Robert Kane (philosopher)

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Robert Kane (born 1938) is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), The Significance of Free Will (1996; awarded the 1996 Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award), edited the Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2004) and is widely published in the philosophy of mind and action, ethics, the theory of values and philosophy of religion.

Kane is one of the leading contemporary philosophers on free will. Advocating what is termed within philosophy "libertarian freedom", Kane argues that "(1) the existence of alternative possibilities (or the agent's power to do otherwise) is a necessary condition for acting freely, and (2) determinism is not compatible with alternative possibilities (it precludes the power to do otherwise)" (Oxford Handbook of Free Will, page 11). It is important to note, however, that the real crux of Kane's position of indeterministic free will is grounded not in a defense of alternative possibilities (AP), but rather in the notion of what Kane refers to as ultimate responsibility (UR). Thus, AP is a necessary but insufficient criterium for free will.

Ultimate responsibility means that agents must be the ultimate creators (or originators) and sustainers of their own ends and purposes. As Kane defines it,

UR: An agent is ultimately responsible for some (event or state) E's occurring only if (R) the agent is personally responsible for E's occurring in a sense which entails that something the agent voluntarily (or willingly) did or omitted either was, or causally contributed to, E's occurrence and made a difference to whether or not E occurred; and (U) for every X and Y (where X and Y represent occurrences of events and/or states) if the agent is personally responsible for X and if Y is and arche (sufficient condition, cause or motive) for X, then the agent must also be personally responsible for Y.

What allows for ultimacy of creation in Kane's picture are what he refers to as "self-forming actions" or SFAs. These SFAs are the undetermined, regress stopping voluntary actions or refrainings in the life histories of agents that are required for UR. UR does not require that every act done of our own free will be undetermined, and thus that for every act or choice we could have done otherwise. Rather, UR requires only that certain of our choices and actions be undetermined (and thus we could have done otherwise); namely, SFAs. Such SFAs form our character, or nature; they inform or future choices, reasons, and motivations in action.

In defending libertarian freedom Kane opposes many modern philosophers, most notably Daniel Dennett.