Abstract

What may cause individuals to act contrarily to their better judgment is that although they have a good reason (or reasons) not to perform an action, they have an insignificant reason to do it. Supposing that the decision to act one way or the other is made by a free agent, un- derstood in the libertarian sense that the person had alternative possi- bilities of action, how does one account for the the actual choice of one alternative? In other words, what accounts for the difference between the fact that one of two alternative possibilities is chosen and the fact that, in another possible world, the other one is chosen? “Event-causal libertarians” who are committed to the view that the situation up until the very moment of choice is identical in both cases, so that the only difference consists in the choice itself, would have to hold that there is nothing that accounts for this difference and that the difference is a matter of luck. A choice contrary to the person’s conscious belief of what is best to do would then be a matter of bad luck, not of weakness of will. Alfred Mele investigates how an event-causal libertarian view that admits these premises can account for the fact that an akratic agent acts freely and responsibly. In addition, he discusses how such a view explains the difference between akratic actions and radical breakdowns of agency. He also gives an account of how the capacity to form free actions for which one is responsible is developed in childhood.