Robert Kane

Robert Kane is discussed as a defender of free will whose account seeks a foundational act capable of stopping the regress of decisions. The book uses Daniel Dennett’s critique of this proposal to distinguish responsibility for action from the search for a single, empirically locatable moment of pure freedom.

Kane’s Regress-Stopping Act

Kane’s argument, as presented here, begins from the thought that responsibility requires some actions in an agent’s life history not to have been settled in advance by the agent’s predominant motives and will. Otherwise, each decision would inherit its determination from earlier decisions, leaving no point at which the agent could be held responsible in a genuinely free sense. Kane therefore looks for a “regress-stopper”: a founding free act that grounds the series of choices.

The difficulty, the book argues, is that this demand seems to require a decision that interrupts the causal chain without itself being explained by the agent’s prior motives and will. Dennett’s critique compares the search to the paradox of the “primal mammal”: if every mammal must have a mammal for a mother, the attempt to identify a first mammal appears to make mammals impossible. In the parallel case, the demand for a first free act threatens to make freedom depend on an origin that cannot be found within the history of actual decisions.

Luther as a Test Case

Kane’s appeal to Martin Luther gives the problem a historical illustration. Luther’s declaration, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” followed the posting of his theses against the Pope and helped trigger the Protestant Reformation. The book asks whether this defiant act was free if Luther experienced it as something he could not avoid.

On the regress-stopper account, Luther’s act would count as free only if earlier choices grounding it were themselves choices he could have made otherwise. But the text finds no such path-breaking points in the past: looking backward through decisions does not reveal a moment that magically breaks the causal sequence. Luther’s example thus makes visible the difficulty in treating freedom as a special, purely free decision buried somewhere among a person’s empirical choices.

Responsibility Without a Pure Origin

The book’s response is not to locate the missing act further back in time. It argues instead that responsibility can attach to the subject’s role in the very constellation of circumstances in which a particular choice appears inevitable. On this account, Luther need not have previously experienced a series of decisions as moments when he could simply have done otherwise; he can still be responsible for the constellation in which his action took the form of “I cannot do otherwise.”

This shifts the question from whether an isolated decision can be found outside the causal history of the agent to whether the subject is responsible for the conditions under which a decision becomes necessary. Kane’s regress-stopping proposal serves as the point of departure for that distinction: the book rejects the need to discover a pure origin among empirical acts, while retaining the question of how freedom and responsibility belong to the subject.