Does Sufficient Explanation Require Determination? Contrastive Closure, Agent-Inclusive Explanation, and Practical Authorship

Does Sufficient Explanation Require Determination? Contrastive Closure, Agent-Inclusive Explanation, and Practical Authorship The demand for sufficient explanation does not, without a further closure principle, entail that the contrast between an action and its relevant alternative must be fixed independently of the agent's token exercise. The difficult question is not whether explanation and necessitation can be distinguished in the abstract, but where the explanatory work distinguishing A from C is located. Existing work on contrastive explanation already shows that this is a live problem for freedom: Clarke develops contrastive rational explanation of free choice; Elzein argues that determinism does not by itself guarantee the psychologically relevant contrastive explanation demanded by luck objections; Pruss distinguishes multiple senses of contrastive explanation and rejects the unrestricted extension of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to them; and Pearce separates complete grounding from grounding necessitation. This paper supplies a locus-relative framework for that debate. Relative to a fixed individuation of the agent's token practical exercise, a claimed contrastive explanation closes independently of the exercise, includes the exercise irreducibly, closes elsewhere, or leaves explanatory remainder. A Contrastive Closure Test then states what an agent-inclusive account must earn without defining libertarianism into the test. A further result separates first-person practical specification from ultimate modal sourcehood: an agent's practical settlement can genuinely help explain what an occurrence is as that agent's intentional action while the settlement itself is exhaustively determined by an exercise-independent basis. Applied to Agápēic Relational Metaphysics (ARM), this blocks any direct inference from otherness, non-coercion, self-presence, or participation — properties established elsewhere in the series — to libertarian alternatives, and shows that the practical-authorship and enactment results developed here supply no such inference either. ARM instead adopts Ultimate Contrastive Sourcehood as an explicit, declared modal and explanatory commitment, naming deterministic reasons-responsive agency as the coherent rival it declines. The paper therefore establishes both a diagnostic apparatus of general application and the disclosed, priced commitment ARM makes at the point the diagnostic leaves open, rather than a neutral proof that non-necessitating contrastive explanations actually succeed.