‘Real Agency

Professor John Heil (Washington University in St. Louis), John Heil

Abstract: Galen Strawson holds that the conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Others, Derk Pereboom, for instance, argue that science provides excellent reasons to think that no action is free. Against these skeptics about free will, I argue that, there are probably good reasons to think that conditions for free actions – real agency – are sometimes satisfied, that ascriptions of agency are sometimes true, but that truthmakers for these ascriptions could be wholly deterministic – or indeterministic – in a way that might seem to place them at odds with genuinely free action.