23 Hudson 2007 contains a nice articulation of the general sort of defence I’m imagining here; he calls it ‘the

big picture, best-candidate, general metaphysics defense’ (217).

20

world that have nothing to do with me, indeterminism threatens to render my actions

completely ungrounded in anything at all, not even me.24

Western Washington University

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21

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