Volitional causation

David Hodgson has recently defended an account of libertarian free will involving what he calls volitional causation. He sees it as falling somewhere between more traditional agent-causal accounts of free will and the so-called event-causal account of libertarian free will defended by, among others, Robert Kane (and which we shall consider later in the chapter).

Hodgson's account is made up of nine propositions, although it is the first five with which I shall be concerned as Hodgson states that they are “basic requirements for any intelligible account of indeterministic free will” (Hodgson 2005: 3), and especially propositions 3 to 5, which are “particularly relevant to the randomness problem” (ibid.: 4). Taken together, these propositions can be seen as an attempt to minimize (or remove) any suggestion of pure randomness in the decision-making process while at the same time emphasizing the non-deterministic nature of our free choices. In this way, Hodgson hopes to be able to successfully argue for a middle way between randomness on the one side and determinism on the other.