Libertarianism, Motivation and Objective Probabilities of Free Actions

In recent years, the literature on free will libertarianism has seen the unfolding of a debate over whether undetermined free actions should be assigned (non-trivial) objective probabilities or can instead be considered probabilistically indeterminate (Buchak 2013; Vicens 2016; O'Connor 2016; Schlosser 2017; Conti 2024). According to one line of reasoning, the ascription of objective probabilities is justified by the phenomenology of decision-making processes. Typically, in situations of choice, we are not equally inclined towards the options open to us, but we are more motivated to choose some of them over others. This, it is argued, suggests that some actions have a higher objective probability associated with them. In this article, I object to this argument and claim that it rests on considerations about the phenomenon of motivational imbalance that fit badly with libertarianism.