Should Kane Abandon the Symmetry of Efforts of Will
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
An agent’s efforts of will have long been at the centre of Robert Kane’s influential account of libertarian free will. For several decades it has been a crucial part of his theory that there is a symmetry to these efforts. That is, Kane has long maintained that an agent engaged in an undetermined choice makes a simultaneous and sustained effort to choose and to choose otherwise. In a recent paper Kane abandons this symmetry. I outline and evaluate this change in Kane’s theory. I begin by explaining how Kane’s theory has changed from a symmetric to an asymmetric account of undetermined free choices. I then explore the philosophical benefits of adopting an asymmetric account by considering its implications for the explanatory luck objection, the phenomenological objection, and the objection that engaging in dual efforts of will involves an unacceptable form of irrationality. Finally, I argue that despite these benefits, Kane’s asymmetric model opens the door to a more pervasive worry about luck and it gives up something most libertarians want: the unconditional ability to choose otherwise. Given these points, I conclude the cost of abandoning the symmetric account of efforts of will is excessively high.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it