Roderick Chisholm and others in the agent-causation tradition argue that moral responsibility requires the agent to be the originating cause of her action in a way that entails she could have done otherwise.

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Key Terms

Could have done otherwise(as a key requirement for free will): The idea that in a given situation, you had the real ability to choose a different action than the one you actually chose.
Originating cause(as what the agent must be according to agent-causation): A cause that starts something new rather than just passing along a chain of causes; the ultimate source or starter of an action.
Roderick Chisholm(as referenced by name in the statement): A 20th-century American philosopher known for developing detailed theories about knowledge, justified belief, and how much evidence we need to believe something.
agent-causation(Philosophy of action): An unanalyzed notion of causation in which the agent as a substance (rather than mental events) is taken to be the cause of action; contrasted with event-causal accounts.

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moral responsibility(The author argues for a pluralistic understanding rather than a Kantian-exclusive one)

A normative concept whose scope is contested; the passage implies it encompasses at least Kantian notions (centered on individual rational agency) and other notions (potentially sociological, collective, or non-individualist in character)

Roderick Chisholm and others in the agent-causation tradition argue that moral responsibility requires the agent to be the originating cause of her action in a way that entails she could have done otherwise.

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