The Disutility of Indeterminism

In their paper “Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe,” Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell defend libertarian free will against the charge that indeterminism would undermine, not enhance, an agent’s control over their choices. Although they provide a useful suite of arguments against versions of the so-called “luck objection” to libertarianism, their view of libertarian agency doesn’t establish that indeterminism and a metaphysically open future make agents more responsible than under determinism. Indeed, their agent causal view requires that micro-level indeterminism must be constrained for macro-level, responsibility-entailing control to emerge. Their view rightly portrays naturally evolved agents as having robust causal powers, but indeterminism can’t make the exercise of those powers more up to the agent or make agents morally responsible in a way not available under determinism.

The Disutility of Indeterminism

Commentary on Potter and Mitchell


1. The prima facie conflict between control and chance

In Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe, Henry Potter and Kevin Mitchell (2025) defend libertarian free will against the charge that indeterminism would undermine, not enhance, an agent’s control over their choices. Libertarians, they say, hold that “free actions must be both undetermined and under the agent’s control.” An agent acts freely just in case they were not necessitated to act as they did even though they authored the act. Freedom from necessity means that in an imagined (counterfactual) replay of an actual choice, the exact same conditions external and internal to the agent prior to the choice might have resulted in a different choice. The future is metaphysically open, says the libertarian, allowing the agent to have done otherwise in an actual situation just as it transpired. But of course to control a choice requires that the agent determine it – necessitate it – so there seems a prima facie conflict between having control and any indeterminism (chance, randomness) involved in the agent’s choice: indeterminism is not under the agent’s control.

2. Is an open future worth wanting?

Taking a step back, why would freedom from determinism constitute a freedom worth wanting, to use a phrase popularized by Daniel Dennett (1984)? What’s valuable about having the capacity to have chosen otherwise than how one’s character, motivations, and deliberations actually determined a choice? This is to ask what’s valuable about having a metaphysically open future, one not necessitated by such determinants. The answer, I suspect, lies in the intuition that for an act to really be my doing, and not merely the working out of impersonal deterministic causation, I have to contribute something that isn’t fully traceable to the causal factors in play, such that I’m not necessitated in my choice. Only an open future would allow such a non-necessitated contribution, something for which I can be held deeply and ultimately responsible since I could have done otherwise but chose not to.

However, for a choice to be mine it has to be traceable to who I am, what I want, and my deliberations, were any involved in the choice. Such tracing would show that the choice was determined by – necessitated by – those factors, in which case ownership of action seems inconsistent with an open future in which chance played a role. Why would I rationally want the agential power or opportunity to act otherwise than what my character, desires, and deliberations determine in an actual situation? Such a power or opportunity would separate me from my choice, rendering it unintelligible as an action I caused and thus can be held responsible for. The supposedly agency-enhancing opportunity allowed by indeterminism in a choice situation, that which permits an open future, seems to conflict with maximally attributing a choice to an agent. It is this apparent conflict between attributable agency and indeterminism that Potter and Mitchell attempt to defuse in making the case for their version of libertarian free will...

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10/2025

Author: 
Tom Clark
Other Categories: 
Morality
Libertarianism