Robert Kane

Robert Kane became the most influential late-twentieth-century defender of libertarian free will because he understood that the traditional debate had become too blunt. Determinism, he argued, was not the only alternative to freedom, and randomness was not the only threat. In The Significance of Free Will, he tried to carve out a third space: a world in which human beings could be genuinely self-determining without becoming little islands of metaphysical exception. His central invention was the idea of self-forming actions, moments of inner conflict in which a person’s agency is not bypassed by causal necessity but tested by it.

That idea reveals something important about Kane’s psychology. He was not simply defending an abstract theory; he was defending a moral image of the person. He wanted responsibility to mean more than the appearance of choice. A human being, in his view, is forged in tension, in the place where contrary motives collide and the self must do more than register preference. Kane’s philosophical temperament was therefore both stern and hopeful. Stern, because he refused to let responsibility dissolve into mechanism. Hopeful, because he believed ordinary life already contains the raw material of freedom: hesitation, temptation, divided loyalties, and the effort to become better than one’s impulses.

This is what gave his work its force. Kane did not imagine liberty as a rare miracle reserved for saints or geniuses. He made it intimate and quotidian. The crucial act may be the one that feels least majestic: the moment someone resists anger, chooses honesty over convenience, or persists in a difficult moral struggle. For Kane, such episodes are not merely evidence of character; they are the workshop in which character is made. His philosophy therefore appeals to people who feel, with some reason, that they are not finished beings but ongoing projects.

Yet the very elegance of Kane’s account also exposes its strain. His defenders often praise the dignity it grants to agency, but critics have long noticed the cost: if the outcome is not predetermined, then what ensures that the agent truly controls which side prevails? Kane’s answer is that control belongs to the whole effortful process, not to a guaranteed result. The self is responsible because it wrestles, chooses, and makes itself through struggle. That is a powerful reply, but it also reveals his deepest commitment: he was willing to accept a degree of metaphysical risk in order to preserve the moral seriousness of choice.

The emotional engine behind Kane’s project seems to have been distrust of any philosophy that makes persons too passive. He treated freedom as something earned in exertion, not bestowed by luck or explained away by physics. The cost of that conviction falls on both sides. To others, it can make moral life feel more burdensome, because it insists that our failures are not only unfortunate but authored. To Kane himself, it may have carried the burden of never being able to give a final, comforting proof that freedom exists exactly as we feel it. What he offered instead was a hard-won vision: that the struggle to become oneself is not an illusion, but the very substance of a human life.