Some psychologists and philosophers have argued that neuroscience is importantly relevant to our moral responsibility practices, especially to our practices of praise and blame. For consider: on an unprecedented scale, contemporary neuroscience presents us with a mechanistic account of human action. Furthermore, in uential studies – most notoriously, Libet et al. (1983) – seem to show that the brain decides to do things (so to speak) before we consciously make a decision. In light of these ndings, then – or so (...) some have argued – we ought to revise our practices of praise and blame. In the current paper, I argue that this conclusion is unwarranted. The reason is that the argument for it depends on controversial non-empirical premises, premises we need not accept. I suggest, however, that neuroscience does bear on our moral responsibility practices in one important, if less revisionary, way. In particular, neuroscience o ers a new kind of evidence for determining when agents should be held exempt from our normal moral responsibility practices. (shrink)

Scientific experiments which try to examine free will are faced with various critical arguments — both philosophical and methodological. In this article I will present the most important and the most interesting critical arguments attacking two the most influential experiments: Benjamin Libet experiment and John‐Dylan Haynes experiment. In the first part of the article I will consider a particular criticism of Libet paradigm, which loses its importance in context of Haynes paradigm. Next I will present critical arguments which attack both (...) Haynes and Libet experiments (and probably all other psychophysiological experiments facing free will problem). Because of this analysis I will consider informative value of presented experiments in context of existence of free will. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problem of freedom of the will, primarily as expounded in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”. My overall aim is to show how Wittgenstein works to reconfigure the debates about freedom of the will so that it can be confronted as the kind of problem he thinks it ultimately is: an ethical and existential problem. Not published until 1989, the LFW have received scant critical attention. I (...) argue that Wittgenstein’s approach is highly distinctive in a way that makes it significantly less vulnerable than its closest cousins to certain powerful lines of critical attack. Chapter One brings out the distinctiveness of the LFW, especially vis-à-vis a putatively Wittgensteinian form of compatibilism, exemplified by Kai Nielsen. Albeit in different ways, Wittgenstein and Nielsen are both concerned to show why being caused to act, e.g. by the laws of nature, does not equate to being compelled to act, e.g. against one’s will. Unlike Nielsen, however, Wittgenstein further recognises that showing the compatibility of freedom and natural laws establishes no more than the logical consistency of holding people responsible, given determinism, and so cannot itself constitute a defence of our practices. Chapter Two introduces, as a still closer comparison with Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson’s practice-based defence of interpersonal, ‘reactive’ attitudes. I argue that the same correlation between a belief in freedom of the will and the primitive expression of ‘reactive’ attitudes/feelings is central also to the LFW. However, I further argue that certain major lines of criticism of Strawson’s practice-based defence of our current practices, familiar in the critical literature, do not in the same way threaten Wittgenstein’s defence of a broader practice-based approach, one that encompasses both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. Chapters Three and Four deal with the difficulties arising from the recognition that our most entrenched and ‘natural’ attitudes are non-reactive rather than reactive, including attitudes that are properly called ‘fatalistic’. Chapter Three develops a response to Galen Strawson’s criticism that if reactive and non-reactive attitudes are both equally expressive of human nature, then any merely descriptive approach to these attitudes will be incapable of resolving the fundamental question of which of these sorts of attitude we ought to adopt. Finally, Chapter Four examines Wittgenstein’s sustained interest in forms of life, especially religious forms of life, which appear to give equal weight to both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. (shrink)

A large portion of philosophy done in the Western analytic tradition attempts to provide conceptual analyses which are tested by examples that elicit intuitions. These intuitions are, in turn, used as evidence either for or against a given analysis. In recent years, there has been much discussion of the uses of intuitions from empirically minded philosophers and psychologists. The basic strategy is to discover empirically how “normal” folks think about certain topics in philosophy. This application of folk intuitions to philosophy (...) branches into roughly two basic approaches. The first is an attempt to show that in given domains, folk intuitions are not very reliable sources of evidence; hence, we have good reason to think that philosophers' intuitions are also not reliable sources of evidence in that domain. The second approach attempts to determine what folk concepts are. Once folk concepts are analyzed, they are then argued to be relevant to philosophical debates. My guiding question for this dissertation is the following one: Why should philosophers care about folk intuitions? One answer is that we should want some philosophical analyses to be grounded in everyday concepts. I argue that there are presently no adequate a priori arguments for the reliability of philosophical intuitions in some philosophically relevant areas. Whether intuitions are reliable enough to ground philosophical analyses is an empirical question. I review four domains where ordinary concepts have been argued to ground philosophical theorizing: (1) epistemology, (2) ethics, (3) free will, and (4) action theory. I argue that the available evidence suggests that we should be skeptical of intuitions in philosophy—but that skepticism does not entail radical skepticism. That is, the empirical studies reveal a wide variety of results which on the surface indicate that intuitions are not reliable (e.g., order effects or framing effects). However, I argue that these seeming instabilities are actually the results of stable differences in different groups of people. Hence, I argue that intuitions are stable in a surprising way—that different groups of people have stable intuitions. This intuition stability, while not the kind of monolithic stability many philosophers might desire, is argued to be sufficient to ground philosophical analyses in these domains. (shrink)

Provides an overview of empirical research relevant to philosophical questions about moral thought, feeling, reasoning, and motivation. Topics include: free will and moral responsibility, egoism and altruism, moral judgment and motivation, weakness and strength of will, moral intuitions, and moral knowledge. [Originally published in 2012. Updated and expanded in 2017.].

Random noise in the neurobiology of animals allows for the generation of alternative possibilities for action. In lower animals, this shows up as behavioral freedom. Animals are not causally predetermined by prior events going back in a causal chain to the origin of the universe. In higher animals, randomness can be consciously invoked to generate surprising new behaviors. In humans, creative new ideas can be critically evaluated and deliberated. On reflection, options can be rejected and sent back for “second thoughts” (...) before a final responsible decision and action. When the indeterminism is limited to the early stage of a mental decision, the later decision itself can be described as adequately determined. This is called the two-stage model, first the “free” generation of ideas, then an adequately determinism evaluation and selection process we call “will.”. (shrink)

There are numerous theoretical reasons which are usually said to undermine the case for mental causation. But in recent years, Libet‘s experiment on readiness potentials (Libet, Wright, and Gleason 1982; Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl 1983), and a more recent replication by a research team led by John Dylan Haynes (Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J., and Haynes, J.-D. [2008]) are often singled out because they appear to demonstrate empirically that consciousness is not causally involved in our choices and actions. (...) In this paper, an alternative interpretation of these studies is offered; one which is in accordance both with the empirical evidence and also with the phenomenology of the will, demonstrating that the two opposing views of agency – both the ones that deny the reality of free will and the ones that affirm it – are equally compatible with the outcomes of these two experiments. On this basis, it is shown that the claim that the results on the timing of readiness potential tip the scales in favour of one or the other view cannot be justified - neither from a neurological, nor from a philosophical perspective. (shrink)