Analyze Three Contemporary Views Regarding the Debate of Free Will and Moral Responsibility

In this paper, I discuss and analyze three contemporary views regarding the debate of free will and moral responsibility. The three views I consider are Robert Kane's libertarianism, John Fischer's semicompatibilism and finally, Derk Pereboom's theory of hard incompatibilism. In this essay I argue that of the three previously mentioned views, Kane's libertarianism is the strongest and least flawed. The paper is constructed as follows. First, I will expound each of the three theories. Second, I will state the objections I find most problematic to Fischer's semicompatibilism and Pereboom's hard incompatibilism. Third, I will consider what I take to be the most pressing objection to Kane's libertarianism. Finally, I will provide an argument that explains how the objection against libertarianism is not nearly as worrisome as the objections against both semicompatibilism and hard incompatibilism.

Robert Kane's Libertarianism is the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible with each other, but the existence of free will is still a possibility. Libertarianism implies that all acts, choices, decisions, etc. are not only undetermined but also free and up to the individual making them. This theory splits up into many subdivisions that I will explicate throughout my paper. The facets that make up this theory form the philosophical view of Libertarianism.

Kane's philosophical theory of libertarianism explores the idea of ultimate responsibility. Kane describes ultimate responsibility as our responsibility for current actions, ones that are essentially determined by our personal character and values, as long as we formed that character ourselves by earlier free actions through something Kane describes as Self-Forming Actions. For Kane, there are two types of ultimate responsibility, action and will responsibility. Action responsibility implies that an agent is ultimately responsible for an action only if the agent is at least partially responsible for anything that is a sufficient cause or motive for the action's occurrence. Simply put, in order to have action responsibility one must posses some sort of desire for the action to occur. For instance if I want to help an old lady across the street and this desire brings me to complete the action, then I have action responsibility. According to Kane, without this prerequisite of premeditated wants or desires, one cannot have action responsibility.

Along with the aforementioned action responsibility, will responsibility is just as important. An agent possesses will responsibility only if the agent is at least partially responsible for any past voluntary action that set his or her will to be the way it is. In simpler terms, an individual has this responsibility if the person is accountable for the slightest bit of their past actions that could have potentially molded their will into what it is today. For example,