Our Free Will: Control Without Counterfactuals

This book offers a new account of free will and a new solution to the free-will problem. The problem is this: We are morally responsible agents, and free will is required for responsibility; and yet free will seems impossible. Determinism is too restrictive, while indeterminism too permissive. This book's solution is Agent & Reaction Control (ARC). ARC says that our freedom derives just from our acts themselves, without any considerations for alternate sequences or counterfactuals. Specifically, we are free because, if and only if, we can intentionally perform the kinds of actions which reflect our good or bad will and to which a suitably placed observer reacts with resentment, gratitude, anger, love, and/or another of the reactive attitudes. After showing that ARC is satisfied under a salient determinism as well as under a salient indeterminism, this book discusses ARC's implications for desert and action-theoretic work in neuroscience.

In short: just as music’s quality comes from the music itself rather than what it would or could have been, this book argues that our freedom to act comes from our acts rather than what we would or could have done.