Assessing the Argument for Agency Incompatibilism

In A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Helen Steward asks us to reconceptualize the metaphysics of agency. To make room for agency, she argues, we must reject: (i) the Causal Theory of Action, (ii) the view that causation is exclusively bottom-up, and (iii) the view that agency is compatible with causal determinism. I am convinced by Steward’s arguments against the first two views, but not by her arguments against the third. There are non-reductive compatibilist alternatives to Steward’s incompatibilist account of action as settling. The idea of agent as robust metaphysical settler of matters concerning the movements of her body is not part of the folk-psychological conception of agency. The causal role that folk psychology ascribes to agents is compatible with determinism of a certain form.