According to event-causal modest libertarian accounts of free action, the sort of control an agent requires to perform free actions consists in the action’s being nondeviantly and indeterministically caused by apt reasons of the agent. It has been argued that these modest views succumb to a problem of luck because they imply that, given exactly the same past up to the time of action, and the same laws of nature, at this time the agent could have performed a different action, or no action at all. Hence, it appears that whatever the agent does at this time as a result of indeterministic deliberation is a matter of freedom- or responsibility-undermining luck. In this paper, I argue that neither Robert Kane’s variant of modest libertarianism, which combines a form of non-traditional agent causation with indeterministic event causation, nor John Lemos’ weightings variant, in which agents perform intentional acts of assigning weights to their reasons, circumvents the luck objection.

Despite the millenniums-old tradition in Abrahamic circles of removing the foreskin of a penis at birth, the involuntary and aggressive practice of circumcision must not be made an exception to the natural, negative right to self-ownership-a birthright which should prevent a parent from physically harming a child from the moment of birth going forward. This paper will present a natural rights argument against the practice of male child circumcision, while also looking into some of the potential physical and psychological consequences of the practice. It will compare the practice with that of female circumcision, which is banned in developed nations but still practiced in the third world, as well as other forms of aggressive action, some once-prevalent, while disputing arguments made for parental ownership of the child, religious expression, cultural tradition, cleanliness, cosmetics, and conformity.

Contemporary discussions on freedom have recently drawn attention to the implications the mind-body relation.Contemporary discussions on freedom have recently drawn attention to the implications of the mind-body relation. Historically, the notion of freedom has centered on various naturalistic options, compatibilism, and weaker notions of libertarian freedom. This leaves strong agent causal libertarianism as a minority position. Entering these discussions, I seek to establish the relation between a particular mind-body view and strong agent causal libertarianism. I make two claims upon characterizing strong agent causal libertarianism. First, I argue that strong agent causal libertarianism requires some version of substance dualism (or immaterialist agency). Second, I argue that strong agent causal libertarianism probably requires something like classical or Cartesian substance dualism. Drawing from the philosopher John Foster in The Immaterial Self, I show that the central defining feature of the sort of libertarian agency under investigation is ‘intrinsic autonomy’. While I recognize that Cartesianism is unpopular in contemporary discussions, I agree with Foster that it is probably what is entailed if we are going to ground something like a strong agent causal libertarianism. The substance needed to explain this robust form of freedom begins to look like something not of this world and more like the substance described by René Descartes.