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Powers, Time and Free WillFreedom of the Will and Rational Abilities

Powers, Time and Free Will: Freedom of the Will and Rational Abilities [Since the 1990s, agential capacities and abilities have played an increasingly prominent role in the debate about free will, especially among compatibilists. But it is still not fully clear what precisely compatibilists will gain by relying on capacities and abilities. In this paper, I try to argue that at least for compatibilists of a certain stripe an appeal to abilities is of significant use. These are compatibilists who try to argue for the compatibility of agential freedom and microphysical determinism by distinguishing between different, mutually irreducible levels of explanation (as, e.g., Christian List has recently done). An abilities account of free will provides the grounds for a much-needed principled argument why we can and should disregard certain microphysical features when providing the kind of explanation which is the primary and salient one for explaining intentional actions.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Powers, Time and Free WillFreedom of the Will and Rational Abilities

Part of the Synthese Library Book Series (volume 451)
Editors: Austin, Christopher J.; Marmodoro, Anna; Roselli, Andrea
Mayr, Erasmus
Powers, Time and Free Will — Mar 29, 2022
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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. Chapters [2] and [4] are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters.
ISBN
978-3-030-92485-0
Pages
115 –135
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Since the 1990s, agential capacities and abilities have played an increasingly prominent role in the debate about free will, especially among compatibilists. But it is still not fully clear what precisely compatibilists will gain by relying on capacities and abilities. In this paper, I try to argue that at least for compatibilists of a certain stripe an appeal to abilities is of significant use. These are compatibilists who try to argue for the compatibility of agential freedom and microphysical determinism by distinguishing between different, mutually irreducible levels of explanation (as, e.g., Christian List has recently done). An abilities account of free will provides the grounds for a much-needed principled argument why we can and should disregard certain microphysical features when providing the kind of explanation which is the primary and salient one for explaining intentional actions.]

Published: Mar 29, 2022

Keywords: Free will; Abilities; Compatibilism; Microphysical determinism; Levels of explanation; Christian list

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