Freedom and Ethics Begin Where Cause and Effect Ends: Two Proofs

This paper diagnoses that the causal framework in which the free will debate has taken place is itself the reason for the defensive posture traditionally assumed by various libertarian positions. By replacing the analytically related terms of cause and effect with the synthetically related terms of act and condition; and by demonstrating that agency can be adequately explained through activity alone without recourse to any underlying substance, a genuine conceptual space for free action appears that is neither necessitated nor random: that of the insufficiently conditioned, or autotelic, act—contingent, self-explanatory, and value positing. Responsibility is derived from it along with the self as a construction achieved through the repetition of such acts. Upon the establishment of persons as equal local first principles of action, an other-regarding normativity is derived from the structure of such action that circumvents the is/ought gap. Wherever such persons are operative, the ought is not derived from the is but is coincidental with it, an arena of activity that is shown to be simultaneously descriptive and normative, independent of any recognition, judgment, or command. This paper does not aim to refute the necessitarian conception of human action, which it acknowledges as coherent, but to reveal the costs in maintaining it and to demonstrate that, once conceptual parity is achieved by the activity monist account, it lacks warrant on the basis of reason alone.