Libertarian Free Will

Philosophical libertarianism (unrelated to the political kind) insists that free will requires genuine alternatives — you could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances. This view is intuitive but faces a dilemma.

If your actions are determined by prior causes, you could not have done otherwise. If they contain a random element, that randomness is not under your control. Neither determinism nor randomness produces genuine agency. So some libertarians appeal to quantum indeterminacy, while others invoke agent causation — the self as an uncaused cause.