Since Donald Davidson issued his challenge to anticausalism in 1963, most philosophers have espoused the view that our actions are causally explained by the reasons why we do them. This Davidsonian consensus, however, rests on a faulty argument. Davidson’s challenge has been met, in more than one way, by anticausalists such as C. Ginet, G. Wilson, and S. Sehon. Hence I endeavor to support causalism with a stronger argument. Our actions are correlated with our motivating reasons; to wit, we often (...) do what we have reason to do. In yet other words, we are often rational. Our frequent rationality is easily explained if causalism is correct, but looks like a staggering coincidence otherwise. Anticausalism thus appears to be ill-equipped to account for the very existence of rational behavior, and so far no attempts in this direction have succeeded. (shrink)

While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of free will, (...) we find, for the most part, nothing to suggest that free will is inconsistent with the presence of unconscious neural precursors to choices. It is only if we adopt highly non-naturalistic assumptions about the mind (e.g. if we embrace Cartesian dualism and locate free choice in the non-physical realm) that it seems plausible to suppose that the neuroscientific data generates a threat to free will. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a form of free will fallibilism. Unlike the free will realist who is fully persuaded that we have sufficient evidence of freedom to justify holding individuals morally responsible for what they do and imposing punishment, and unlike the free will skeptic who is fully persuaded that we do not have enough evidence to believe that we face a future of open alternatives, the free will fallibilist will believe that we have enough evidence to justify a (...) belief in freedom for some purposes but not for others. Along the way I argue that deliberation-compatibilism of the sort recently defended by Pereboom is subject to a very familiar sort of counterexample. The question that concerns me the most is whether punishment—this brutal institution that disposes of the lives of countless of our most vulnerable citizens—can be justified. I think it cannot, precisely because there is not sufficient evidence that human beings are free to choose between branching alternatives and so deserve to be treated like that. At least, if there is such justifying evidence it is more or less completely balanced by evidence that all events including human actions have causes. Moreover, I find compatibilism utterly unpersuasive. At the same time, I believe that I am a free agent; what I do is in large part up to me. I believe that the explanation of action cannot be reduced to causal explanation, and I believe that the logic of action requires a notion of branching time. I have two pictures of the universe; which of the two pictures I may rely upon will depend upon just what it is that I intend to do. Between the problem that preoccupies me, punishment, and my day-to-day choices, there is a wide gap. There are a lot of choices that, on the axis of justification, fall in between the two, many of them choices about how to treat those around us: whether to snub a friend who has insulted me, whether to castigate her, whether to reward a kind act with praise. Where to draw the line is a topic for another paper. The only principle that right now seems to me firm enough to act upon is this: the greater the likelihood of doing harm, the less likely the choice is to be justified. (shrink)