According to incompatibilism, determinism precludes free will. Liber­tarians are incompatibilists who also believe in free will. Hence, they’re committed to free will’s requiring the falsity of determinism—in­determinism. The trouble is that the very indeterminism which the libertarians need seem inimical to free will in that it is hard to see how indeterministic events can be under the agent’s control. This, in short, is the so-called Libertarian Dilemma: free will seems incompatible with determinism, but it also seems incompatible with indeterminism—so, free will seems impossible.
This book offers an in-depth analysis of this problem and some of the major contemporary attempts by libertarians to forge a successful “way out” of it. In doing so, some central issues in the metaphysics of free will are analyzed in detail, e.g., the logic of contemporary arguments for each of the horns of the dilemma; the problem of locating the libertarians’ requisite indeterminism; the nature of “agent causation” and its prospects for solving the dilemma. This book will be of interest to philosophers or students of philosophy who have an interest in the metaphysics of free will.