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Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mark Ravizza (1998)

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  1. Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility.D. Justin Coates & Philip Swenson - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):629-645.
    Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is appropriately (...)
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  • In Defense of Love Internalism.D. Justin Coates - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (3):233-255.
    In recent defenses of moral responsibility skepticism, which is the view that no human agents are morally responsible for their actions or character, a number of theorists have argued against Peter Strawson’s (and others’) claim that “the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other” would be undermined if we were not morally responsible agents. Among them, Derk Pereboom (2001, 2009) and Tamler Sommers (2007, 2012) most forcefully argue against this conception of (...)
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  • A Wholehearted Defense of Ambivalence.D. Justin Coates - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (4):419-444.
    Despite widespread agreement that ambivalence precludes agency “at its best,” in this paper I argue that ambivalence as such is no threat to one’s agency. In particular, against “unificationists” like Harry Frankfurt I argue that failing to be fully integrated as an agent, lacking purity of heart, or being less than wholehearted in one’s choices, tells us nothing about whether an agent’s will is properly functioning. Moreover, it will turn out that in many common circumstances, wholeheartedness with respect to some (...)
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  • Review of Walter Glannon, Bioethics and the Brain 1. [REVIEW]Thomas W. Clark - 2007 - American Journal of Bioethics 7 (5):59-60.
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  • Omissions, Responsibility, and Symmetry.Randolph Clarke - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (3):594-624.
    It is widely held that one can be responsible for doing something that one was unable to avoid doing. This paper focuses primarily on the question of whether one can be responsible for not doing something that one was unable to do. The paper begins with an examination of the account of responsibility for omissions offered by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, arguing that in many cases it yields mistaken verdicts. An alternative account is sketched that jibes with and (...)
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  • On an argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility.Randolph Clarke - 2005 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):13-24.
    Galen Strawson has published several versions of an argument to the effect that moral responsibility is impossible, whether determinism is true or not. Few philosophers have been persuaded by the argument, which Strawson remarks is often dismissed “as wrong, or irrelevant, or fatuous, or too rapid, or an expression of metaphysical megalomania.” I offer here a two-part explanation of why Strawson’s argument has impressed so few. First, as he usually states it, the argument is lacking at least one key premise. (...)
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  • Intentional omissions.Randolph Clarke - 2010 - Noûs 44 (1):158-177.
    It is argued that intentionally omitting requires having an intention with relevant content. And the intention must play a causal role with respect to one’s subsequent thought and conduct. Even if omissions cannot be caused, an account of intentional omission must be causal. There is a causal role for one’s reasons as well when one intentionally omits to do something.
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  • Free will, causation, and absence.Randolph Clarke - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1517-1524.
    This paper comments on Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free Will, challenging the non-modal conception of reasons-sensitivity that Sartorio advances.
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  • Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism.Randolph Clarke - 2009 - Mind 118 (470):323-351.
    This paper examines recent attempts to revive a classic compatibilist position on free will, according to which having an ability to perform a certain action is having a certain disposition. Since having unmanifested dispositions is compatible with determinism, having unexercised abilities to act, it is held, is likewise compatible. Here it is argued that although there is a kind of capacity to act possession of which is a matter of having a disposition, the new dispositionalism leaves unresolved the main points (...)
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  • Absence of action.Randolph Clarke - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):361-376.
    Often when one omits to do a certain thing, there's no action that is one's omission; one's omission, it seems, is an absence of any action of some type. This paper advances the view that an absence of an action--and, in general, any absence--is nothing at all: there is nothing that is an absence. Nevertheless, it can result from prior events that one omits to do a certain thing, and there can be results of the fact that one omits to (...)
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  • The Case of Jojo and Our Pretheoretical Intuitions: An Externalist Interpretation.Michelle Ciurria - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2):265-276.
    In their contribution to the Review of philosophy and psychology (19 March 2010), David Faraci and David Shoemaker object to Susan Wolf’s sane deep self view of moral responsibility, which is supposed to accord with our pretheoretical intuitions about deprived childhood victims better than the plain deep-self view. Wolf’s account hinges on the intuitiveness of a particular example, which asks us to consider JoJo, the son of an evil dictator of a small, undeveloped country who grows up to adopt his (...)
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  • Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. [REVIEW]Michelle Ciurria - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology (4):1-5.
    Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.749443.
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  • A Comparative Defense of Self-initiated Prospective Moral Answerability for Autonomous Robot harm.Marc Champagne & Ryan Tonkens - 2023 - Science and Engineering Ethics 29 (4):1-26.
    As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and robots approach autonomous decision-making, debates about how to assign moral responsibility have gained importance, urgency, and sophistication. Answering Stenseke’s (2022a) call for scaffolds that can help us classify views and commitments, we think the current debate space can be represented hierarchically, as answers to key questions. We use the resulting taxonomy of five stances to differentiate—and defend—what is known as the “blank check” proposal. According to this proposal, a person activating a robot could (...)
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  • Opportunity and Responsibility for Health.Eric Cavallero - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (4):369-386.
    Wealth and income are highly predictive of health and longevity. Egalitarians who maintain that this “socioeconomic-status gradient” in health is unjust are challenged by the fact that a significant component of it is owed to the higher prevalence of certain kinds of voluntary risk-taking among members of lower socioeconomic groups. Some egalitarians have argued that these apparently free personal choices are not genuinely free, and that those who make them should not be held morally responsible for the resulting harms to (...)
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  • False beliefs and naive beliefs: They can be good for you.Roberto Casati & Marco Bertamini - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):512-513.
    Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon.
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  • Free Will Skepticism and the Question of Creativity: Creativity, Desert, and Self-Creation.D. Caruso Gregg - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3.
    Free will skepticism maintains that what we do, and the way we are, is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense—the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame. In recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers have advanced and defended versions of free will skepticism, including Derk Pereboom (2001, 2014), Galen Strawson (2010), Neil Levy (2011), Bruce Waller (2011, (...)
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  • Free Will, Self-Governance and Neuroscience: An Overview.Alisa Carse, Hilary Bok & Debra J. H. Mathews - 2018 - Neuroethics 11 (3):237-244.
    Given dramatic increases in recent decades in the pace of scientific discovery and understanding of the functional organization of the brain, it is increasingly clear that engagement with the neuroscientific literature and research is central to making progress on philosophical questions regarding the nature and scope of human freedom and responsibility. While patterns of brain activity cannot provide the whole story, developing a deeper and more precise understanding of how brain activity is related to human choice and conduct is crucial (...)
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  • Blameworthiness as Deserved Guilt.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (1):89-115.
    It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...)
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  • Mitigating Soft Compatibilism.Justin A. Capes - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):640-663.
    According to what I will call mitigating soft compatibilism, although the truth of determinism is consistent with free action and moral responsibility, determinism nevertheless mitigates praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. In this paper, I take a closer look at this novel brand of compatibilism. My principal aim in doing so is to further explicate the view and to explore ways in which it can be deployed in defense of the more general compatibilist thesis. I also discuss one of the most pressing challenges (...)
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  • Incompatibilism and the transfer of non-responsibility.Justin A. Capes - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (6):1477-1495.
    Arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility sometimes make use of various transfer of non-responsibility principles. These principles purport to specify conditions in which lack of moral responsibility is transmitted to the consequences of things for which people are not morally responsible. In this paper, after developing what I take to be the most serious objections to extant principles of this sort, I identify and defend a new transfer of non-responsibility principle that is immune to these and other (...)
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  • Frankfurt cases: the fine-grained response revisited.Justin A. Capes & Philip Swenson - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):967-981.
    Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal to be said (...)
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  • Action, responsibility and the ability to do otherwise.Justin A. Capes - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (1):1-15.
    Here it is argued that in order for something someone “does” to count as a genuine action, the person needn’t have been able to refrain from doing it. If this is right, then two recent defenses of the principle of alternative possibilities, a version of which says that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have refrained from doing it, are unsuccessful.
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  • New Essays on the Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility.Joseph Keim Campbell - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (3-4):193 - 201.
    This is the introduction to a volume of new essays in the metaphysics of moral responsibility by John Martin Fischer, Carl Ginet, Ishtiyaque Haji, Alfred R. Mele, Derk Pereboom, Paul Russell, and Peter van Inwagen. I provide some background for the essays, cover the main debates in the metaphysics of moral responsibility, and emphasize some of the authors' contributions to this area of philosophy.
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  • Engineers’ Responsibilities for Global Electronic Waste: Exploring Engineering Student Writing Through a Care Ethics Lens.Ryan C. Campbell & Denise Wilson - 2017 - Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (2):591-622.
    This paper provides an empirically informed perspective on the notion of responsibility using an ethical framework that has received little attention in the engineering-related literature to date: ethics of care. In this work, we ground conceptual explorations of engineering responsibility in empirical findings from engineering student’s writing on the human health and environmental impacts of “backyard” electronic waste recycling/disposal. Our findings, from a purposefully diverse sample of engineering students in an introductory electrical engineering course, indicate that most of these engineers (...)
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  • The Prejudice of Freedom: an Application of Kripke’s Notion of a Prejudice to our Understanding of Free Will.James Cain - 2021 - Acta Analytica 36 (3):323-339.
    This essay reframes salient issues in discussions of free will using conceptual apparatus developed in the works of Saul Kripke, with particular attention paid to his little-discussed technical notion of a prejudice. I begin by focusing on how various forms of modality (metaphysical, epistemic, and conceptual) underlie alternate forms of compatibilism and discuss why it is important to avoid conflating these forms of compatibilism. The concept of a prejudice is then introduced. We consider the semantic role of prejudices, in particular (...)
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  • What Should we Believe About Free Will?Jeremy Byrd - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (3):505-522.
    Given the available evidence, I argue that we face considerable uncertainty about free will. In particular, I argue that the available philosophical evidence does not support being highly confident in our theories about the nature of free will, though this does not necessarily mean that we should suspend judgment about either incompatibilism or compatibilism. For those who accept incompatibilism, however, I argue that there is enough uncertainty about libertarian free will that they should suspend judgment about whether we are ever (...)
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  • The Dialectical Advantage of the Direct Argument.Jeremy Byrd - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (2):431-444.
    Traditionally, incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism claim that we cannot be morally responsible unless we could have done otherwise and that we cannot do otherwise if we are determined. The Direct Argument for incompatibilism supposedly offers its defenders a dialectical advantage over this traditional approach insofar as it does not appear to rely on either of these controversial claims. Recently, though, David Widerker has argued against this supposition and urged that it is time to say farewell to the Direct (...)
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  • Agnosticism about moral responsibility.Jeremy Byrd - 2010 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):411-432.
    Traditionally, incompatibilism has rested on two theses. First, the familiar Principle of Alternative Possibilities says that we cannot be morally responsible for what we do unless we could have done otherwise. Accepting this principle, incompatibilists have then argued that there is no room for such alternative possibilities in a deterministic world. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have argued that incompatibilism about moral responsibility can be defended independently of these traditional theses (Ginet 2005: 604-8; McKenna 2001; Stump 1999: 322-4, 2000 (...)
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  • Making sense of akrasia.Matthew Burch - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (5):939-971.
    There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it's impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there's a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics (...)
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  • A pluralistic account of degrees of control in addiction.Federico Burdman - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):197-221.
    While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...)
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  • Theoretical Motivation of “Ought Implies Can”.Wesley Buckwalter - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):83-94.
    A standard principle in ethics is that moral obligation entails ability, or that “ought implies can”. A strong case has been made that this principle is not well motivated in moral psychology. This paper presents an analogous case against the theoretical motivation for the principle. The principle is in tension with several foundational areas of ethical theorizing, including research on apologies, excuses, promises, moral dilemmas, moral language, disability, and moral agency. Across each of these areas, accepting the principle that obligation (...)
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  • Responsibility in healthcare across time and agents.Rebecca C. H. Brown & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (10):636-644.
    It is unclear whether someone’s responsibility for developing a disease or maintaining his or her health should affect what healthcare he or she receives. While this dispute continues, we suggest that, if responsibility is to play a role in healthcare, the concept must be rethought in order to reflect the sense in which many health-related behaviours occur repeatedly over time and are the product of more than one agent. Most philosophical accounts of responsibility are synchronic and individualistic; we indicate here (...)
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  • On the legal responsibility of autonomous machines.Bartosz Brożek & Marek Jakubiec - 2017 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 25 (3):293-304.
    The paper concerns the problem of the legal responsibility of autonomous machines. In our opinion it boils down to the question of whether such machines can be seen as real agents through the prism of folk-psychology. We argue that autonomous machines cannot be granted the status of legal agents. Although this is quite possible from purely technical point of view, since the law is a conventional tool of regulating social interactions and as such can accommodate various legislative constructs, including legal (...)
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  • Irresponsibly Infertile? Obesity, Efficiency, and Exclusion from Treatment.Rebecca C. H. Brown - 2019 - Health Care Analysis 27 (2):61-76.
    Many countries tightly ration access to publicly funded fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilisation. One basis for excluding people from access to IVF is their body mass index. In this paper, I consider a number of potential justifications for such a policy, based on claims about effectiveness and cost-efficiency, and reject these as unsupported by available evidence. I consider an alternative justification: that those whose subfertility results from avoidable behaviours for which they are responsible are less deserving of treatment. (...)
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  • Group motivation.Jessica Brown - 2022 - Noûs 56 (2):494-510.
    In this paper I discuss a key issue for group moral responsibility, namely whether we can make sense of a group acting for one reason rather than another. The notion of acting for one reason rather than another is central to standard accounts of individual agency and responsibility; and also determines whether an individual is blameworthy or praiseworthy for an action. Thus if we model group responsibility on individual responsibility, we need to be able to make sense of a group (...)
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  • Choice, moral responsibility and alternative possibilities.Vivienne Brown - 2006 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (3):265-288.
    Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring (...)
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  • Against Moral Responsibilisation of Health: Prudential Responsibility and Health Promotion.Rebecca C. H. Brown, Hannah Maslen & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):114-129.
    In this article, we outline a novel approach to understanding the role of responsibility in health promotion. Efforts to tackle chronic disease have led to an emphasis on personal responsibility and the identification of ways in which people can ‘take responsibility’ for their health by avoiding risk factors such as smoking and over-eating. We argue that the extent to which agents can be considered responsible for their health-related behaviour is limited, and as such, state health promotion which assumes certain forms (...)
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  • Attributionism and Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias.Michael Brownstein - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4):765-786.
    Implicit intergroup biases have been shown to impact social behavior in many unsettling ways, from disparities in decisions to “shoot” black and white men in a computer simulation to unequal gender-based evaluations of résumés and CVs. It is a difficult question whether, and in what way, agents are responsible for behaviors affected by implicit biases. I argue that in paradigmatic cases agents are responsible for these behaviors in the sense that the behavior is “attributable” to them. That is, behaviors affected (...)
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  • A Chance for Attributable Agency.Hans J. Briegel & Thomas Müller - 2015 - Minds and Machines 25 (3):261-279.
    Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. (...)
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  • Reflective luck and belief ownership.Daniel Breyer - 2010 - Acta Analytica 25 (2):133-154.
    A belief is reflectively lucky if it is a matter of luck that the belief is true, given what a subject is aware of on reflection alone. Various epistemologists have argued that any adequate theory of knowledge should eliminate reflective luck, but doing so has proven difficult. This article distinguishes between two kinds of reflective luck arguments in the literature: local arguments and global arguments. It argues that local arguments are best interpreted as demanding, not that one be reflectively aware (...)
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  • Knowledge, Credit, and Cognitive Agency.Daniel S. Breyer - 2013 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4):503-528.
    According to credit theories of knowledge, S knows that p only if S deserves credit for truly believing that p. This article argues that any adequate credit theory has to explain the conditions under which beliefs are attributable to subjects. It then presents a general account of these conditions and defends two models of cognitive agency. Finally, the article explains how an agent-based approach rescues the credit theory from an apparent counterexample. The article's defense of the credit theory is qualified, (...)
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  • Cognitive integration and the ownership of belief: Response to Bernecker.Daniel Breyer & John Greco - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1):173–184.
    This paper responds to Sven Bernecker’s argument that agent reliabilism cannot accommodate internalist intuitions about clarvoyance cases. In section 1 we clarify a version of agent reliabilism and Bernecker’s objections against it. In section 2 we say more about how the notion of cognitive integration helps to adjudicate clairvoyance cases and other proposed counterexamples to reliabilism. The central idea is that cognitive integration underwrites a kind of belief ownership, which in turn underwrites the sort of responsibility for belief required for (...)
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  • Learning to Act.Jan Bransen - 2016 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 3 (1):11-35.
    In this paper I argue that to understand minded agency – the capacity we typically find instantiated in instances of human behaviour that could sensibly be questioned by asking “What did you do?” – one needs to understand childhood, i.e. the trajectory of learning to act. I discuss two different types of trajectory, both of which seem to take place during childhood and both of which might be considered crucial to learning to act: a growth of bodily control (GBC) and (...)
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  • An Anatomy of Moral Responsibility.M. Braham & M. van Hees - 2012 - Mind 121 (483):601-634.
    This paper examines the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. A central feature of the analysis is a condition that we term the ‘avoidance potential’, which gives precision to the idea that moral responsibility implies a reasonable demand that an agent should have acted otherwise. We show how our theory can allocate moral responsibility to individuals in complex collective action problems, an issue that sometimes goes by the name of ‘the problem of many hands’. We also show how it allocates (...)
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  • In praise of animals.Rhys Borchert & Aliya R. Dewey - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (4):1-26.
    Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action just in case the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of (...)
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  • On some recent moves in defence of doxastic compatibilism.Anthony Robert Booth - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8):1867-1880.
    According to the doxastic compatibilist, compatibilist criteria with respect to the freedom of action rule-in our having free beliefs. In Booth (Philosophical Papers 38:1–12, 2009), I challenged the doxastic compatibilist to either come up with an account of how doxastic attitudes can be intentional in the face of it very much seeming to many of us that they cannot. Or else, in rejecting that doxastic attitudes need to be voluntary in order to be free, to come up with a principled (...)
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  • The four faces of omission: Ontology, terminology, epistemology, and ethics.Giovanni Boniolo & Gabriele De Anna - 2006 - Philosophical Explorations 9 (3):277 – 293.
    In this paper, the ontological, terminological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of omission are considered in a coherent and balanced framework, based on the idea that there are omissions which are actions and omissions which are non-actions. In particular, we suggest that the approach to causation which best deals with omission is Mackie's INUS conditional proposal. We argue that omissions are determined partly by the ontological conditional structure of reality, and partly by the interests, beliefs, and values of observers. The final (...)
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...)
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  • From Freedom From to Freedom To: New Perspectives on Intentional Action.Sofia Bonicalzi & Patrick Haggard - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:459073.
    There are few concepts as relevant as that of intentional action in shaping our sense of self and the interaction with the environment. At the same time, few concepts are so elusive. Indeed, both conceptual and neuroscientific accounts of intentional agency have proven to be problematic. On the one hand, most conceptual views struggle in defining how agents can adequately exert control over their actions. On the other hand, neuroscience settles for definitions by exclusion whereby key features of human intentional (...)
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  • Why Compatibilists Need Alternative Possibilities.Reid Blackman - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):529-544.
    Defenders of compatibilism occupy one of two camps: those who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, and those who deny this. Those compatibilists who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise are interested in defending a reading of ‘can’ such that one can do otherwise even if determinism is true. By contrast, those compatibilists who think that free will does not require the ability to do otherwise tend to join incompatibilists in denying that (...)
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