Dilemma true, dilemma false? A critical issue in the free will debate

One of the most common arguments against libertarian free will consists of the suggestion that a decision that was not causally determined must therefore be random and therefore not rationally decided. Carlos J. Moya expresses the gist of the argument well:

Ultimate control involves two aspects, namely ultimacy of source and rational cum volitional control. And it would seem that this condition is incompatible with either determinism or indeterminism. Determinism may allow for rational cum volitional control, but not for ultimacy of source, for, with the possible exception of a first, uncaused cause, there are no ultimate sources or origins in a deterministic world. Indeterminism, in turn, allows for events, such as choices, that, being undetermined, can play the role of fresh, ultimate origins or causes, but now it seems that these ultimate causes cannot be under the agent’s rational cum volitional control. If these events, say choices, are explained by previously existent reasons, they can be rational but hardly ultimate causes; and if they are not so explained, they can be ultimate but not rationally controlled causes.

("Belief and Moral Responsibility")

Frankly, I don't see the dilemma. I think it rests on false assumptions.

The main false assumption involves mistaking outcomes with a probabilistic or even random distribution as owing to chance. But that does not appear to remotely follow. LFW models predict probabilistic mapping of outcomes regardless of the degree of rationality for a given decision. For example, "Cindy" might choose any of Bresler's 33 flavors in a LFW scenario. If she picks each one an equal number of times during an infinite number of trials, the random distribution does not necessarily indicate that her choices were randomly caused. There is, after all, no ontological Luck entity. It simply indicates that Cindy's desire for particular ice cream flavors at a given moment map to a random distribution. And if her decision was always for vanilla in a LFW scenario neither would it establish that her decisions were causally determined, since correlation does not establish causation.

The second false assumption involves the notion that causal determinism serves as sort of tell-tale for rationality. Certainly not that determinism equates with rationality--we see enough stupid acts every day that the determinism=rationality hypothesis would be immediately falsified. So what accounts for the view expressed by Moya and held by others that "(d)eterminism may allow for rational cum volitional control"? I believe they tend to look at outcomes judged as rational in retrospect and grade the decision as rational on that basis--but is that a legitimate method?

I don't think it is. Compatibilists tend not to see the will (that is, consciousness) as the driving force behind decisions. They describe the will as an emergent phenomenon that has its origin in some particular alignment of matter, and the emergent phenomenon is logically after the alignment of matter. Many if not most compatibilists would think it fair to say that the will is caused by matter, and on that basis I would assert that it is a step in the causal chain that might as well be absent. There is no real need for consciousness in a deterministic world made up of matter alone. Rationality, then, is judged arbitrarily after the fact rather than serving as a principled tool of the emergent consciousness. By analogy, the unconscious tree does not move the rock by employing a wedge or a lever. It simply put down a root and the rock happened to move as a result.

This tack by compatibilists and LFW skeptics tries to turn the very goal of LFW models into a liability. Once outcomes are not causally determined, the skeptic may automatically proclaim them "chance" and therefore non-rational. LFW skeptic (philosopher) Galen Strawson at least acknowledges that the consistency of causally determined outcomes serves as no escape, but that results in making "chance" irrelevant to the discussion. Once luck has swallowed everything it loses any explanatory value. We either work on dividing luck up into useful categories or discard it from a discussion in which it no longer serves a purpose. I would suggest that the sure outcomes of a given scenario repeated endless times is a useful category of luck, and equally so an indeterministic outcome of 80/20.

Moya's paper provides another handy exemplar of the skeptical argument while discussing an example of a decision according to philosopher Robert Kane's "ultimate responsibility" framework:

(I)f the agent confronts the choice with a meta-criterion, her will is not unsettled and the choice cannot be truly self-forming.

Moya's reasoning appears to dismiss the fact that there are often multiple rational ways to arrive at decisions. If the subject chooses meta-criterion A 75 percent of the time and meta-criterion B 15 percent of the time, it simply does not follow that her will is unsettled in any relevant sense. Nor does it follow that either A or B is a non-rational course of action. With that outcome distribution the decision is indeterministic by definition and the choices are appropriately judged as to rationality not according to the distribution of outcomes but based on the reasoning they represent.

The LFW skeptic is not entitled to the assumption that a probabilistic distribution of outcomes equates with a non-rational process. Let him prove the point if he requires it for his overall argument.