Texas, born 1938

Robert Kane

To be ultimately responsible for who you are, some of your choices must have been genuinely open, undetermined by everything before them. Those choices happen in moments of real inner conflict, and whichever way you go, you made it so.

The view

Kane, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, is the most influential defender of libertarian free will in recent decades. His book The Significance of Free Will (1996) set out to answer the standard objection to libertarianism, that an undetermined choice would be a matter of luck rather than control, and so could not be free.

The key idea is ultimate responsibility. To be ultimately responsible for an act, you must be responsible for anything that was a sufficient cause of it, including your character. Most of our acts flow from our characters, and that is fine, as long as the character was formed in part by earlier acts that were not themselves determined. Kane calls these self-forming actions. They need not be frequent, but there must be some.

The argument

In a self-forming action the agent is trying to do two competing things at once, and whichever succeeds, succeeds because she was trying to make it succeed. After Kane, The Significance of Free Will (1996)

Kane's example is a businesswoman on her way to an important meeting who sees an assault in an alley. She is torn: her conscience tells her to stop and help, her ambition to keep going. Kane suggests that her brain is running two competing processes at once, and that the conflict stirs up indeterminacy in each, at the level of neural noise. Whichever process wins, she was trying to make it win, so the result is her doing. The indeterminism is not a random intruder; it is a hindrance she overcomes. Run the struggle below.

Run it several times: sometimes she helps, sometimes she hurries on, and nothing in her past settled which. Kane argues that, either way, she is responsible, because she endorsed both efforts and the winner was the one she was making. And by her choice she becomes a slightly different person: someone who helps, or someone who does not.

Where he meets Dennett

Kane took the luck objection seriously, as Dennett did, and his account of competing processes sits well with Dennett's picture of the brain as a parliament of rival processes, not a single commander. Both care about self-formation, about how we become the people whose acts express us. Kane's view answers, in part, the challenge Dennett set in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want", and Kane engaged closely with Dennett's criticisms.

Where they part

On whether the indeterminism does any work. Dennett's pseudo-random generator applies directly: replace Kane's quantum noise with a deterministic equivalent, and the businesswoman would struggle, choose and become the same kind of person. Nobody, including her, could tell the difference. So, Dennett argued, ultimate responsibility in Kane's sense is not something anyone needs. The self-making Kane cares about happens anyway, as people respond to what they meet and to how others react to what they do. Kane replies that only indeterminism makes the self-making truly the agent's, rather than the universe's.

See every view compared →

Further reading

• Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1996).
• Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005): a fair-minded guide to the whole debate.
• Incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.