I’ve often thought that the classic debates about free will suffer from a conflation of causation and necessitation. More generally, it’s often seemed to me that without a generally satisfying theory of causation, we have no reason to be worried that free will is a mere illusion. Since the reality of rational agency — where ‘reality’ is a matter of our reasoning controlling what we do in a way that cannot be explained entirely in terms of non-rational antecedent causes — seems like a necessary condition of our being able to formulate scientific and philosophical theories that stand a decent chance of being true, we would seem to have powerful reason to be skeptical at best of any philosophical or scientific theory that denies the reality of rational agency (this may be the one thing I think Kant got roughly right). When we notice, in addition to this consideration, that philosophers and scientists have arrived at no generally accepted theory of causation, and that many have even gone so far as to deny that science has any need for the concept of a cause at all, it seems even less sensible to get worked up about the possibility that maybe everything each of us does is determined entirely by antecedent causal factors over which our reasoning has no influence whatsoever. Continue reading →