Editing Daniel Dennett (section)

===Free will vs Determinism===
While he was a confirmed [[Compatibilism|compatibilist]] on [[free will]], in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—chapter 15 of his 1978 book ''[[Brainstorms]]''<ref>''Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology'', MIT Press (1981), pp. 286–99.</ref>—Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to [[Libertarianism (metaphysics)|libertarian]] views.

{{blockquote|The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.<ref>''Brainstorms'', p. 295</ref>}}

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including [[William James]], [[Henri Poincaré]], [[Arthur Compton]], and [[Henry Margenau]], Dennett defended this model for the following reasons:

{{blockquote|
# First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
# Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
# Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
# A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
# Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
# Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.
}}

{{blockquote|These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.<ref>''Brainstorms'', pp. 295–97</ref>}}

Leading libertarian philosophers such as [[Robert Kane (philosopher)|Robert Kane]] have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, [[Moral character|character]] and [[Value (personal and cultural)|values]], and feelings and [[Desire (emotion)|desires]]. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

{{blockquote|[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control ''after'' the chance considerations have occurred.}}
{{blockquote|But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is ''determined'' by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the ''libertarian'' sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.<ref>Robert Kane, ''A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will'', Oxford (2005) pp. 64–65</ref>}}