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The Non-Reality of Free Will

New York: Oxford University Press (1990)

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  1. Let's Not Do Responsibility Skepticism.Ken M. Levy - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (3):458-73.
    I argue for three conclusions. First, responsibility skeptics are committed to the position that the criminal justice system should adopt a universal nonresponsibility excuse. Second, a universal nonresponsibility excuse would diminish some of our most deeply held values, further dehumanize criminals, exacerbate mass incarceration, and cause an even greater number of innocent people (nonwrongdoers) to be punished. Third, while Saul Smilansky's ‘illusionist’ response to responsibility skeptics – that even if responsibility skepticism is correct, society should maintain a responsibility‐realist/retributivist criminal justice (...)
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  • The Conceptual Foundation of Morality.Gal Yehezkel - 2021 - Springer.
    This book offers a solution to the ancient philosophical problem regarding the nature and the justification of morality. The importance of this subject matter is obvious, not merely as an abstract philosophical problem, but perhaps even more as a practical challenge, regarding the way we ought to live our lives: the values that ought to direct us, and the ends that we ought to pursue. -/- In the course of this inquiry, a wide array of philosophical topics is explored: the (...)
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  • Free Will in Human Behavior and Physics.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Labor and Social Relations 30 (6):185-196.
    If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world shares the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly a certain goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which the aim can be achieved or not by the one who determines the target. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will unlike a human possessing both. Consequently, and paradoxically, (...)
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  • Why Compatibilists Must Be Internalists.Taylor W. Cyr - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (4):473-484.
    Some compatibilists are internalists. On their view, whether an agent is morally responsible for an action depends only on her psychological structure at that time. Other compatibilists are externalists. On their view, an agent’s history can make a difference as to whether or not she is morally responsible. In response to worries about manipulation, some internalists have claimed that compatibilism requires internalism. Recently, Alfred Mele has argued that this internalist response is untenable. The aim of this paper is to vindicate (...)
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  • Agent Causation and Free Will: a Case for Libertarianism.Thad Botham - 2017 - In Lenny Clapp (ed.), Philosophy for Us. Cognella. pp. 49-58.
    Some people endorse a view called incompatibilism, which states that free will is incompatible with determinism. No free action could possibly be determined, they think. More informatively, incompatibilists think it is impossible that someone’s freely acting be causally guaranteed to happen by things that occur before she freely acts. Some people hold a view called libertarianism, which states both that incompatibilism is true and that someone actually performs a free action. Other people reject incompatibilism. They hold to compatibilism, which is (...)
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  • The Metaphysical Irrelevance of the Compatibilism Debate (and, More Generally, of Conceptual Analysis).Mark Balaguer - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (1):1-24.
    It is argued here that the question of whether compatibilism is true is irrelevant to metaphysical questions about the nature of human decision‐making processes—for example, the question of whether or not humans have free will—except in a very trivial and metaphysically uninteresting way. In addition, it is argued that two other questions—namely, the conceptual‐analysis question of what free will is and the question that asks which kinds of freedom are required for moral responsibility—are also essentially irrelevant to metaphysical questions about (...)
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  • Moral responsibility and agents’ histories.Alfred Mele - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 142 (2):161-181.
    To what extent should an analysis of an agent’s being morally responsible for an action that he performed—especially a compatibilist analysis of this—be sensitive to the agent’s history? In this article, I give the issue a clearer focus than it tends to have in the literature, I lay some groundwork for an attempt to answer the question, and I motivate a partial but detailed answer.
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  • Free Will and Contextualism.Steven Rieber - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 129 (2):223-252.
    This paper proposes a contextualist solution to the puzzle about free will. It argues that the context-sensitivity of statements about freedom of the will follows from the correct analysis of these statements. Because the analysis is independently plausible, the contextualism is warranted not merely in virtue of its capacity to solve the puzzle.
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  • (1 other version)Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in Life (repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - In Masahiro Morioka (ed.), Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz. Journal of Philosophy of Life, Waseda University. pp. 228-278.
    A lengthy reply to 13 critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ collected in an e-book and reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_. The contributors are from a variety of philosophical traditions, including the Anglo-American, Continental and East Asian (especially Buddhist and Japanese) ones.
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  • The Two-Stage Solution to the Problem of Free Will.Robert O. Doyle - 2013 - In Antoine Suarez Peter Adams (ed.), Is Science Compatible with Free Will? Springer. pp. 235-254.
    Random noise in the neurobiology of animals allows for the generation of alternative possibilities for action. In lower animals, this shows up as behavioral freedom. Animals are not causally predetermined by prior events going back in a causal chain to the origin of the universe. In higher animals, randomness can be consciously invoked to generate surprising new behaviors. In humans, creative new ideas can be critically evaluated and deliberated. On reflection, options can be rejected and sent back for “second thoughts” (...)
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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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  • Freedom and Indoctrination.Michael Garnett - 2015 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2pt2):93-108.
    It has been alleged that compatibilists are committed to the view that agents act freely and responsibly even when subject to certain forms of radical manipulation. In this paper I identify and elucidate a form of compatibilist freedom, social autonomy, that is essential to understanding what is wrong with ordinary indoctrination and argue that it also holds the key to understanding what goes wrong in more fanciful manipulation cases.
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  • The Main Problem with USC Libertarianism.Levy Ken - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 105 (2):107-127.
    Libertarians like Robert Kane believe that indeterminism is necessaryfor free will. They think this in part because they hold both (1) thatmy being the ultimate cause of at least part of myself is necessary forfree will and (2) that indeterminism is necessary for this ``ultimateself-causation''. But seductive and intuitive as this ``USCLibertarianism'' may sound, it is untenable. In the end, nometaphysically coherent (not to mention empirically valid) conception ofultimate self-causation is available. So the basic intuition motivatingthe USC Libertarian is ultimately (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Willensfreiheit.Geert Keil - 2017 - Berlin: De Gruyter.
    Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neuere Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Ferner entwickelt der Autor eine eigene Position, die er 'fähigkeitsbasierten Libertarismus' nennt. Er widerspricht dem breiten philosophischen Konsens, dass jedenfalls eine Art von Freiheit mit einem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei, nämlich die Fähigkeit, sich unter gegebenen Bedingungen so oder anders zu entscheiden. Im Buch wird argumentiert, dass der libertarischen Freiheitsauffassung, die wir im Alltag alle teilen, bei näherer Betrachtung keine Tatschen (...)
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  • Morally Embedded Selves and Embedded Compatibilism.Guy Pinku - 2012 - Philosophica 85 (2):67-89.
    The principal argument suggested here is that we are all morally embedded selves: We have no control over the abilities that make us moral agents nor can we control the degree to which we have these abilities; in other words, we are not responsible for our good or bad qualities as moral agents. This, I believe, calls for the adoption of embedded compatibilism (EC). According to EC, people have control over their conduct; this control, however, is embedded within prerequisites, which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?Jason Turner, Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris & Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):28-53.
    Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...)
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  • Free will and the unconscious precursors of choice.Markus E. Schlosser - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):365-384.
    Benjamin Libet's empirical challenge to free will has received a great deal of attention and criticism. A standard line of response has emerged that many take to be decisive against Libet's challenge. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that this standard response fails to put the challenge to rest. It fails, in particular, to address a recent follow-up experiment that raises a similar worry about free will (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). In the second part, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Equal Opportunity or Equal Social Outcome?Marc Fleurbaey - 1995 - Economics and Philosophy 11 (1):25.
    John Rawls's work has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality, and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how (...)
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  • Farewell to the luck (and Mind) argument.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (2):199-230.
    In this paper I seek to defend libertarianism about free will and moral responsibility against two well-known arguments: the luck argument and the Mind argument. Both of these arguments purport to show that indeterminism is incompatible with the degree of control necessary for free will and moral responsibility. I begin the discussion by elaborating these arguments, clarifying important features of my preferred version of libertarianism—features that will be central to an adequate response to the arguments—and showing why a strategy of (...)
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  • Epistemology.Matthias Steup - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...)
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  • On being one's own person.D. Meyerson - 1998 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (4):447-466.
    The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical account of our sense that some people are more their own person than others. I begin by exposing the weaknesses in three possible accounts, which I label the "interventionist", the "existentialist" and the "ideal" accounts. I then go on to argue that the distinguishing feature of those who are their own person is that their natural inclinations are accurately expressed in their behaviour.
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  • On the importance of history for responsible agency.Manuel Vargas - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (3):351-382.
    In this article I propose a resolution to the history issue for responsible agency, given a moderate revisionist approach to responsibility. Roughly, moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and normatively adequate theory of responsibility will require principled departures from commonsense thinking. The history issue is whether morally responsible agency – that is, whether an agent is an apt target of our responsibility-characteristic practices and attitudes – is an essentially historical notion. Some have maintained that responsible agents must have (...)
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  • Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Jason Turner - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (5):561-584.
    Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...)
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  • Cogs in a Cosmic Machine: A Defense of Free Will Skepticism and its Ethical Implications.Sacha Greer - unknown
    Free will skepticism denies that humans possess the type of freedom required for moral responsibility (FMR). While not the most popular position in scientific, philosophical, or mainstream communities, I contend that this lack of acceptance is due not to flaws inherent in the position, but to misconceptions concerning its ethical and practical implications. In my dissertation, I endorse free will skepticism, beginning with a refutation of contrary positions, followed by a response to objections, and ending with a defense of social (...)
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  • Cross-world luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists as well.Mirja Pérez de Calleja - 2014 - Philosophical Explorations 17 (2):112-125.
    (2014). Cross-world luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists as well. Philosophical Explorations: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 112-125. doi: 10.1080/13869795.2014.912673.
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  • Merit, fit, and basic desert.Daniel Haas - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (2):226-239.
    Basic desert is central to the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists over the four-case manipulation argument. I argue that there are two distinct ways of understanding the desert salient to moral responsibility; moral desert can be understood as a claim about fitting responses to an agent or as a claim about the merit of the agent. Failing to recognize this distinction has contributed to a stalemate between both sides. I suggest that recognizing these distinct approaches to moral desert will help (...)
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  • Manipulation, Moral Responsibility, and Bullet Biting.Alfred R. Mele - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (3):167-184.
    This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behind the zygote argument. The malady known as “intuition deficit disorder” is also discussed.
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  • Defending nonhistorical compatibilism: A reply to Haji and cuypers1.Michael McKenna - 2012 - Philosophical Issues 22 (1):264-280.
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  • Re-examining Frankfurt Cases.Robert Allen - 1997 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (3):363-376.
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  • Doxastic freedom.Matthias Steup - 2008 - Synthese 161 (3):375-392.
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  • A metacompatibilist account of free will: Making compatibilists and incompatibilist more compatible.Bruce N. Waller - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 112 (3):209-224.
    The debate over free will has pittedlibertarian insistence on open alternativesagainst the compatibilist view that authenticcommitments can preserve free will in adetermined world. A second schism in the freewill debate sets rationalist belief in thecentrality of reason against nonrationalistswho regard reason as inessential or even animpediment to free will. By looking deeperinto what motivates each of these perspectivesit is possible to find common ground thataccommodates insights from all those competingviews. The resulting metacompatibilist view offree will bridges some of the differencesbetween (...)
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  • Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love.N. L. Engel-Hawbecker - 2021 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 195-214.
    A central debate in the philosophy of love is whether people can love one another for good reasons. Reasons for love seem to help us sympathetically understand and evaluate love or even count as loving at all. But it can seem that if reasons for love existed, they could require forms of love that are presumably illicit. It might seem that only some form of wishful thinking would lead us to believe reasons for love could never do this. However, if (...)
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  • A Modest Historical Theory of Moral Responsibility.Michael McKenna - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3):83-105.
    Is moral responsibility essentially historical? Consider two agents qualitatively identical with respect to all of their nonhistorical properties just prior to the act of A-ing. Is it possible that, due only to differences in their respective histories, when each A-s only one A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so? Nonhistorical theorists say “no.” Historical theorists say “yes.” Elsewhere, I have argued on behalf of philosophers like Harry G. Frankfurt that nonhistorical theorists can resist the historical theorists’ case against (...)
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  • Agent-Causation, Explanation, and Akrasia: A Reply to Levy’s Hard Luck. [REVIEW]Christopher Evan Franklin - 2015 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 9 (4):753-770.
    I offer a brief review of, and critical response to, Neil Levy’s fascinating recent book Hard Luck, where he argues that no one is ever free or morally responsible not because of determinism or indeterminism, but because of luck. Two of Levy’s central arguments in defending his free will nihilism concern the nature and role of explanation in a theory of moral responsibility and the nature of akrasia. With respect to explanation, Levy argues that an adequate theory of moral responsibility (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility, Manipulation Arguments, and History: Assessing the Resilience of Nonhistorical Compatibilism. [REVIEW]Michael McKenna - 2012 - The Journal of Ethics 16 (2):145-174.
    Manipulation arguments for incompatibilism all build upon some example or other in which an agent is covertly manipulated into acquiring a psychic structure on the basis of which she performs an action. The featured agent, it is alleged, is manipulated into satisfying conditions compatibilists would take to be sufficient for acting freely. Such an example used in the context of an argument for incompatibilism is meant to elicit the intuition that, due to the pervasiveness of the manipulation, the agent does (...)
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  • Improving the Metaphysical Argument Against Free Will.Noel Hendrickson - 2007 - Philosophical Papers 36 (2):271-294.
    Galen Strawson and Saul Smilansky have offered a well-known argument that free will does not exist because the control involved is so robust that it would require influence over an infinite series of prior decisions. (Strawson 1986, 1994, 2002, Smilansky 2000, 2002) Unfortunately, while this metaphysical argument has attracted widespread attention, it has garnered few adherents. Thus, in order to improve the metaphysical argument against free will, I offer a new interpretation of the argument, its fundamental principle, and its relationship (...)
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  • On free will, responsibility and indeterminism: Responses to Clarke, Haji, and Mele.Robert Kane - 1999 - Philosophical Explorations 2 (2):105-121.
    This paper responds to three critical essays on my book, The Significance of Free Will(Oxford, 1996) by Randolph Clarke, Istiyaque Haji and Alfred Mele (which essays appear in this issue and an earlier issue of this journal). This response first explains crucial features of the theory of free will of the book, including the notion of ultimate responsibility.The paper then answers objections of Haji and Mele that the occurrence of undetermined choices would be matters of luck or chance, and so (...)
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  • Free will, chance, and mystery.Laura Ekstrom - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 113 (2):153-80.
    This paper proposes a reconciliation between libertarian freedomand causal indeterminism, without relying on agent-causation asa primitive notion. I closely examine Peter van Inwagen''s recentcase for free will mysterianism, which is based in part on thewidespread worry that undetermined acts are too chancy to befree. I distinguish three senses of the term chance I thenargue that van Inwagen''s case for free will mystrianism fails,since there is no single construal of the term change on whichall of the premises of his argument for (...)
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  • Global control and freedom.Bernard Berofsky - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (2):419-445.
    Several prominent incompatibilists, e.g., Robert Kane and Derk Pereboom, have advanced an analogical argument in which it is claimed that a deterministic world is essentially the same as a world governed by a global controller. Since the latter world is obviously one lacking in an important kind of freedom, so must any deterministic world. The argument is challenged whether it is designed to show that determinism precludes freedom as power or freedom as self-origination. Contrary to the claims of its adherents, (...)
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  • The Ethical Advantages of Free Will Subjectivism.Richard Double - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2):411-422.
    Adopting meta‐level Free Will Subjectivism is one among several ways to maintain that persons never experience moral freedom in their choices. The other ways of arguing against moral freedom I consider are presented by Saul Smilansky, Ted Honderich, Bruce Waller, Galen Strawson, and Derk Pereboom. In this paper, without arguing for the acceptance of free will subjectivism, I argue that subjectivism has some moral and theoretical advantages over its kindred theories.
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  • Subjective correlates and consequences of belief in free will.A. Will Crescioni, Roy F. Baumeister, Sarah E. Ainsworth, Michael Ent & Nathaniel M. Lambert - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (1):41-63.
    Four studies measured or manipulated beliefs in free will to illuminate how such beliefs are linked to other aspects of personality. Study 1 showed that stronger belief in free will was correlated with more gratitude, greater life satisfaction, lower levels of perceived life stress, a greater sense of self-efficacy, greater perceived meaning in life, higher commitment in relationships, and more willingness to forgive relationship partners. Study 2 showed that the belief in free will was a stronger predictor of life satisfaction, (...)
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  • Historicism, Non-historicism, or a Mix?Ishtiyaque Haji - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (3):185-204.
    This paper revisits the issue of whether responsibility is essentially historical. Roughly, the leading question here is this: Do ways in which we can acquire pertinent antecedents of action, such as beliefs, desires, and values, have an essential bearing on whether we are responsible for actions that are suitably related to these antecedents? I argue, first, that Michael McKenna’s interesting case for nonhistoricism is indecisive, and, second, his brand of modest historicism, while highly insightful, yields results concerning responsibility that ought (...)
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  • Epistemic issues in the free will debate: can we know when we are free?Scott Sehon - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (2):363-380.
    In this paper, I argue that the views of Robert Kane on the one hand and John Fischer and Mark Ravizza on the other both lead to the following conclusion: we should have very low confidence in our ability to judge that someone is acting freely or in a way for which they can be held responsible. This in turn means, I claim, that these views, in practice, collapse into a sort of hard incompatibilist position, or the position of a (...)
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  • What we can say about what we can do: A defense of the conditional analysis of 'can'.Jan Thomas - 1995 - Philosophical Papers 24 (3):167-182.
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  • Indeterminism and free agency: Three recent views.Timothy O'Connor - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3):499-26.
    It is a commonplace of philosophy that the notion of free will is a hard nut to crack. A simple, compelling argument can be made to show that behavior for which an agent is morally responsible cannot be the outcome of prior determining causal factors.1 Yet the smug satisfaction with which we incompatibilists are prone to trot out this argument has a tendency to turn to embarrassment when we're asked to explain just how it is that morally responsible action might (...)
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  • Neural holism and free will.Daniel A. Levy - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (2):205-228.
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  • (1 other version)A coherent, naturalistic, and plausible formulation of libertarian free will.Mark Balaguer - 2002 - Noûs 36 (3):379-406.
    Let libertarianism be the view that humans are capable of making decisions that are simultaneously undetermined and appropriately non-random. It’s often argued that this view is incoherent because indeterminacy entails randomness (of some appropriate kind). I argue here that the truth is just the opposite: the right kind of indeterminacy in our decisions actually entails appropriate non-randomness, so that libertarianism is coherent, and the question of whether it’s true reduces to the wide-open empirical question of whether certain of our decisions (...)
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  • The Principle of Rational Explanation Defended.Richard Double - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 31 (2):133-142.
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  • Flanagan and Cartesian Free Will: A Defense of Agent Causation.John Lemos - 2006 - Disputatio 2 (21):1 - 22.
    In a recent book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan discusses the Cartesian, or agent causation, view of free will. According to this view, when a person acts of his own free will his action is not caused by antecedent events but is caused by the agent himself, and in acting the agent acts as an uncaused cause. Flanagan argues at length that this view is false. In this article, I defend the agent causation view against Flanagan’s criticisms and (...)
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  • Neural holism and free will.Donald Levy - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (2):205-229.
    Both libertarian and compatibilist approaches have been unsuccessful in providing an acceptable account of free will. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, including the connectionist theory of mind and empirical findings regarding modularity and integration of brain functions, provide the basis for a new approach: neural holism. This approach locates free will in fully integrated behavior in which all of a person's beliefs and desires, implicitly represented in the brain, automatically contribute to an act. Deliberation, the experience of volition, and cognitive (...)
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