Notions of agency and of weakness of will clearly seem to be related to one another. This essay takes on a rather modest task in relation to current discussion of these topics; it seeks to establish the following claim: If A is a normal human agent, weakness of will is possible for A. The argument relies on demonstrating that certain necessary conditions for normal human agency are at least roughly equivalent to certain sufficient conditions for weakness of will. The connection (...) between agency and weakness of will is made through the use of an extended example that lays bare the links between the two. (shrink)

This paper critically examines so-called “epistemic Frankfurt cases” (see e.g., Kelp 2016; Zagzebski 2001) against the backdrop of the original Frankfurt case. A distinction is drawn between two ways of deserving “epistemic credit,” which are subsequently compared to the concept of moral responsibility that is in play within the original Frankfurt case. Based on this analysis, Zagzebski's claim that agents in “epistemic Frankfurt cases” can be considered epistemically credible for the same reason as the agent in the original version is (...) said to be morally responsible is challenged; raising doubts as to whether these cases really are best described as instances of knowledge. The paper concludes with the construction and discussion of a case that is a genuine epistemic analogue to the original Frankfurt case. (shrink)

It is commonly held that no one can be morally responsible for a necessary truth. In this paper, I will provide various examples that cast doubt on this idea. I also show that one popular argument for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism (van Inwagen’s Direct Argument) fails given my examples.

The concept of missed care refers to an irrefragable truth that required nursing care, which is left undone, occurs in the delivery of health care. As a technical concept, missed care offers nurses the opportunity to articulate a problematic experience. But what are we to make of missed care from an ethical perspective? Can nurses be held morally responsible for missed care? Ethically speaking, it is generally accepted that if a person has a moral obligation to do something, s/he needs (...) to have the capacity to do it. If a person does not have the capacity to fulfil a moral obligation, then s/he cannot be held responsible for failing to do so. This is captured by the “ought implies can” (OIC) principle. This paper brings the OIC principle to the forefront of the discussion on missed care. It is contended that nurses – qua moral agents – may be discharged from a moral obligation to carry out a required caring act because of some inability that is not of their making and therefore may not be morally responsible for missed care. However, the OIC principle may not be applied to all situations of missed care depending on their causes. In addition, following in the thought of Sapontzis (The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1991, XXIX, 383–393) it is contended that when an original obligation to deliver a required act of care cannot be fulfilled, other obligations may be generated as summed up in the “Principle of Making Amends” and the “Principle of Appropriate Feeling.” It is the view of this paper that these further principles could prevent the OIC principle from being used to simply excuse omissions of care from a normative standard and could support the view that nurses continue to have alternative obligations to make amends and to respond with appropriate feelings to missed care. (shrink)

:In this essay, I distinguish two dimensions of responsibility: responsibility for expressing the will one has in action and responsibility for having the will one expresses in action. I argue that taking both of these dimensions into account is necessary to do full justice to our understanding of moral responsibility and our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible in moral and legal contexts. I further argue that the distinction between these dimensions of responsibility is importantly related to understanding age-old debates (...) about the freedom of the will. For the first dimension of responsibility is historically related to the freedom of action—the power to freely express the will one already has in action. While the second dimension is historically related to the freedom of the will—the power to freely form or shape that will one may later express in action. And I argue that while the freedom of action so defined may be compatible with determinism, the freedom of will, and the deeper responsibility associated with it for forming one’s own will, which I call “ultimate responsibility,” are not compatible with a thoroughgoing determinism. In arguing throughout the essay for these claims and for the need to take into account both of these dimensions to do full justice to our understanding of moral responsibility, I consider ordinary practices of holding persons responsible in a variety of moral and legal contexts, discussing in the process H. L. A. Hart’s “fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing” criterion for assessing responsibility and blame in legal and criminal contexts, the relevance of recent experimental studies about folk intuitions concerning assessments of responsibility and blame, Harry Frankfurt’s critique of the “principle of alternative possibilities,” the distinction between “will-settled” and “will-setting” actions, and contemporary critiques of the very possibility and intelligibility of an ultimate responsibility for forming one’s own will that would be incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

A popular form of virtue epistemology—defended by such figures as Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski and John Greco—holds that knowledge can be exclusively understood in virtue-theoretic terms. In particular, it holds that there isn't any need for an additional epistemic condition to deal with the problem posed by knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. It is argued that the sustainability of such a proposal is called into question by the possibility of epistemic twin earth cases. In particular, it is argued that such cases demonstrate (...) the need for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge to appeal to an independent epistemic condition which excludes knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. (shrink)

Why Free Will is Real, by ListChristian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 216.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 687-709, November 2021.

ABSTRACT Frankfurt cases are often presented as counterexamples to the principle that one is morally responsible for one’s action only if one could have acted otherwise. But ‘could have acted otherwise’ is context-sensitive; it’s therefore open to a proponent of this principle to reply that although there is a salient sense in which agents in Frankfurt-style cases couldn’t have acted otherwise, there’s another, different sense in which they could have, and it is this latter sense which is relevant to what (...) we are morally responsible for doing. In this paper, I will evaluate the prospects of this contextualist response. I will argue that despite some initial signs of promise, the response fails, for reasons that were clearly anticipated in Frankfurt’s original paper. (shrink)

In Harry Frankfurt’s seminal “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” he advances an argument against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: if an agent is responsible for performing some action, then she is able to do otherwise. However, almost all of the Frankfurt cases in this literature involve impermissible actions. In this article, I argue that the failure to consider other deontic categories exposes a deep problem, one that threatens either to upend much current moral theorizing or to upend the relevance of (...) Frankfurt cases. (shrink)

Der Beitrag entwickelt ein neues, machtbasiertes Verantwortungsmodell für die individuelle Verstrickung in globale strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten. Er geht von dem Problem aus, dass die meisten Bedingungen für die Zuerkennung moralischer Haftbarkeitsverantwortung in Fällen der individuellen Verstrickung in globale strukturelle Übel nicht erfüllt sind: Wenn eine Person beispielsweise ein unter ausbeuterischen Bedingungen produziertes T-Shirt kauft, so ist diese Handlung für das Eintreten der strukturellen Ungerechtigkeit weder hinreichend noch notwendig, die Person hat die strukturell ungerechten Eff ekte ihrer Handlung häufi g nicht intendiert (...) und kann die Folgen ihrer Handlungen epistemisch nicht ausreichend gut überblicken. Nicht zuletzt ist ihre Partizipation an der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaftsordnung unfreiwillig. Der Beitrag diskutiert, welche Lösung Iris Marion Young in ihrem Modell kollektiv geteilter Verantwortung für dieses Problem vorgeschlagen hat, und argumentiert, dass hier insbesondere in Hinblick auf das Kriterium der kausalen Relevanz Probleme bestehen bleiben. Davon ausgehend schlägt der Beitrag ein ergänzendes, machttheoretisch begründetes Modell der Zuerkennung moralischer Haftbarkeitsverantwortung vor: Verantwortung wird diesem zufolge nicht nur in Bezug auf einzelne Handlungen konzeptualisiert, sondern auch in Bezug auf die strukturell generierte und generalisierte Handlungsfähigkeit, die Personen aufgrund ihres Status in Regelsystemen gegenüber anderen Personen besitzen. In diesem Sinne wird einzelnen Personen Verantwortung nicht nur für die kausalen Eff ekte ihrer Handlungen, sondern bereits für die kausalen Eff ekte der Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht über andere übertragen. Ich argumentiere, dass Personen für ihre soziale Macht gegenüber anderen verantwortlich gemacht werden können, weil diese Macht die generalisierte Vorbedingung ihrer individuellen Handlungsfähigkeit darstellt und weil sie ihre sozial konstituierte Handlungsfähigkeit durch jegliches Handeln implizit annehmen. Soziale Macht wird Personen durch soziale Regeln übertragen: Auch dominierende Macht besitzt jemand, ohne dafür notwendigerweise etwas tun zu müssen. Sobald eine Person ausgehend von ihrer sozialen Macht handelt, reproduziert sie damit notwendigerweise die sozialen Konstitutionsbedingungen ihrer Macht über andere. Genauer stellt die Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht eine NESS-Bedingung in Hinblick auf die Reproduktion derjenigen strukturell ungerechten sozialen Regeln dar, die ihr Macht erst übertragen haben. Dabei können Personen meistens vorhersehen, dass die Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht, d.h. ihrer sozialen Statusfunktionen globale strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten auf kausal relevante Art und Weise reproduziert. Obwohl die Annahme sozialer Statusfunktionen normalerweise unfreiwillig ist, kann Personen für diese kompensatorische Verantwortung übertragen werden, insofern sie die ungerechten Effekte dieser Annahme vorhersehen können. Da die Effekte unserer Statusannahme kausal und epistemisch kollektiv geteilt sind, schlage ich vor, diese Form der Verantwortung als eine kollektiv-geteilte zu verstehen. Um strukturellen Ungerechtigkeiten abzuhelfen, müssen Personen entsprechend dazu beitragen, handlungsfähige kollektive Akteure – d.h. gerechte politische Institutionen – zu bilden. (shrink)

Theological incompatibility arguments suggest God's comprehensive foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. Logical incompatibility arguments suggest a complete set of truths about the future is logically incompatible with human free will. Of the two, most think theological incompatibility is the more severe problem; but hardly anyone thinks either kind of argument presents a real threat to free will. I will argue, however, that sound theological and logical incompatibility arguments exist and that, in fact, logical incompatibly is the more severe (...) problem. A deep analysis of the arguments will reveal that, to avoid a fatalist conclusion, we must reject bivalence and adopt a specific kind of temporal ontology (presentism), which also forces the theist to embrace open theism. (shrink)

Carolina Sartorio has criticized the reasons-responsiveness theory of freedom for being inconsistent with the actual-sequence view motivated by the Frankfurt-style cases. Specifically, reasons-responsiveness conceived as a modal property does not pertain to the actual sequence of the agent's action and thereby it is irrelevant to the agent's freedom and moral responsibility. Call this the challenge of irrelevance. In this article, I present this challenge in a new way that overcomes certain limitations of Sartorio's argument. I argue that the root of (...) the challenge is that reasons-responsiveness as an unmanifested modal property seems to be nonexplanatory for the agent's action. I show that reasons-responsiveness theorists will confront this challenge even if they do not endorse the actual-sequence view. Finally, I deflate this challenge with David Lewis's model of causal explanation, showing that reasons-responsiveness is explanatory in virtue of providing information about the causal history of the agent's action. (shrink)

In his recent book Willensfreiheit Geert Keil defends a version of libertarianism. Yet he criticizes a flagship argument for incompatibilism. Van Inwagen's consequence argument, Keil thinks, relies on an irrelevant premise when it claims that agents have no choice about the remote past. I argue that Keil's charge rests on a misunderstanding. I then sketch why discussions of the consequence argument should focus on the question whether or not a certain version of rule Beta is valid.

Harming other people is prima facie wrong. Unless we can be very certain that doing so is justified under the circumstances, we ought not to do it. In this paper, I argue that we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist criminal justice systems for this reason; we cannot be sufficiently certain that the harm is justified. Gregg Caruso, Ben Vilhauer and others have previously argued for the same conclusion; however, my own version sidesteps certain controversial premises of theirs. Harsh retributivist criminal (...) justice can only be morally right if the following three propositions are true: Moral responsibility exists, retributivism is right, and we can find out how much punishment offenders deserve for their crimes. Suppose that we initially assign a high credence to each of the three propositions; I assume for the sake of argument that there are good arguments in support of each. Nevertheless, these arguments ultimately depend on intuitions. Since we have philosophical peers whose intuitions differ from ours, we ought to downgrade our credence in each. However, even slightly less credence in each proposition means far less credence in a conjunction of all three. Since the stakes are high and there are morally safer options for a criminal justice system, we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist ones. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe a hitherto overlooked kind of practical irrationality, which I call irrational option exclusion. An agent who suffers from this problem does not merely fail to act on her best judgement – she fails to realize that the superior action is even an option for her. I furthermore argue that this kind of irrationality is serious enough to undermine moral responsibility. I show that an agent suffering from this problem has compromised reasons-responsiveness, does not really express (...) her will through action, and has a hard time doing otherwise; thus, from the standpoint of several popular moral responsibility theories, we ought to conclude that her responsibility is at the very least diminished. (shrink)

In this paper I do three things. Firstly, I defend the view that in his most familiar arguments about morality and the theological postulates, the arguments which appeal to the epistemological doctrines of the first Critique, Kant is as much of a fictionalist as anybody not working explicitly with that conceptual apparatus could be: his notion of faith as subjectively and not objectively grounded is precisely what fictionalists are concerned with in their talk of nondoxastic attitudes. Secondly, I reconstruct a (...) logically distinct argument to a fictionalist conclusion which I argue Kant also gives us, this time an argument to the conclusion that it is a good thing if our commitment to the existence of God is nondoxastic. And finally, I argue that this argument is of continuing interest, to Kantians and non-Kantians alike, not only because it raises interesting questions about the relation of morality to belief in God (which go in the opposite direction to most discussions, which focus on whether and to what extent belief in God can be an aid to morality), but also because this ‘Moral Hazard Argument’ seems to be available to religious realists and non-realists alike, thus suggesting that religious fictionalism is not by any means just an interesting version of religious non-realism. (shrink)

According to the New Dispositionalist’s response to the Frankfurt Cases, Jones can do otherwise because Black merely masks (or finks), but does not deprive Jones of the relevant ability. This reasoning stands in the tradition of a line of thought according to which an informed view of the truth conditions of ability attributions allows for a compatibilist stance. The promise is that once we understand how abilities work, it turns out that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with determinism, (...) or with Black standing ready to intervene, or indeed both, as the New Dispositionalists hold. In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Understanding how abilities work gives us no reason to think that the ability to do otherwise relevant for free will is compatible with either Black’s presence or determinism. (shrink)

In his seminal paper ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Harry Frankfurt argues against the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP)—the principle that persons are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise—by presenting a case in which, apparently, a person is morally responsible for what he has done even though, due to the presence of a counterfactual intervener, he could not have done otherwise. According to a compelling (yet relatively under-discussed) response to Frankfurt’s attack on (...) PAP, Frankfurt has not succeeded in showing that the principle is false, since in the scenario he asks us to imagine the agent has an alternate possibility: he can (unwittingly) force the intervener’s hand by revising his decision to perform the action in question and thereby avoid performing the action himself. This response to Frankfurt has been objected to, however, on the grounds that the agent does not avoid performing the action since the intervener acts upon an involuntary prior sign. The goal of this article is to show that this objection fails. While it is true that the prior sign upon which the intervener acts is involuntary, it is a consequence of a change of mind that is voluntary. It follows that the agent does what is needed to avoid performing the action in question (in the counterfactual sequence). (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has famously argued against the principle of alternate possibilities by presenting a case in which, apparently, a person is morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise. A number of commentators have proposed dispositionalist responses to Frankfurt, arguing that he has not produced a counterexample to PAP because, contrary to appearances, the ability to do otherwise is indeed present but is a disposition that has been ‘masked’ or ‘finked’ by the presence (...) of a counterfactual controller. This article argues that this response to Frankfurt does not undercut his attack on PAP, since there are Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the principle—‘brain-malfunction’ cases—that evade the dispositionalist analysis. (shrink)

Many follow Kant in thinking that morally worthy actions must be carried out solely from the motive of duty. This outlook faces two challenges: (1) The One Feeling Too Few problem (actions that issue from, say, compassion also seem to have moral worth), and (2) The One Thought Too Many problem (some actions have moral worth precisely because they’re not motivated by duty). These challenges haven’t led Kantians to dispense with the motive of duty. Instead, they have proposed to push (...) it into the background. We should not (the thought goes) construe duty as a primary motive, a consideration that motivates the agent to act. Duty is best thought of as a secondary motive, a background concern that constrains her choice. Since it is consistent with acting from duty at the secondary level that one is motivated at the primary level by compassion, this move is thought to overcome both challenges. In this paper, I argue that secondary motive views don’t live up to their stated ambitions. Such proposals either fail to make progress on issues with which primary motive views continue to grapple, or they render the motive of duty ill-suited to underwrite a plausible account of moral worth. (shrink)

An agent who is the victim of covert and nonconstraining control is unaware of being controlled and controllers get their way by manipulating the victims so that they willingly do what the controllers desire. Our primary objective is to argue that if cases of CNC manipulation undermine compatibilist accounts of the sort of control required for moral responsibility, they also undermine various agent‐causal and non‐agent‐causal libertarian accounts as well.

Jednou z důležitých otázek týkajících se svobodné vůle je tzv. otázka kompatibility. Táže se, zda jsou svobodná vůle a morální zodpovědnost slučitelné s platností determinismu. Existuje řada postojů k dané problematice. Na jedné straně se můžeme setkat s inkompatibilismem, který tvrdí, že svobodná vůle a morální zodpovědnost nejsou kompatibilní s kauzálním determinismem (ať již mluvíme o libertariánství či přísném determinismu), na straně druhé máme kompatibilismus, který se sloučením těchto dvou koncepcí nemá problém. Můj zájem je zaměřen pouze na současnou debatu (...) týkající se svobodné vůle, která prozatím nedošla k jednotné odpovědi na danou otázku. Jedním ze způsobů podpory stanovisek (ať již jedné či druhé strany) je odkaz na jejich intuitivnost. Lidské intuice jsou ale empiricky testovatelné, proč tedy tvrzení filosofů neověřit? Tuto otázku si pokládají zástupci poměrně mladého filosofického směru, kterým je experimentální filosofie. Ta ve svém znaku nese hořící křeslo, aby demonstrovala vymezení vůči závěrům získaným skrze čistě apriorní přístup a snahu o empirická přezkoumání dosavadních poznatků filosofie. Za pomoci experimentálních metod se zástupci experimentální filosofie snaží mapovat intuice laiků (tedy nefilosofů), kteří nejsou zatíženi teoretickými závazky jako samotní filosofové, a nedochází tudíž k nechtěnému zkreslení výsledků. Mým cílem je představit výsledky experimentální filosofie ohledně otázky kompatibility. Aby to bylo možné, je nutné se zběžně seznámit se základními odpověďmi na otázku kompatibility. Dále shrnu nejvýznamnější experimenty, které do dané diskuse přispěly. Chci zároveň poukázat, že debata experimentálních filosofů nabrala velice rychle svébytného směru, čímž, dle mého názoru, má potenciál původní diskusi posunout a obohatit. (shrink)

Agents have no control over the formation of their own zygote. Others may do. According to a well-known argument, the so-called Zygote Argument for incompatibilism, these facts, together with a prima facie plausible further assumption, are sufficient to prove that human agents cannot be responsible for their actions if they live in a deterministic universe. This paper argues that the lack of agents’ control over the constitution of their own zygote can undermine their responsibility only in exceptional conditions and that (...) the occurrence or non-occurrence of those conditions has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of determinism. What undermines agents’ responsibility in the situations described by the Zygote Argument is the occurrence of some specific initial conditions which may render the manipulation of agents’ behaviour possible, and not the truth of determinism. (shrink)

This paper seeks to rehabilitate St. Augustine’s widely dismissed response to the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will. This requires taking a fresh look at his analysis in On Free Choice of the Will, and arguing its relevance to the current debate. Along the way, mistaken interpretations of Augustine are rebutted, his real solution is developed and defended, a reason for his not anticipating Boethius’s a temporalist solution is suggested, a favorable comparison with Ockham is made, rival solutions (...) are rejected, and the aporetic nature of the problem is explained. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

Frankfurt cases are purported counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, which implies that we are not morally responsible for unavoidable actions. A major permutation of the counterexample strategy features buffered alternatives; this permutation is designed to overcome an influential defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. Here we defend the buffering strategy against two recent objections, both of which stress the timing of an agent’s decision. We argue that attributions of moral responsibility aren’t time-sensitive in the way the objectors (...) suppose. We then turn to the crucial question of when an action is relevantly avoidable—when, in the parlance of the literature, an alternative possibility is robust. We call attention to two plausible tests for robustness that merit further consideration, showing that the agents in buffered Frankfurt cases don’t pass these tests, despite being morally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

One strategy in recent discussions of theological fatalism is to draw on Harry Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) to defend human freedom from divine foreknowledge. For those who endorse this line, “Frankfurt counterexamples” are supposed to show that PAP is false, and this conclusion is then extended to the foreknowledge case. This makes it critical to determine whether Frankfurt counterexamples perform as advertised, an issue recently debated in this journal via a pair of articles by (...) David Widerker and John Martin Fischer. I suggest that this debate can be avoided: divine foreknowledge is itself aparadigmatic counterexample to PAP, requiring no support from suspect Frankfurt counterexamples. (shrink)

The most serious challenge to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) comes in the form of a dilemma: either the counterexample presupposes determinism, in which case it begs the question; or it does not presuppose determinism, in which case it fails to deliver on its promise to eliminate all alternatives that might plausibly be thought to satisfy PAP. I respond to this challenge with a counterexample in which considering an alternative course of action is a necessary condition (...) for deciding to act otherwise, and the agent does not in fact consider the alternative. I call this a “buffer case,” because the morally relevant alternative is “buffered” by the requirement that the agent first consider the alternative. Suppose further that the agent’s considering an alternative action—entering the buffer zone—is what would trigger the counterfactual intervener. Then it would appear that PAP-relevant alternatives are out of reach. I defend this counterexample to PAP against three objections: that considering an alternative is itself a morally relevant alternative; that buffer cases can be shown to contain other alternatives that arguably satisfy PAP; and that even if the agent’s present access to PAP-relevant alternatives were eliminated, PAP could still be satisfied in virtue of earlier alternatives. I conclude that alternative possibilities are a normal symptom, but not an essential constituent, of moral agency. (shrink)

John Harris recently argues that the moral bioenhancement proposed by Persson and Savulescu can damage moral agency by depriving the recipients of their freedom to fall (freedom to make wrongful choices) and therefore should not be pursued. The link Harris makes between moral agency and the freedom to fall, however, implies that all forms of moral enhancement, including moral education, that aim to make the enhancement recipients less likely to “fall” are detrimental to moral agency. In this paper, I present (...) a new moral agency-based critique against the moral bioenhancement program envisaged by Persson and Savulescu. I argue that the irresistible influences exerted by the bioenhancement program harms our capabilities for conducting accurate self-reflection and forming decisions that truly express our will, which subsequently undermine our moral agency. (shrink)

In “Divine Freedom,” I argue that morally significant incompatibilist freedom is a great good. So God possesses morally incompatibilist freedom. So, God can do wrong or at least can do worse than the best action He can do. So, God is not essentially morally perfect. After careful consideration of numerous objections, I conclude that this argument is undefeated.

Reflections on Meaning refines Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning. Horwich holds that the meaning of a word is constituted by the nonsemantic property that best explains a certain law. For a given word, the law to be explained governs that word’s use by specifying the “acceptance conditions” of a privileged class of sentences containing the word (26). Horwich devotes considerable energy to details in Reflections on Meaning and focuses on especially pressing problems for his use theory of meaning. As (...) a result the book’s topics run the gamut, and the connections between its chapters are not always strong. Rather than try to provide a synoptic overview, I’ll discuss three areas where it seems further clarification and detail could be fruitful: the distinction between semantic and nonsemantic properties, context sensitivity, and compositionality. Horwich thinks ours is a “fundamentally non-semantic world” (27), making it crucial that meaning be explained in nonsemantic terms. In particular, he insists that we “exclude from the analyzing-properties [of word meaning] anything that would itself require analysis in terms of meaning”: we can’t appeal to reference, belief, or intention, for example (37). But Horwich does not object to “accounts of meaning in psychological terms,” and his own theory relies heavily on a psychological, nonsemantic relation that Horwich calls “acceptance” (37). It’s difficult to see a substantive difference between this technical notion and belief. Acceptance, for Horwich, is “the psychological (but nonsemantic) relation to a sentence that is manifested in our relying on it as a premise in theoretical and practical inference” (40–41). Belief, on the other hand, is a relation with these properties except that it is semantic. Horwich’s other characterizations of acceptance don’t sharpen the distinction very much: “S accepts a sentence just in case that sentence, or its mental correlate, is in S’s belief box” (41); “believing a given proposition is nothing more than accepting some sentence that expresses it” (61).. (shrink)

I argue that free will is a nominal construct developed and deployed post hoc in an effort to provide cohesive narratives in support of a priori moral-judgmental dispositions. In a reversal of traditional course, I defend the view that there are no circumstances under which attributions of moral responsibility for an act can, should, or do depend on prior ascriptions of free will. Conversely, I claim that free will belief depends entirely on the apperceived possibility of moral responsibility. Orthodoxy dictates (...) an agency-first thesis, according to which free will is necessarily antecedent to moral responsibility. However, I present a number of arguments against this view, and in favor of an agency-last stance, according to which the concept of free will is dependent upon that of moral responsibility. I provide further support for my case in the form of new empirical evidence regarding the stable mode of inference used to attribute free will across moral contexts. These experimental results can be interpreted to imply the deflation of one of the longest-standing veridical paradoxes in experimental philosophy. Furthermore, the sole conceptual scheme found to be capable of modeling the experimental results is also capable of illuminating several classic works in the analytic philosophy of moral agency. (shrink)

What must the world be like, and what must we agents be like, in order to be morally responsible for our actions? In Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility, Dana Nelkin develops and defends what she dubs the ‘rational abilities’ view (RA) of moral responsibility. On this compatibilist view, an agent is morally responsible for an action, in a sense which makes it appropriate to hold her accountable for that action, if she has ‘the ability to do the right thing (...) for the right reasons, or a good thing for good reasons’ (7). The most distinctive features of Nelkin’s view are that (i) the conditions for moral responsibility are asymmetric, (ii) those conditions are compatibilist, that is, consistent with a deterministic world, (iii) in which causal relations hold between substances (rather than events) some of which are agents. An agent exercises her rational abilities when she is determined by her nature to act for certain reasons. (shrink)

This paper discusses the moral responsibility issue in Aristotle and, especially, in Harry Frankfurt and Alexander of Aphrodisias, seeking to identify whether it is compatible with determinism.