¹ Watson, Gary, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” in Schoeman, F. D., ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 256–86.Google Scholar

² David Shoemaker has written extensively and astutely about the relation of these three notions of responsibility—attributability, accountability, and answerability—spelling out their implications and relations to one another in enlightening detail. See his Responsibility From the Margins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

³ Aristotle, , Nichomachean Ethics. Vol. 9 of The Works of Aristotle, Ross, W. D., ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), 1114a13–22, 255a8, 110a17, 1113b21, 1114a18–19.Google Scholar In comments on this essay, both Fred Miller and David Keyt pointed out the similarities between much that I say about responsibility for one’s will and what Aristotle says about responsibility for character. His view, they argue, is that character is formed by the kinds of actions we take. Vicious actions create and sustain a vicious character and virtuous actions a virtuous character. I agree, but would add that character traits are only one (albeit important) aspect of what is historically designated as the will, which includes not only persistent traits of character, but also motives and preferences (which may be long or shorter term) and intentions, which are the immediate products of choices. The will from which we act includes all of these.

⁴ Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Nidditch, P., ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Bk. II, chap. xxi, 134.Google Scholar Locke himself seems to qualify his position in a later edition of this work, in what I would regard as the fruitful direction, when he says: “Yet there is a case wherein a Man is at Liberty in respect of willing; and that is the choosing of a remote Good as an end to be pursued. Here a Man may suspend the act of his choice from being determined for or against the thing proposed, till he has examined whether it be really of a nature, in itself and consequences, to make him happy, or no” (Ibid., 139).

⁵ Skinner, B. F., Walden Two (New York: MacMillan, 1962).Google Scholar

⁶ For an overview of this work, see Nahmias, Eddy, “Intuitions about Free Will, Determinism and Bypassing,” in Kane, Robert, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 555–76.Google Scholar

⁷ Nichols, Shaun, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Kane, Robert, Free Will and Values (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985).Google Scholar

⁹ To be more precise about what is meant here and throughout by “causal impossibility”: The occurrence of a state or event, E, at a time, t, (E_t), is causally impossible, if and only if, there are states and/or events occurring prior to t (P_t-) and laws of nature (L), such that <It is not possible that (P_t-& L & E_t)>. The laws involved in this definition, being natural laws, need not be logically necessary. They need not hold in all logically possible worlds. What is required, however, if E_t is causally impossible is that in every logically possible world in which the laws L do hold and the relevant states and/or events, P_t-, occur prior to t, E does not occur at t. Its occurring, given these laws and these prior states and events, is logically impossible. I am indebted here to David Palmer, whose comments on the essay impressed on me the importance of spelling out the meaning of “causal impossibility” employed in it in more precise terms.

¹⁰ As David Palmer correctly points out in written comments on this essay, many writers on moral responsibility speak here of a distinction between indirect or derivative responsibility and direct or nonderivative responsibility. The drunk driver is indirectly or derivatively responsible for killing the pedestrian in this example by virtue of earlier actions, such as drinking and driving, for which he is directly responsible. I accept such a distinction, but would spell it out somewhat differently in ways that sometimes depart from the way some writers distinguish indirect and direct responsibility. I distinguish two kinds of responsible action that are done “of an agent’s own free will.” The first are actions done of an agent’s own free will in the sense of a will that was formed by the agent by prior self-forming actions (SFAs). The second are the self-forming actions or SFAs themselves by which the agent forms the will from which the agent subsequently acts. These two kinds of responsible action are related to what many call indirectly and directly responsible actions, respectively, though there are some nuanced differences. What they do correspond to are the two dimensions of responsibility of the title of this essay: responsibility for expressing the will one has an action and responsibility for having the will one expresses in action. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the nuanced differences between these distinctions and the distinction between what many call indirect and directly responsible actions. But the distinctions are related, if not identical.

¹¹ Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil,” passim.

¹² E.g., in Kane, Robert, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4–5.Google Scholar

¹³ Hart, H. L. A., Punishment and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Brink, David and Nelkin, Dana, “Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility,” in Shoemaker, David, ed., Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 283–87.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Frankfurt, Harry, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ E.g., Kane, Robert, “Responsibility, Indeterminism and Frankfurt-style Cases,” in Widerker, David and McKenna, Michael, eds., Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003);Google Scholar Kane, Robert, “Frankfurt-Style Examples and Self-forming Actions,” in Haji, Ishtiyaque and Caouette, Justin, eds., Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 58–73.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In comments on this essay, Michael McKenna correctly points out that this argument against FSEs departs in some important respects from earlier arguments I have made against such examples. As early as my 1985 book (see note 8), I argued that the usual FSEs put forward by Frankfurt and many others illicitly presuppose determinism since the controllers require a reliable “prior sign” in order to know what the agent is about to do and hence whether or not to intervene. Such reliable prior signs, however, will not be available if, as libertarians about free will require, some free actions must be undetermined up to the moment they occur. Similar arguments against FSEs were later put forward by others, such as David Widerker, “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” Philosohical Review 104 (1995): 247-61 and Carl Ginet, “In Defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” Philosophical Perspectives 10 (1996): 403–17. In the decades following, however, various defenders of FSEs, such as Mele, Alfred and Robb, David, “Rescuing Frankfurt-style Examples,” Philosophical Review 107 (1998): 97–112,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pereboom, Derk, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and others, produced new examples of FSEs designed to work in cases where the choices or actions to be controlled were undetermined, as libertarians require. In response to these new FSEs, I have argued (see note 16 for the relevant articles), as I do in this essay, that while these more recent FSEs do take into account the indeterminism required of libertarian free choices, they rule out another condition of equal importance that libertarian free choices which are SFAs, must satisfy. Namely, the presence of the controller in such indeterministic FSEs, whether or not the controller actually intervenes, makes it impossible for the agents to have plural voluntary control (PVC) over the controlled choices, i.e., the power at the time to willingly make them and the power to willingly do otherwise. Thus I argue, as I do here, that the kind of control exercised over agents in FSEs of all varieties, deterministic or indeterministic, would make such SFAs impossible. So that if libertarian free choices that are self-forming satisfy both conditions, as I believe they must, being undetermined and the agents having PVC over whether or not they occur, they cannot be controlled by Frankfurt controllers.

¹⁸ Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (London: Vintage Books, 1989), Sec. 17.8, 89.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Strawson, P. F., “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 21.Google Scholar

²⁰ See, e.g., Kane, Free Will and Values; Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);Google Scholar “Responsibility, Luck and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 5 (1998): 217–40; “Some Neglected Pathways in the Free Will Labyrinth,” in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 406–37; “Rethinking Free Will: New Perspectives on an Ancient Problem” in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edition, ed. Robert Kane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 381–404; “New Arguments in Debates on Libertarian Free Will,” in Libertarian Free Will: Contemporary Debates, ed. David Palmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 179–214.

²¹ Part of this task of making sense of such a free will and the associated tapestry of ideas involves considering the empirical and scientific question whether any indeterminism is there in the brain in ways appropriate for free will. No purely philosophical theory can settle this matter. It is interesting, however, that in the past decade there has been more openness and discussion on the part of scientists and philosophers about this possibility and it remains an open scientific question. See, e.g,, Glimcher, Paul, “Indeterminacy in Brain and Behavior,” Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005), 25–56;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Bishop, Robert C., “Chaos, Indeterminism and Free Will,” in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd ed., Kane, Robert, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011), 84–100;Google Scholar Brembs, B., “Towards a Scientific Concept of Free Will as a Biological Trait,” Proceeding of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278 (2011): 930–39;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Hameroff, Stuart and Penrose, Roger, “Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1996): 36–53;Google Scholar Jedlicka, Peter, “Quantum Stochasticity and (the End of) Neurodeterminism,” in Corradini, Antonella and Meixner, Uwe eds., Quantum Physics Meets the Philosophy of Mind (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 183–97;Google Scholar Heisenberg, Martin, “The Origin of Freedom in Animal Behavior,” in Suarez, A. and Adams, P. eds., Is Science Compatible with Free Will? (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2013), 95–103;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Tse, Peter Ulric, The Neural Basis of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shadlen, Michael, “Comments on Adina Roskies: Can Neurosciences Resolve Issues about Free Will?” in Sinnott-Armstrong, W. ed., Moral Psychology Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 175–87;Google Scholar Stapp, Henry, The Mindful Universe (Berlin: Springer, 2007);Google Scholar Balaguer, Mark, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).Google Scholar

²² One could imagine simpler cases in which will power is exercised only in one direction and the alternative choice is the result of “weakness of will.” Such cases can occur. But the resulting choices would not be SFAs in the sense intended here because they would not be “will-setting” choices. The alternative choice would rather be the result of a failure to do what the will was “set” on doing (hence, “weakness of” will). In such cases, you would not be actively “setting” your will in one direction or another, but rather failing or succeeding in doing what your will was already set on doing. I have discussed these and other issues about weakness of will at greater length elsewhere, e.g., in The Significance of Free Will, 130–33, 154–57, where I argue that traditional discussions of this topic have overlooked a number of significant distinctions. I am indebted to Chandra Sripada for helpful comments on the original paper related to this topic.

²³ Kane, The Significance of Free Will, 214.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 65.Google Scholar

²⁶ Kane, Significance of Free Will, 214–15.