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  1. Review of "Free Will and Modern Science", R. Swinburne , 2011. [REVIEW]Markus Schlosser - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (4):463-466.
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  • Why the luck problem isn't.Manuel Vargas - 2012 - Philosophical Issues 22 (1):419-436.
    The Luck Problem has existed in one form or another since David Hume, at least. It is perhaps as old as Stoic objections to the Epicurean swerve. Although the general issue admits of different formulations with subtly different emphases, the characterization of it that will serve as my target focuses on “cross-worlds” luck, a kind of luck that arises when the decision-making of agents is indeterministic.
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  • The Physiognomy of Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Neal A. Tognazzini - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2):381-417.
    Our aim in this paper is to put the concept of moral responsibility under a microscope. At the lowest level of magnification, it appears unified. But Gary Watson has taught us that if we zoom in, we will find that moral responsibility has two faces: attributability and accountability. Or, to describe the two faces in different terms, there is a difference between being responsible and holding responsible. It is one thing to talk about the connection the agent has with her (...)
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  • Recent work on free will and moral responsibility.Neil Levy & Michael McKenna - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (1):96-133.
    In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...)
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  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
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  • Moral responsibility.Andrew Eshleman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...)
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  • Moral responsibility—what is all the Fuss about?Kenton Machina - 2007 - Acta Analytica 22 (1):29-47.
    Examination of several accounts regarding the nature of moral responsibility allows the extraction of a conceptual core common to all of them. Relying on that core conception of moral responsibility, the paper explores what human life without moral responsibility would be like. That exploration establishes that many robust forms of human relationship and nonmoral normativity could continue, absent moral responsibility, even if moral responsibility were abandoned on incompatibilist grounds. Much more importantly, it also establishes, contra Waller and Pereboom, that only (...)
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  • The demand and desert functions of moral judgment.Wesley Buckwalter - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (7):1015-1035.
    This paper assesses two accounts of what it means to have a moral responsibility. According to the desert account, moral responsibility amounts to deserving credit or blame for doing or failing to do things. According to an alternative theory, the demand account, moral responsibility amounts to being subject to a moral requirement, such as an obligation or duty. On this account, moral responsibility identifies the presence of a moral demand that may or may not be accompanied by desert. Experiments are (...)
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  • Free Will and Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2022 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), A Companion to Free Will. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 378-392.
    Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter explicates and (...)
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  • Responsibility: the State of the Question Fault Lines in the Foundations.David Shoemaker - 2020 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 58 (2):205-237.
    Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".
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  • Free Will, Self‐Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck.Kristin M. Mickelson - 2019 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1):224-256.
    *As mentioned in Peter Coy's NYT essay "When Being Good Is Just a Matter of Being Lucky" (2023) -/- ----- -/- How is the problem of free will related to the problem of moral luck? In this essay, I answer that question and outline a new solution to the paradox of moral luck, the source-paradox solution. This solution both explains why the paradox arises and why moral luck does not exist. To make my case, I highlight a few key connections (...)
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  • Understanding Moral Responsibility within the Context of the Free Will Debate.Stephen G. Morris - 2012 - Florida Philosophical Review 12 (1):68-82.
    Since philosophers generally agree that free will is understood partly by the relation it holds to moral responsibility, achieving a better understanding of free will requires that we have a clear idea of the sort of moral responsibility to which free will is thought to be connected. I argue that examining the substantive differences that exist between compatibilists and incompatibilists reveals a specific notion of moral responsibility that is best suited for philosophical debates regarding free will. Upon examination, it becomes (...)
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  • Responsibility Beyond Belief: The Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility.Christopher Michael Cloos - 2018 - Dissertation,
    In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.
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  • Constitutive Moral Luck and Strawson's Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.Robert J. Hartman - 2018 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (2):165-183.
    Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson gives for the (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility, Voluntary Control, and Intentional Action.Kyle G. Fritz - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (4):831-855.
    Many theorists writing about moral responsibility accept that voluntary control is necessary for responsibility. Call such theorists volitionists. Recently, volitionism has been called into question by theorists I call nonvolitionists. Yet neither volitionists nor nonvolitionists have carefully articulated a clear volitionist thesis, nor have they sufficiently explained the concept of voluntary control that somehow seems connected to volitionism. I argue that attempts to explain the volitionist thesis, voluntary control, and their relation are more problematic than have previously been recognized. Instead, (...)
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  • Is Ultimate Moral Responsibility Metaphysically Impossible? A Bergsonian Critique of Galen Strawson's Argument.Mark Ian Thomas Robson - 2017 - Philosophy 92 (4):519-538.
    What I want to do in this essay is examine a notorious argument put forward by Galen Strawson. He advocates what he describes as an a priori argument against the possibility of ultimate (moral) responsibility. There have been many attempts at answering Strawson, but whether they have been successful is debatable. I attempt to employ Henri Bergson's approach to the free will debate and assess whether what he says has any purchase in terms of criticism of Strawson's position. I conclude (...)
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  • Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
    Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics (...)
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  • Buddhist Meditation and the Possibility of Freedom.Rick Repetti - 2016 - Science, Religion and Culture 2 (2):81-98.
    I argue that if the claims Buddhist philosophy makes about meditation virtuosos are plausible, then Buddhism may rebut most of the strongest arguments for free will skepticism found in Western analytic philosophy, including the hard incompatiblist's argument (which combines the arguments for hard determinism, such as the consequence argument, with those for hard indeterminism, such as the randomness argument), Pereboom's manipulation argument, and Galen Strawson's impossibility argument. The main idea is that the meditation virtuoso can cultivate a level of mind (...)
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  • The implications of rejecting free will: An empirical analysis.Stephen Morris - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (2):299-321.
    While skeptical arguments concerning free will have been a common element of philosophical discourse for thousands of years, one could make the case that such arguments have never been more numerous or forceful than at present. In response to these skeptical attacks, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concern that the widespread acceptance of such skeptical attitudes could have devastating social consequences. In this paper, I set out to address whether such concerns are well-founded. I argue that there is reason (...)
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  • Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument.Michael Anthony Istvan - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (3):399-420.
    Against its prominent compatiblist and libertarian opponents, I defend Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. Against John Martin Fischer, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that an agent can be responsible for an action only if he is responsible for every factor contributing to that action. Against Alfred Mele and Randolph Clarke, I argue that it is absurd to believe that an agent can be responsible for an action when no (...)
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  • Compatibilism and Retributivist Desert Moral Responsibility: On What is of Central Philosophical and Practical Importance.Gregg D. Caruso & Stephen G. Morris - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (4):837-855.
    Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense :5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144:45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk Pereboom (...)
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  • Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Behavior: A Public Health-Quarantine Model.Gregg D. Caruso - 2016 - Southwest Philosophy Review 32 (1):25-48.
    One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justified are insufficient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The first is that one of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifications that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per (...)
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  • The Manipulation Argument, At the Very Least, Undermines Classical Compatibilism.Yishai Cohen - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (2):291-307.
    The compatibility of determinism and the ability to do otherwise has been implicitly assumed by many to be irrelevant to the viability of compatibilist responses to the manipulation argument for incompatibilism. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. The manipulation argument may be unsound. But even so, the manipulation argument, at the very least, undermines classical compatibilism, the view that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, and having that ability is compatible with determinism. This is because classical compatibilism, (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility and Foundationalism.Stephen Kershnar - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (2):381-402.
    If an individual is morally responsible, then there is a responsibility-foundation that makes him morally responsible, but there is no responsibility-foundation that makes him responsible. This rested on the notion that if there were a responsibility-foundation, it would be either an ungrounded choice or an ungrounded character state and that neither can serve as the foundation. The paper then considered three types of objections. First, moral responsibility does not require a responsibility-foundation. Second, a character state can serve as the foundation. (...)
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  • Character-development and heaven.Luke Henderson - 2014 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (3):319-330.
    Numerous philosophers in recent decades have argued that a partial explanation for how the blessed in heaven are impeccable while remaining free and responsible is that they have cultivated or developed such a virtuous character prior to heaven that once in heaven they are incapable of acting contrary to their virtuously cultivated characters. Further, because the agents are at least partially responsible for the construction of their characters, they can be considered free and responsible with regard to the choices or (...)
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  • Nietzsche's Constructive Philosophy: Self-understanding and the Sovereign Individual.Walter Duhaime - unknown
    There is an apparent disagreement between recent commentators who find in Nietzsche both a constructive philosophy and a compatibilist account of freedom, and Brian Leiter’s reading that rejects both. The reason for this disagreement, I argue, is that Leiter’s “illiberal” view is limited in scope to Nietzsche’s critical philosophy, while Nietzsche also has a constructive philosophy aimed at select readers. I read Nietzsche’s critical philosophy as targeting the metaphysical entities that underpin asceticism and herd values, not the mental states and (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Buffered Alternatives.Matthew Paskell - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy:1-26.
    Frankfurt-style cases challenge the intuitively plausible “Principle of Alternative Possibilities” (pap), which claims that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise. Most such cases have familiar responses by defenders of the pap, most notably the “dilemma defense” levied against traditional Frankfurt-style cases. However, one particular style – buffered alternatives cases – are even more challenging. The ingenuity of these cases lies in the introduction of a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for doing otherwise, which acts as a buffer between the agent and (...)
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  • Two Arguments for Impossiblism and Why It isn’t Impossible to Refute them.Joseph Corabi - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (2):569-584.
    This paper examines two arguments against the possibility of moral responsibility—the first directly from the work of Galen Strawson and the next inspired by Strawson’s argument. Both of these arguments are found wanting, and their shortcomings are used as a springboard to sketch a positive libertarian view of moral responsibility and defend that view against preliminary objections.
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  • Whose Argumentative Burden, which Incompatibilist Arguments?—Getting the Dialectic Right.Michael McKenna - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):429-443.
    Kadri Vihvelin has recently argued that between compatibilists and incompatibilists, the incompatibilists have a greater dialectical burden than compatibilists. According to her, both must show that free will is possible, but beyond this the incompatibilists must also show that no deterministic worlds are free will worlds. Thus, according to Vihvelin, so long as it is established that free will is possible, all the compatibilist must do is show that the incompatibilists' arguments are ineffective. I resist Vihvelin's assessment of the dialectical (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility as Guiltworthiness.A. P. Duggan - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2):291-309.
    It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, (...)
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  • It wasn’t up to Jones: unavoidable actions and intensional contexts in Frankfurt examples.Seth Shabo - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (3):379-399.
    In saying that it was up to someone whether or not she acted as she did, we are attributing a distinctive sort of power to her. Understanding such power attributions is of broad importance for contemporary discussions of free will. Yet the ‘is up to…whether’ locution and its cognates have largely escaped close examination. This article aims to elucidate one of its unnoticed features, namely that such power attributions introduce intensional contexts, something that is easily overlooked because the sentences that (...)
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