Divine simplicity and responsibility for creation

Libertarians believes something like this:

1. If an agent has primary responsibility for a state of affairs A, then the agent gained that resposibility by intentionally indeterministically causing A.

Here, primary responsibility is distinguished from the kind of derivative responsibility that someone who freely got drunk (and hence has primary responsibility for getting drunk) has for the accident caused while drunk.

Next, add this plausible thesis:

2. If an agent gains primary responsibility for a state of affairs A by intentionally causing A, then the agent has primary responsibility for an intention relevantly connected to A.

Now, combine (1) and (2). Suppose Alice has primary responsibility for A. Then she had an intention I = I₁ relevantly connected to A that she had primary responsibility for. Applying (1) and (2) to I₁, we conclude that Alice had primary responsibility for an intention I₂ relevantly connected to I, and primary responsibility for an intention I₃ relevantly connected to I₂, and so on, ad infinitum.

But of course we don’t have an infinite chain of intentions. So we must break out of the chain. I think there is only one way to do so: at some point, I_n = I_n + 1. In other words, the intention relevantly connected to I_n just is I_n once again: there is no further intention. Rather, one’s intention to produce I_n is just constituted by I_n.

This means that it is possible for one to be primarily responsible for a state of affairs A—say an intention I_n—when the intention with which one caused A is itself at least partly constituted by A.

Now, I take it that something like this is what happens when a simple God creates something: God’s intention to create horses is partly constituted by horses, rather than simply by some inner state of God’s.

There is a lesson here: The primary worry that one has about a simple God’s contingently creating things—namely, that a simple God cannot have contingent inner states—is mirrored by a parallel worry about a libertarian agent’s production of intentions.