Libertarianism as a Naturalistic Position

There is a rather thinly-veiled suspicion amongst some compatibilists that libertarians are able to embrace their claims about the nature of the human will only in virtue of a general readiness to suppose that human beings occupy a very special place within the order of nature. This readiness, they imagine, is borne of an assumption that many of those compatibilists eschew – the assumption that the universe is theistic and that an omniscient and benevolent god has provided for human beings to be specially positioned within it. Though the world might conceivably be indeterministic, these compatibilists believe, there is no scientifically acceptable ground for supposing that the indeterminism involved might be of such a kind as to provide for anything like freedom of the will – and they are therefore wary and mistrustful of the libertarian’s willingness to accept that the will itself might be the locus (at least on some occasions) of an indeterministic form of operation. To accept this, without taking oneself to have other grounds for embracing the idea that the powers of human beings need not be rooted in ordinary sorts of physics and metaphysics, seems to them wildly unmotivated; it is therefore inferred that probably, their libertarian opponents do believe themselves to have such other grounds. But I am both a libertarian and an atheist. In this paper, therefore, I defend libertarianism against the charge that it flies in the face of what we know or are justified in believing about the order of nature – and indeed, try to make out the beginnings of a case for the view that libertarianism should, on the contrary, be regarded as the position of choice for those who take their science seriously.