This essay critically examines Alfred R. Mele’s attempt to solve a problem for libertarianism that he calls the problem of present luck. Many have thought that the traditional libertarian belief in basically free acts (where the latter are any free A-ings that occur at times at which the past up to that time and the laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing at that time) entail that the acts are due to luck at the time of the act (present luck) rather than to the kind of agent control required for genuinely free, morally responsible action. While libertarians frequently have tried to rebut the claim that basically free acts are due to present luck, Mele argues for the daring thesis that they should embrace present luck rather than try to explain it away. His strategy is to argue that the assumption of present luck in the decisions of very young children (or “little agents”) does not preclude us from attributing to them a small amount of moral responsibility and that this makes it possible to conceive of moral development as a gradual process in which as the frequency of the indeterministically caused free actions increases, the agents take on greater and greater moral responsibility. In this paper I give several possible reconstructions of Mele’s argument and analyze in detail why none of them succeeds.
Journal Article Free Action and Unconscious Motivation Get access David Blumenfeld David Blumenfeld University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 56, Issue 3, 1 July 1972, Pages 426–443, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197256314 Published: 19 December 2014
Journal Article VI.—PUNISHMENT FOR INTENTIONS Get access GERALD DWORKIN, GERALD DWORKIN University of CaliforniaBerkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar DAVID BLUMENFELD DAVID BLUMENFELD University of CaliforniaBerkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume LXXV, Issue 299, July 1966, Pages 396–404, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXXV.299.396 Published: 01 July 1966
