Many object to libertarianism by arguing that it manages to solve one problem of luck only by falling prey to another . According to this objection, there is something freedom-undermining about the very circumstances that the libertarian thinks are required for freedom. However, it has proved difficult to articulate precisely what it is about these circumstances that is supposed to undermine freedom—the absence of certain sorts of explanations has perhaps been the most common complaint. In this paper, however, I argue (...) that recent work on the metaphysics of ontological dependence provides the resources for formulating the luck objection in its strongest form. (shrink)

One well-known incompatibilist response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples is the ‘flicker-of-freedom strategy’. The flicker strategy claims that even in a Frankfurt-style counterexample, there are still morally relevant alternative possibilities. In the present paper, I differentiate between two distinct understandings of the flicker strategy, as the failure to differentiate these two versions has led some philosophers to argue at cross-purposes. I also explore the respective dialectic roles that the two versions of the flicker strategy play in the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. (...) Building on this discussion, I then suggest a reason why the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate has reached a stalemate. (shrink)

In ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Harry Frankfurt introduces a scenario aimed at showing that the having of alternative possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she could have done otherwise; Frankfurt thinks his scenario shows that PAP is, in fact, false. Frankfurt thinks that the denial of PAP gives credence to compatibilism, the thesis that an agent could both be causally determined (...) in all her actions and yet be morally responsible.1 Since its introduction, Frankfurt’s original ex-. (shrink)

Most libertarians think that some version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) is true. A number of libertarians, which I call ‘Frankfurt-libertarians,’ think that they need not embrace any version of PAP. In this paper, I examine the writings of one such Frankfurt-libertarian, Eleonore Stump, for her evaluation of the impact of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP. I show how, contrary to her own claims, Stump does need a PAP-like principle for her account of free action. I briefly argue (...) that this discussion also goes some distance to showing that any Frankfurt-libertarian is in a similar position regarding the need for some PAP-like principle. If I am correct, then Frankfurt-libertarians must either renounce their incompatibilism or concede that FSCs fail to show all PAP-like principles to be false. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer’s most recent collection of essays, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, is both incredibly wide-ranging and impressively detailed. Fischer manages to cover a staggering amount of ground in the free will debate, while also providing insightful and articulate analyses of many of the positions defended in the field. In this collection, Fischer focuses on the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. In the first section of his book, Fischer defends Frankfurt cases as an important (...) and useful tool in rejecting the necessity of regulative control for moral responsibility. In the second section, Fischer turns his attention to his own account of guidance control. In this essay, I first focus on Fischer’s defense of Frankfurt cases, specifically his response to the argument that the assumption of determinism in such cases is question-begging. I then analyze two objections to Fischer’s account of guidance control. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the metaphor of the pilgrimage, which Fischer introduces in the opening essay of his collection. (shrink)

Human freedom is in tension with nomological determinism and with statistical determinism. The goal of this paper is to answer both challenges. Four contributions are made to the free-will debate. First, we propose a classification of scientific theories based on how much freedom they allow. We take into account that indeterminism comes in different degrees and that both the laws and the auxiliary conditions can place constraints. A scientific worldview pulls towards one end of this classification, while libertarianism pulls towards (...) the other end of the spectrum. Second, inspired by Hoefer, we argue that an interval of auxiliary conditions corresponds to a region in phase space, and to a bundle of possible block universes. We thus make room for a form of non-nomological indeterminism. Third, we combine crucial elements from the works of Hoefer and List; we attempt to give a libertarian reading of this combination. On our proposal, throughout spacetime, there is a certain amount of freedom that can be interpreted as the result of agential choices. Fourth, we focus on the principle of alternative possibilities throughout and propose three ways of strengthening it. (shrink)

There is a way of doing moral philosophy which goes something like this: If it can be shown that it is rational for perfectly selfish people to accept the constraints of morality, then it will follow, a fortiori, that it is rational for people capable of affective bonds, and thus less selfish, to do so. On this way of proceeding the real argument – that is, the argument for the actual constraints to be adopted – proceeds with only fully rational (...) individuals who have no other concern than to maximize their nontuistic preferences. Then it is noted that the affective capacities of human beings actually make quite palatable the constraints that the fully rational persons with wholly nontuistic preferences have agreed upon. (shrink)

‘Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.’ But when is a mens rea? In the last twenty years discussions of this question have been stimulated by controversial decisions in the English House of Lords in the cases of Smith, Morgan and Majewski.The case of Smith decided that a man might be guilty of murder if a reasonable person, knowing the circumstances, would have foreseen that death would result even if the agent himself did not so foresee. This appeal to (...) the ‘reasonable person’ imports what is known as the ‘objective test’ as opposed to the ‘subjective test’ of the agent's actual foresight or knowledge. The case of Morgan inclined per contra to the subjective test. (shrink)

A classic, though basically neglected question about motivation arises when we attempt to account for blame’s nature—namely, does the recognition central to blame need help from an independent desire in order to motivate the blame-characteristic dispositions that arise in the blamer? Those who have attended to the question think the answer is yes. Hence, they adopt what I call a Humean Construal of blame on which blame is (a) a judgment that an individual S is blameworthy and (b) an independent (...) desire about S not doing as they did or being as they are. This paper rejects arguments for the Humean Construal, illustrates deep failings of that view, and uses these considerations to support anti-Humean accounts of blame in particular and moral motivation more broadly. (shrink)

A distinctive position in contemporary political philosophy is occupied by those who defend the principle of public justification. This principle states that the moral or political rules that govern our common life must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. In this article, I evaluate Gerald Gaus’s defence of this principle, which holds that it is presupposed by our moral reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. He argues, echoing P.F. Strawson in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, that these attitudes are (...) so deep a part of us that we are unable to rationally reject them. I examine and reject this defence of the principle. Considering the nature of our commitment to the moral reactive attitudes, I argue that those attitudes need not be grounded in a commitment to public justification. The availability of alternative grounds for these attitudes shows, contra Gaus, that we can rationally reject the principle of public justification while maintaining a wholehearted commitment to the reactive attitudes. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make high-stakes decisions is sometimes thought to create a troubling responsibility gap – that is, a situation where nobody can be held morally responsible for the outcomes that are brought about. However, philosophers and practitioners have recently claimed that, even though no individual can be held morally responsible, groups of individuals might be. Consequently, they think, we have less to fear from the use of AI than might appear to be the case. This (...) paper assesses this claim. Drawing on existing philosophical models of collective responsibility, I consider whether changing focus from the individual to the collective level can help us identify a locus of responsibility in a greater range of cases of AI deployment. I find that appeal to collective responsibility will be of limited use in filling the responsibility gap: the models considered either do not apply to the case at hand or else the relevant sort of collective responsibility, even if present, will not be sufficient to remove the costs that are often associated with an absence of responsibility. (shrink)

The problem that divine foreknowledge poses for free will is one that is notoriously difficult to solve. If God believes in advance how an agent will act, this fact about the past eradicates all alternatives for the actor, given the infallibility of God’s beliefs. And if we assume, with many theists, that free will requires alternatives possibilities, then it looks as if God’s omniscience is incompatible with our free will. One solution to this problem, introduced and defended by David Hunt, (...) draws on the source incompatibilist position in the secular free debate. According to source incompatibilists, free will does not require alternative possibilities but is also not compatible with causal determinism. Hunt argues that because God’s foreknowledge does not eliminate future alternatives through causal means, it is compatible with free will. In this paper, I challenge Hunt’s position using Kevin Timpe’s distinction between “wide” and “narrow” source incompatibilists. I argue that if one wishes to be an incompatibilist concerning free will and causal determinism, one must accept that alternatives are required for free will. And if one must accept that alternatives are a necessary condition for free will, then Hunt’s solution to the foreknowledge dilemma will not succeed. (shrink)

About a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is part of the “situationist” literature in social psychology, which suggests that the contexts in which agents act have a larger influence on behavior, and that personality traits have a smaller influence, (...) than is ordinarily supposed. Recently, there has been increased interest among philosophers in research like Zimbardo’s and its potential for influencing ethical theories. This increase is due in part to the publication of John Doris’ Lack of Character. More recently, Doris and Dominic Murphy have argued that soldiers, including those at Abu Ghraib, often act under conditions of moral excuse because the situational pressures to which they are exposed impair their capacities for moral judgment. I argue that soldiers can be morally responsible for wartime behavior even if their moral capacities have been substantially impaired. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by factors external to the agent. I conclude that even if the non-occurrence of an unwelcome outcome (...) is ensured, the agent whose action explains this non-occurrence is praiseworthy for preventing the outcome. My examples are similar in important respects to Frankfurt-type cases. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the relationship between my examples and Frankfurt-type cases involving both actions and omissions. I conclude that while I may be responsible for the consequences of an action even if those consequences are unavoidable, this is not necessarily so for the consequences of omissions. (shrink)

I argue that wrongdoers may be open to moral blame even if they lacked the capacity to respond to the moral considerations that counted against their behavior. My initial argument turns on the suggestion that even an agent who cannot respond to specific moral considerations may still guide her behavior by her judgments about reasons. I argue that this explanation of a wrongdoer’s behavior can qualify her for blame even if her capacity for moral understanding is impaired. A second argument (...) is based on the observation that even when a blameworthy wrongdoer could have responded to moral considerations, this is often not relevant to her blameworthiness. Finally, I argue against the view that because blame communicates moral demands, only agents who can be reached by such communication are properly blamed. I contend that a person victimized by a wrongdoer with an impaired capacity for moral understanding may protest her victimization in a way that counts as a form of moral blame even though it does not primarily express a moral demand or attempt to initiate moral dialogue. (shrink)

The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions cases. This tension has thus far largely been treated (...) as an internal puzzle for defenders of FSCs to solve. My goal here is to regiment this tension into a clear argument which undermines the FSC based critique of PAP. I will also argue that there is an in principle reason to doubt that Frankfurt-Style Compatibilists will be able to successfully respond to my argument. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of (...) the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism. (shrink)

This article discusses left-libertarian justifications of basic income. The basic income policy is designed to decouple income from employment in the monetized economy by allowing the individual to access, on a regular stipulated basis, a grant that is independent of her ability and willingness to work for remuneration. This article attempts to amend an important failure with respect to the way in which the concept of real freedom has been treated in Van Parijs’ pioneering defense of the universal grant. Van (...) Parijs’ defense of basic income does not pay substantial attention to the freedom that work-lovers would gain from the opportunity to opt out of work, which the grant would facilitate if sufficiently generous. Van Parijs’ justification of basic income is incomplete in terms of the value it places on the opportunity to enjoy freedom from employment from the purview of every member of society, not only those that will, or might, decide to lead a life (partially) outside of work. The article develops the argument that such failure results from the fact that Van Parijs’ conception of freedom is centered on the importance of actual or potential preference satisfaction as opposed to non-agent-centered reasons. (shrink)

Moral agency status is often given to those individuals or entities which act intentionally within a society or environment. In the past, moral agency has primarily been focused on human beings and some higher-order animals. However, with the fast-paced advancements made in artificial intelligence, we are now quickly approaching the point where we need to ask an important question: should we grant moral agency status to AI? To answer this question, we need to determine the moral agency status of these (...) entities in society. In this paper I argue that to grant moral agency status to an entity, deliberate norm-adherence must be possible. In this paper I argue that, under the current status quo, AI systems are unable to meet this criterion. The novel contribution this paper makes to the field of machine ethics is first, to provide at least two criteria with which we can determine moral agency status. We do this by determining the possibility of deliberate norm-adherence through examining the possibility of deliberate norm-violation. Second, to show that establishing moral agency in AI suffer the same pitfalls as establishing moral agency in constitutive accounts of agency. (shrink)

Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because that there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. According to consequentialism an action A is wrong if and only if there was another action B that the agent could have performed such that, if the agent had performed B instead of A, the consequences would have been better. Relatively little attention has (...) been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of ‘could have’ in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that the following conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism: the agent could have done B instead of A if and only if, there is a decision such that had the agent made this decision, then she would have done B, and not A. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of ‘could have’, but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of ‘could have’ in a consequentialist criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of whether philosophy actually makes progress. This discussion has been prompted, in no small part, by the depth and persistence of disagreement among philosophers on virtually every major theoretical issue in the field. In this paper, I examine the role that the Method of Cases – the widespread philosophical method of testing and revising theories by comparing their verdicts against our intuitions in particular cases – plays in creating and sustaining theoretical disagreements (...) in philosophy. Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, I argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the structure of the theories that philosophers seek to construct using the MoC and the structure of the concepts on which our case-specific intuitions are based. This incompatibility renders MoC-based philosophical theorizing unable ever to succeed by the very standards of adequacy that it sets for itself. And this, in turn, helps to explain the depth and persistence of theoretical disagreements – and, in certain ways, the lack of progress – in the many areas of philosophy where the MoC plays an important role. (shrink)

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one''s-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive (...) results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her. (shrink)

Many philosophers take mental causation to be required for free will. But it has also been argued that the most popular view of the nature of mental states, i.e. non-reductive physicalism, excludes the existence of mental causation, due to what is known as the ‘exclusion argument’. In this paper, I discuss the difference-making account of mental causation proposed by [List, C., and Menzies, P. 2017. “My Brain Made Me Do It: The Exclusion Argument Against Free Will, and What’s Wrong with (...) It.” In H. Beebee, C. Hitchcock, & H. Price (eds.), Making a Difference: Essays on the Philosophy of Causation. Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press], who argue that their account not only solves the problem of causal exclusion but also saves free will. More precisely, they argue that it rebuts what they call ‘the Neurosceptical Argument’, the argument that if actions are caused by neural states and processes unavailable to us, there is no free will. I argue that their argument fails for two independent reasons. The first reason is that they fail to show that difference-makers are independent causes. The second reason is that physical realizers of mental states can be individuated in a way that makes both mental states and their realizers difference-makers. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that it cannot be the case that a person ought to perform an action if this person cannot perform this action. However, most of these philosophers do not give arguments for the truth of this claim. In this paper, I argue that it is plausible to interpret this claim in such a way that it is entailed by the claim that there cannot be a reason for a person to perform an action if it is impossible that (...) this person will perform this action. I then give three arguments for the truth of the latter claim, which are also arguments for the truth of the former claim as I interpret it. (shrink)

A common objection to particular views of attributability is that they fail to account for weakness of will. In this paper, I show that the problem of weakness of will is much deeper than has been recognized, extending to all views of attributability on offer because of the general form that these views take. The fundamental problem is this: current views claim that being attributionally responsible is a matter of exercising whatever capacity that they take to be relevant to attributability; (...) however, weakness of will cases show that we can be attributionally responsible for actions that result from failing to exercise that capacity. I propose a novel solution that any view of attributability can and must take on board in order to be viable. The solution is to recognize that being attributionally responsible is not fundamentally a matter of exercising the attributability-relevant capacity but is rather a matter of having that capacity, so long as that capacity figures in the explanation of the action. (shrink)

As object-directed emotions, reactive attitudes can be appropriate in the sense of fitting, where an emotion is fitting in virtue of accurately representing its target. I use this idea to argue for a theory of moral accountability: an agent S is accountable for an action A if and only if A expresses S’s quality of will and S has the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. For the sake of argument, I assume that a reactive attitude is fitting (...) if and only if its constituent thoughts are true, and I argue for the above theory by determining thoughts partly constituting resentment and gratitude. Although others have argued that the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons is necessary for accountability, the argument here is significantly better in two respects. First, it does not rely on intermediary ethical principles, supplementary arguments, or assumptions about the nature of reactive attitudes specifically. Instead, it simply assumes that reactive attitudes, like all emotions, have cognitive content. Second, the argument here is more powerful because it brings to light the quality of will condition and has the resources to flesh out the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) have famously served as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). The fine-grained version of the flicker defense has become one of the most popular responses to FSCs. Proponents of this defense argue that there is an alternative available to all agents in FSCs such that the cases do not show that PAP is false. Specifically, the agents could have done otherwise than decide on their own, and this available alternative is robust enough to ground moral (...) responsibility. In this paper, I argue that, when relying on definitions of ‘on one’s own’ within the literature on FSCs, a case can be constructed in which the agent could not have done otherwise than make a decision on his own. Insofar as this new case is successful, it will be able to avoid arguments about robustness while showing that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities of the type argued for by proponents of the fine-grained version of the flicker defense. (shrink)

Recent work by Alfred Mele, Romy Jaster and Chandra Sripada recognizes that abilities come in degrees of fallibility. The rough idea is that abilities are often not surefire. They are liable to fail. The more liable an ability is to fail, the more fallible it is. Fallibility is plausibly significant for addiction, responsibility, and normative theorizing. However, we lack an adequate account of what fallibility consists in. This article addresses that problem. Perhaps the most natural approach is to say (roughly) (...) the fallibility of your ability to F is the proportion of scenarios in which you do not F, among those in which you try to F. I argue that this approach (in all plausible versions) is mistaken. I then introduce the notion of an action’s “fragility,” and propose that we use that new notion to understand fallibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to the ‘Principle of Alternative Possibilities’, an agent is morally responsible for performing some action only if she could have done otherwise. Beginning with Harry Frankfurt nearly fifty years ago, a number of putative counterexamples have been offered. In this essay, I consider a type of counterexample developed by David Hunt: so-called ‘complete blockage’ Frankfurt examples. The chief objection to these cases is that they presuppose causal determinism, thereby begging the question against incompatibilists. I argue, however, that even (...) if we grant that complete blockage Frankfurt examples assume causal determinism, they can still be successfully deployed as counterexamples to PAP without begging the question. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to draw attention to an issue which has been largely overlooked in contemporary just war theory – namely the impact that the conditions under which an army is assembled are liable to have on the judgments that are made with respect to traditional principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I argue that the way in which an army is assembled can significantly alter judgments regarding the justice of a war. In doing (...) so, I present and defend a principle of ‘just assembly’ and argue that satisfying this principle is an essential part of any deliberation regarding the justice of a particular conflict. (shrink)

The paper attempts to explicate and justify the position I call `Agency Incompatibilism'- that is to say, the view that agency itself is incompatible with determinism. The most important part of this task is the characterisation of the conception of agency on which the position depends; for unless this is understood, the rationale for the position is likely to be missed. The paper accordingly proceeds by setting out the orthodox philosophical position concerning what it takes for agency to exist, before (...) going on to explain why and how that orthodoxy should be challenged. The relations between my own views and those of others writing on the issues of free will and moral responsibility, in three crucial and inter-connected areas are then explored. These are (1) the question how animals should figure in the philosophy of action; (2) the question what the lesson is of `Frankfurt-style' examples; and (3) the distinction between so-called `leeway' incompatibilism and `source' incompatibilism. The paper moves on to consider and respond to various objections to Agency Incompatibilism, including the claim that to embrace the conception of agency that makes incompatibilism plausible is to beg the question against the compatibilist, and also the worry that determinism is an empirical thesis which ought not to be straightforwardly falsifiable by such a priori reasoning as Agency Incompatibilism appears to involve. I also try to rebut the worry that Agency Incompatibilism is committed to the existence of an unintelligible and/or naturalistically impossible variety of irreducible agent causation. (shrink)

This paper provides a discussion and defense of a recent formulation of the idea that moral responsibility for actions depends on the capacity to respond to reasons. This formulation appears in several publications by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, where the authors argue that moral responsibility involves a kind of control over one's actions which they call "guidance control." This kind of control does not require an agent's ability to do something different from what he actually does, but instead (...) requires only that the actual process leading to the action be responsive in some suitable way to the reasons that the agent has for acting. After summarizing this view, I offer the following two innovations to the authors' view: I argue that the level of control required for moral responsibility (which I call "regular reasons-responsiveness") is much stronger than what the author's view allows for; and 2) I give a common-sense account of the kinds of motivational mechanism relevant to moral responsibility. Given these innovations, I show that this kind of view allows us to easily answer some counterexamples that appear in the current literature on moral responsibility. (shrink)

The paper argues that it is possible for an incompatibilist to accept John Martin Fischer's plausible insistence that the question whether we are morally responsible agents ought not to depend on whether the laws of physics turn out to be deterministic or merely probabilistic. The incompatibilist should do so by rejecting the fundamentalism which entails that the question whether determinism is true is a question merely about the nature of the basic physical laws. It is argued that this is a (...) better option for ensuring the irrelevance of physics than the embrace of semi-compatibilism, since there are reasons for supposing that alternate possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility, despite Fischer's claims to the contrary. There are two distinct reasons for supposing that alternate possibilities might be necessary for moral responsibility—one of which is to do with fairness, the other to do with agency itself. It is suggested that if one focuses on the second of these reasons, Fischer's arguments for supposing that alternate possibilities are unnecessary for moral responsibility can be met by the incompatibilist. Some possible reasons for denying that alternate possibilities are necessary for the existence of agency are then raised and rejected. (shrink)

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have fueled widespread academic discourse on the ethics of AI within and across a diverse set of disciplines. One notable subfield of AI ethics is machine ethics, which seeks to implement ethical considerations into AI systems. However, since different research efforts within machine ethics have discipline-specific concepts, practices, and goals, the resulting body of work is pestered with conflict and confusion as opposed to fruitful synergies. The aim of this paper is to explore ways to (...) alleviate these issues, both on a practical and theoretical level of analysis. First, we describe two approaches to machine ethics: the philosophical approach and the engineering approach and show how tensions between the two arise due to discipline specific practices and aims. Using the concept of disciplinary capture, we then discuss potential promises and pitfalls to cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of science, we finally describe how metacognitive scaffolds can be used to avoid epistemological obstacles and foster innovative collaboration in AI ethics in general and machine ethics in particular. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – a (...) power whose exercise intrinsically implies the possibility of having done otherwise. I then show how to respond to the objection that the alternative possibility noted is not sufficiently ‘robust’ to ground his moral responsibility. I also distinguish my own argument for the claim that source incompatibilism is not truly independent of leeway incompatibilism from an argument for the same conclusion which has been offered previously by Kevin Timpe, and suggest that my own version has the dialectical advantage that it does not automatically assume from the outset that sourcehood requires indeterminism, and hence is in line with the traditional idea that the alternate possibilities requirement on moral responsibility is the common property of compatibilists and incompatibilists alike. (shrink)

This paper argues for the replacement of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by an alternative principle, the Principle of Possible Non-Performance, which it is argued represents an important improvement on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities in the context of Frankfurt-style examples. The suggestion that the principle offers only the possibility of something insufficiently 'robust' to supply a decent replacement to PAP is countered.

This paper argues that there are a number of different things that could be meant by the claim that a given agent 'could have done otherwise', because there are multiple ways of disambiguating the various anaphoric devices which are contained in the phrase. It goes on to suggest that on at least one of these disambiguations, the claim that a Frankfurtian agent could have done otherwise might be defensible, even given the presence of a counterfactual intervener who will ensure that (...) the agent phis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the rejection of doxastic voluntarism is not as straightforward as its opponents take it to be. I begin with a critical examination of William Alston's defense of involuntarism and then focus on the question of whether belief is intentional.

Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning. However, given the complex nature of the theory, hardly any work has de facto attempted to implement the core tenets of virtue ethics in moral machines. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how virtue ethics can be taken all the way from theory to machine implementation. To achieve this goal, we (...) critically explore the possibilities and challenges for virtue ethics from a computational perspective. Drawing on previous conceptual and technical work, we outline a version of artificial virtue based on moral functionalism, connectionist bottom–up learning, and eudaimonic reward. We then describe how core features of the outlined theory can be interpreted in terms of functionality, which in turn informs the design of components necessary for virtuous cognition. Finally, we present a comprehensive framework for the technical development of artificial virtuous agents and discuss how they can be implemented in moral environments. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has many times been suggested as a promising recipe for the construction of artificial moral agents due to its emphasis on moral character and learning. However, given the complex nature of the theory, hardly any work has de facto attempted to implement the core tenets of virtue ethics in moral machines. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how virtue ethics can be taken all the way from theory to machine implementation. To achieve this goal, we (...) critically explore the possibilities and challenges for virtue ethics from a computational perspective. Drawing on previous conceptual and technical work, we outline a version of artificial virtue based on moral functionalism, connectionist bottom–up learning, and eudaimonic reward. We then describe how core features of the outlined theory can be interpreted in terms of functionality, which in turn informs the design of components necessary for virtuous cognition. Finally, we present a comprehensive framework for the technical development of artificial virtuous agents and discuss how they can be implemented in moral environments. (shrink)

The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility of time travel. At (...) the end of the paper, I formulate a more sophisticated version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a certain fine grained notion of actions. I then explain how this new kind of counterexample can be augmented to show that even the more sophisticated principle is false. (shrink)

Discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities have largely ignored the limits of what Frankfurt-style counter-examples can show. Rather than challenging the coherence of the cases, I argue that even if they are taken to demonstrate the falsity of the principle, they cannot advance the compatibilist cause. For a forceful incompatibilist argument can be constructed from the Frankfurtian premise that agents in Frankfurtian circumstances would have done what they did even if they could have done something else. This 'counterfactual stability' (...) meets the same fate under determinism as does the ability to do otherwise. Thus the cases are irrelevant to the compatibility debate. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017In Causation and Free Will Carolina Sartorio offers an intricate argument for the claim ‘that actual sequences are sufficient grounds for freedom: they ground freedom, and nothing is required to ground it other than themselves, or their own grounds’. On this view, free will with respect to a choice or action is not explained in terms of the agent’s having alternative possibilities. Like Harry Frankfurt, Sartorio rejects the Principle of Alternate Possibilities : Principle of Alternate Possibilities : (...) a person does something freely only if he could have done otherwise. As is well known, Frankfurt opposes PAP on the grounds that it is vulnerable to counter-examples. One of Sartorio’s variants of these examples is as follows: Frankfurt’s case: Frank has reasons to harm Furt and makes the choice on... (shrink)