There is a growing trend in policy making of holding people responsible for their lifestyle-based diseases. This has sparked a heated debate on whether people are responsible for these illnesses, which has now come to an impasse. In this paper, I present a psychological model that explains why different views on people’s responsibility for their health exist and how we can reach a resolution of the disagreement. My conclusion is that policymakers should not perceive people as responsible while health care (...) personnel should take the opposing view. (shrink)

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 (...) facing a compatibilist view of this sort, and I offer some suggestions as to how proponents of the view might attempt to address that challenge. (shrink)

This essay critically examines Alfred R. Mele’s attempt to solve a problem for libertarianism that he calls the problem of present luck. Many have thought that the traditional libertarian belief in basically free acts (where the latter are any free A-ings that occur at times at which the past up to that time and the laws of nature are consistent with the agent’s not A-ing at that time) entail that the acts are due to luck at the time of the (...) act (present luck) rather than to the kind of agent control required for genuinely free, morally responsible action. While libertarians frequently have tried to rebut the claim that basically free acts are due to present luck, Mele argues for the daring thesis that they should embrace present luck rather than try to explain it away. His strategy is to argue that the assumption of present luck in the decisions of very young children (or “little agents”) does not preclude us from attributing to them a small amount of moral responsibility and that this makes it possible to conceive of moral development as a gradual process in which as the frequency of the indeterministically caused free actions increases, the agents take on greater and greater moral responsibility. In this paper I give several possible reconstructions of Mele’s argument and analyze in detail why none of them succeeds. (shrink)

Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much (...) hangs on this issue because manipulation-based arguments are among the most important for defending incompatibilist views of free will. In this paper, I investigate this issue from a experimental perspective, using a set of statistical methods well suited for identifying the features of hypothetical cases people’s intuitions are responding to. Results strongly support the compatibilist view—subjects’ tendency to judge that a manipulated agent is unfree was found to depend on their judgments that the agent suffers impairments to certain psychological/volitional capacities that compatibilists say are the basis for free will. I discuss the significance of these results for the use of manipulation cases in the philosophical debate about free will. (shrink)

The paper argues against the very commonly held view that whenever a substance may be said to be the cause of something, a fuller and metaphysically more accurate understanding of the situation can always be obtained by looking to the properties in virtue of which that substance was able to bring about the effect in question. Paul Humphreys’ argument that when a substance is said to have produced an effect, it always turns out to be an aspect or property of (...) that substance which brought about the effect in question is examined and criticized; it is argued that it is based on an illegitimate application of Mill’s Methods of Difference and Agreement to the case. Mill’s methods, it is suggested, are methods of empirical, not of ontological enquiry. The paper then turns to examine an argument by Mele which appears to depend on a structurally rather similar assumption that if there is nothing about a subject which could explain why she does one thing rather than another, it cannot really be up to that subject which thing occurs. It is suggested that, too, the inference is faulty, and that once it is rejected, one common objection to libertarianism—the argument from luck—might be more readily met. (shrink)

Among challenges to libertarians, the _Mind_ Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the _Mind_ Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the _Mind_ Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument (...) serves to renew the challenge. The Assimilation Argument challenges libertarians to explain how ostensible exercises of free will are relevantly different from other causally undetermined outcomes, outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. In particular, libertarians must explain how agents can have the power to settle which of two causally possible futures becomes the actual future. This will require them to distinguish cases where this power is supposedly present from similar cases where it’s clearly absent. (shrink)

Typical incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism contend that being basically morally responsible for a decision one makes requires that, if that decision has proximal causes, it is not deterministically caused by them. This article develops a problem for this contention that resembles what is sometimes called the problem of present (or cross-world) luck. However, the problem makes no reference to luck nor to contrastive explanation. This article also develops a solution.

Alfred Mele’s zygote argument for incompatibilism is based on a case involving an agent in a deterministic world whose entire life is planned by someone else. Mele’s contention is that Ernie (the agent) is unfree and that normal determined agents are relevantly similar to him with regards to free will. In this paper, I examine four different ways of understanding this argument and then criticize each interpretation. I then extend my criticism to manipulation arguments in general. I conclude that the (...) zygote argument is no threat to compatibilism. (shrink)

In this paper, we do three things. First, we put forth a novel hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments. Second, we argue that this hypothesis explains both some general features of everyday thinking about responsibility and the appeal of skeptical arguments against moral responsibility. Finally, we argue that, if correct, the hypothesis provides a defense against these skeptical arguments.

Our aim in this paper is to put the concept of moral responsibility under a microscope. At the lowest level of magnification, it appears unified. But Gary Watson has taught us that if we zoom in, we will find that moral responsibility has two faces: attributability and accountability. Or, to describe the two faces in different terms, there is a difference between being responsible and holding responsible. It is one thing to talk about the connection the agent has with her (...) action; it is quite another to talk about the potential interaction the agent might have with her moral community. It turns out, though, that the faces of moral responsibility can themselves be viewed under an even higher level of magnification. If moral responsibility has two faces, then our aim in this paper is to examine their features. To do so reveals subtle distinctions in our concept of moral responsibility and its interaction with surrounding issues that, we argue, can help illuminate various debates in the literature. (shrink)

Libertarians, like Thomas Reid, hold that motives do not causally necessitate our choices. The problem that arises is to explain how the agent decides to act according to one motive and not the other. In light of some objections brought up by Leibniz and Edwards but also by contemporary compatibilists such as Haji and Goetz, I examine Thomas Reid's possible answer to this problem. I argue that to explain our choices Reid would appeal not only to motives and character traits (...) but also to the amount of effort needed to choose what is best. I also address Reid's criticism of the implicit presupposition of the Principle of Suffi cient Reason. My aim is therefore to explore, clarify and defend Reid's account of agency in choicemaking. (shrink)

This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the (...) compatibility question, but that their general approach suffers from significant practical and philosophical difficulties. Section 4 reviews experimental work addressing other aspects of the free will/moral responsibility debate, and section 5 concludes with a discussion of avenues for further research. (shrink)

Adversaries of Moral Luck (AMLs) are at pains to explain why wrongdoers are liable to bear burdens (punishment, compensation etc.) which are related to the harm they cause, because the consequences of what we do are a matter of luck. One attempt to solve this problem suggests that wrongdoers who cause more harm are liable to bear a greater burden not because they are more blameworthy but rather because they get the short straw in a liability lottery (represented by the (...) apparently indeterminate causal process). In this paper I argue that this attempt fails on several grounds. Apart from the fact that it is hard to see how the implementation of liability lotteries can be motivated and the fact that such scheme presupposes a political order (whereas the notion of liability does not seem to presuppose one), detaching liability from the outcomes of a culpable action undermines whichever justifications there were for imposing liability in the first place. Moreover, relying on the determination of the causal process as a good indication of the wrongdoer’s degree of culpability is mistaken, because the luck brought about through the causal process is not necessarily the only element involved in cases of harmful conduct which lies beyond the wrongdoers’ control. (shrink)

Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a ‘soft line’ reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation—and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line reply—can be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as (...) alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist’s perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent’s responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens. (shrink)

In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...) will and moral responsibility, and finally (6) the debate centering on luck. (shrink)

In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. (...) These studies also illustrate some problems that pertain to all of the studies that have been run thus far. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt dramatically shaped the debates over freedom and responsibility by arguing that the sort of freedom germane to responsibility does not involve the freedom to do otherwise. His argument turns upon an example meant to disprove the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: A person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. Debate over Frankfurt's argument has turned almost exclusively on the success of the example meant to defeat it. But there is more (...) to Frankfurt's argument than the example in question, and this is not widely recognized. Inattention to these other aspects of Frankfurt's argument has distorted the force of it. In this paper I shall explore avenues for both refuting and advancing Frankfurt's argument that look beyond the examples. These further considerations invite us to think in broader terms about moral responsibility's nature and the sort of freedom required for it. (shrink)

Compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility disagree with one another about the bearing of agents’ histories on whether or not they are morally responsible for some of their actions. Some stories about manipulated agents prompt such disagreements. In this article, I call attention to some of the main features of my own “history-sensitive” compatibilist proposal about moral responsibility, and I argue that arguments advanced by Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas leave that proposal unscathed.

This article distinguishes among and examines three different kinds of argument for the thesis that moral responsibility and free action are each incompatible with the truth of determinism: straight manipulation arguments; manipulation arguments to the best explanation; and original-design arguments. Structural and methodological matters are the primary focus.

In this paper I seek to identify different sorts of freedom putatively linked to moral responsibility; I then explore the relationship between such notions of freedom and the Consequence Argument, on the one hand, and the Frankfurt-examples, on the other. I focus (in part) on a dilemma: if a compatibilist adopts a broadly speaking "conditional" understanding of freedom in reply to the Consequence Argument, such a theorist becomes vulnerable in a salient way to the Frankfurt-examples.

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.

Psychopathy involves impaired capacity for prudential and moral reasoning due to impaired capacity for empathy, remorse, and sensitivity to fear-inducing stimuli. Brain abnormalities and genetic polymorphisms associated with these traits appear to justify the claim that psychopaths cannot be morally responsible for their behavior. Yet psychopaths are capable of instrumental reasoning in achieving their goals, which suggests that they have some capacity to respond to moral reasons against performing harmful acts and refrain from performing them. The cognitive and affective impairment (...) of the psychopath justifies mitigated responsibility, but not excuse. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate on free will, most philosophers assume that the defense of libertarianism implies the defense of the notion of alternative possibilities. This article discusses this presupposition by showing that it is possible to build a libertarianism without alternative possibilities, apparently more robust than libertarianism with alternative possibilities. Inspired by Bergson, this nonclassical libertarianism challenges the idea that all causation implies the actualization of a predetermined possibility (an idea shared by determinism and classical libertarianism). Moreover, it challenges the (...) idea that free will is a mere choice between prefixed possibilities: for this libertarianism, free will is the result of a creative process of the mind—an entirely causal process whose outcome is not, however, predetermined. This nonclassical libertarianism describes the process of forming a will in a more realistic way than classical libertarianism does. Furthermore, it is not threatened by the problem of chance. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a (...) Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility. (shrink)

This paper offers a new argument for compatibilism about moral responsibility by drawing attention to some overlooked implications of incompatibilism. More specifically, I argue that incompatibilists are committed to some unsavory claims about pairs of agents in deterministic worlds. These include comparative claims about moral responsibility, blameworthiness, desert, punishment, and the fittingness of reactive attitudes. I argue that we have good reasons to reject such comparisons because they fail to account for key differences between deterministic agents. This provides us with (...) reason to embrace compatibilism and reject incompatibilism. (shrink)

I outline a heretofore neglected difference between manipulation scenarios and merely deterministic ones. Plausible scientific determinism does not imply that the relevant prior history of the universe is independent of us, while manipulation does. Owing to sensitive dependence of physical outcomes upon initial conditions, in order to trace a deterministic history, a microphysical level of analysis is required. But on this level physical laws are time-symmetrically deterministic, and causality, conceived asymmetrically, disappears. I then consider a revised scenario to resurrect the (...) threat of manipulation even in the presence of time-symmetry and sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. To do so we posit a manipulator containing all the information of the manipulated and time-symmetrically related to him. The new scenario violates special relativity, but even waiving that objection, the scenario faces a dilemma. I argue that the manipulator either lacks agency enough to manipulate the target, or can integrate thoughts separated by long time spans into a single decision. In the latter case, the 'manipulated agent' disappears into the manipulator, making it the story of just one agent. (shrink)

In discussions on moral responsibility for actions, a commonly discussed case is one in which an agent is manipulated into performing some action. On some views, such agents lack responsibility for those actions partly because they issue from attitudes that were acquired in an inappropriate way. In this paper, it is argued that such views are in need of revision. After introducing a new problematic case of a manipulated agent, revisions are offered for specific views. The paper concludes with a (...) discussion of the views in a broader context, as well as some potential implications of the revisions. (shrink)

I raise three new objections against Robert Kane’s account of ultimate responsibility based on what he calls self-forming actions (sfa s). First, the ultimate responsibility that we have for our character is very limited, since, according to Kane’s model of character development, our character is shaped by sfa s for which we are only minimally responsible. Second, it is not desirable to rely on sfa s to shape our character. There are much better alternatives. Third, given what typically motivates our (...) sfa s, we only rarely satisfy the conditions on responsibility for the changes in character that our sfa s give rise to. (shrink)

A common style of argument in the literature on free will and moral responsibility is the Manipulation Argument. These tend to begin with a case of an agent in a deterministic universe who is manipulated, say, via brain surgery, into performing some action. Intuitively, this agent is not responsible for that action. Yet, since there is no relevant difference, with respect to whether an agent is responsible, between the manipulated agent and a typical agent in a deterministic universe, responsibility is (...) not compatible with the truth of determinism. In response, some theorists have argued that there is a relevant difference, and have developed two sorts of accounts of that difference: bypassing views, and manipulator-focused views. Manipulator-focused views suggest that the difference concerns the presence of a manipulator, whereas bypassing views suggest that the relevant difference concerns the fact that the action issues from attitudes that the manipulated agent acquired in a way that bypassed her capacities for control over her mental life. One sort of case used to decide between these sorts of accounts is a case of machine induction, which is just like a manipulation case, yet the change in the agent is the result of some natural force. Against the received view, Xiaofei Liu argues that such cases pose problems for bypassing views, and favor manipulator-focused views instead. This paper addresses Liu’s arguments, as well as a variety of cases, concluding that cases of machine induction do not provide motivation for a bypassing theorist to adopt a manipulator-focused view. (shrink)

I recently argued that reductive physicalist versions of libertarian free will face a physical indeterminism luck objection. John Lemos claims that one potential advocate of reductive physicalist libertarianism, Robert Kane, avoids this physical indeterminism luck objection. I here show how the problem remains.

Determinism is frequently understood as implying the possibility of perfect prediction. This possibility then functions as an assumption in the Manipulation Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Yet this assumption is mistaken. As a result, arguments that rely on it fail to show that determinism would rule out human free will. We explain why determinism does not imply the possibility of perfect prediction in any world with laws of nature like ours, since it would be impossible for (...) an agent to predict with certainty any future event that is causally influenced by events outside her own backward light cone yet inside the backward light cone of the future event. This is the _light-cone limit_ and it undermines the Manipulation Argument or limits what this argument can tell us about the relevance of determinism to free will. We also respond to objections that the light-cone limit is irrelevant to the Manipulation Argument. (shrink)

Anscombe’s “Causality and Determination” is often cited in the contemporary free will debate, but rarely discussed in much detail. It’s main contribution, it is thought, is the defense of an alternative to deterministic causation, thus clearing the way for an incompatibilist analysis of free actions in terms of probabilistic causation. However, in this paper I will show that the contemporary probabilistic analysis of free action actually stands in direct conflict with Anscombe’s lecture. Instead, I will argue, its true value for (...) incompatibilist accounts of free will lies in Anscombe’s thought that there are various fundamentally different kinds of causality. This variety, I argue, allows for a revised conception indeterminism and an understanding of free will as the manifestation of a particular sort of agent-causal power. (shrink)

Philosophers have already recognized the importance of causal preemption involving “positive” events. First, preemption with positive events raises problems for counterfactual theories of causation. Second, theories of moral and legal responsibility rely heavily on the concept of causation, so accurately assessing responsibility in preemption cases requires correctly assessing their causal structure. However, philosophers have not discussed preemption involving “negative” events or omissions. This paper argues that cases of preemptive omissions exist and have important implications for theories of causation and for (...) moral and legal responsibility. Of theoretical importance, the alterations made to counterfactual theories of causation to address preemption with positive events do not seem to work for accommodating preemptive omissions. Of practical importance, there have been actual legal cases involving preemptive omissions, and at least one such case was, this paper contends, decided incorrectly on erroneous causal grounds. This paper identifies what must happen for preemptive omissions to obtain. It then argues for the existence of preemptive omissions by constructing a series of cases and drawing structural parallels between preemption cases with positive events and cases with omissions. It ultimately presents a formula for generating preemptive omissions and examines both why “traditional” methods of generating preemption fail for omissions and why the proposed method avoids such concerns. (shrink)

Claims about freedom and predestination are ubiquitous in movies, novels, and myths. These claims touch upon the philosophical problem of the compatibility of free will and determination. In order to make an informed judgment about whether these claims are true, it is helpful to know what philosophers have to say about free will. However, philosophical discussions are usually absent in popular culture. It is perhaps no wonder, since free will is a topic that has been discussed for millennia. Consequently, these (...) discussions have become quite complicated and not easy to decipher. This essay is a popular introduction to these discussions, accessible to readers without former acquaintance with the topic. I provide references to other works for readers interested in knowing more. My aim is to show that while there are persuasive arguments against free will, there are no fewer persuasive replies to these arguments. Free will is a fascinating topic, and I hope that acquaintance with the relevant philosophical discussion will prove useful for those who wonder if anyone is free to create their own destiny. (shrink)

The modal collapse objection to classical theism has received significant attention among philosophers as of late. My aim in this paper is to advance this blossoming debate. First, I briefly survey the modal collapse literature and argue that classical theists avoid modal collapse if and only if they embrace an indeterministic link between God and his effects. Second, I argue that this indeterminism poses two challenges to classical theism. The first challenge is that it collapses God’s status as an intentional (...) agent who knows and intends what he is bringing about in advance. The second challenge is that it collapses God’s providential control over which creation obtains. (shrink)

Some incompatibilists about free will or moral responsibility and determinism would abandon their incompatibilism were they to learn that determinism is true. But is it reasonable to flip-flop in this way? In this article, we contend that it is and show what follows. The result is both a defense of a particular incompatibilist strategy and a general framework for assessing other cases of flip-flopping.

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (shrink)

As neuroscience progresses, we will not only gain a better understanding of how our brains work, but also a better understanding of how to modify them, and as a result, our mental states. An important question we are faced with is whether the state could be justified in implementing such methods on criminal offenders, without their consent, for the purposes of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism; a practice that is already legal in some jurisdictions. By focusing on a prominent type (...) of view of free action, which I call bypassing views, this paper evaluates how such interventions may negatively impact the freedom of their subjects. The paper concludes that there will be a tension between the goals of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism, on the one hand, and the negative impact such interventions may have on free action, on the other. Other things equal, the better that a particular intervention is at achieving the former, the more likely it is to result in the latter. (shrink)

Many philosophers think there is a luck problem confronting libertarian models of free will. If free actions are undetermined, then it seems to be a matter of chance or luck that they occur—so the objection goes. Agent-causal libertarians have responded to this objection by asserting that free actions, in their essence, involve a direct causal relation between agents and the events they cause. So, free actions are not lucky after all. Not everyone, however, is convinced by this response. Al Mele (...) and Peter van Inwagen, for instance, argue that luckiness remains even if agent-causation exists. One way to answer their arguments, I suggest, is by appealing to considerations in metaphysical grounding and the associated idea of explanatory priority. Mele’s argument loses force if facts about which possible world is actual are partly grounded in facts about free choices themselves. And van Inwagen’s challenge can be met if facts about free actions are explanatorily prior to any objective probabilities associated with those actions. (shrink)

One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a (...) universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents. (shrink)

Modal collapse arguments are all the rage in certain philosophical circles as of late. The arguments purport to show that classical theism entails the absurdly fatalistic conclusion that everything exists necessarily. My first aim in this paper is bold: to put an end to action-based modal collapse arguments against classical theism. To accomplish this, I first articulate the ‘Simple Modal Collapse Argument’ and then characterize and defend Tomaszewski’s criticism thereof. Second, I critically examine Mullins’ new modal collapse argument formulated in (...) response to the aforementioned criticism. I argue that Mullins’ new argument does not succeed. Third, I critically examine a powers-based modal collapse argument against classical theism that has received much less attention in the literature. Fourth, I show why God’s being purely actual, as well God’s being identical to each of God’s acts, simply cannot entail modal collapse given indeterministic causation. This, I take it, signals the death of modal collapse arguments. But not all hope is lost for proponents of modal collapse arguments—for the death is a fruitful one insofar as it paves the way for new inquiry into at least two new potential problems for classical theism. Showing this is my paper’s second aim. (shrink)

Molinists hold that there are contingently true counterfactuals about what agents would do if put in specific circumstances, that God knows these prior to creation, and that God uses this knowledge in choosing how to create. In this essay we critique Molinism, arguing that if these theses were true, agents would not be free. Consider Eve’s sinning upon being tempted by a serpent. We argue that if Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts that fully explains both (...) Eve’s action and everything else Eve does that influences that action; and that if this is the case, Eve does not act freely. The first premise of this argument follows from the explanatory relations the Molinist is committed to, and the second premise follows from libertarian intuitions about free will. (shrink)

Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that agents cause actions to occur or not occur: Maddy’s decision to get a beer causes her to get up off her comfortable couch to get a beer, though she almost chose not to get up. Libertarian free will notoriously faces the luck objection, according to which agential states do not determine whether an action occurs or not, so it is beyond the control of the agent, hence lucky, whether an action occurs or (...) not: Maddy’s reasons for getting beer in equipoise with her reasons to remain in her comfortable seat do not determine that she will get up or stay seated, so it seems beyond her control, hence lucky, that she gets up. In this paper I consider a sub-set of the luck objection called the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection, according to which indeterministic physical processes cause actions to occur or not, and agent’s lack control over these indeterministic physical processes, so agent’s lack control over, hence it is lucky, whether action occurs or not. After motivating the physical indeterminism luck objection, I consider responses from three recent event-causal libertarian models, and conclude that they fail to overcome the problem, though one promising avenue is opened up. (shrink)

One type of soft-line reply to manipulation arguments, which I call ‘the another-agent reply’, focuses on the existence of some controlling agent and how this can undermine the actor's moral responsibility. A well-known challenge to this type of reply is the so-called ‘machine induction’ case. This paper provides an argument for why ‘machine induction’ presents no real challenge to the another-agent reply. It further argues that any soft-liner who does not leave room for the existence of some controlling agent in (...) their explanation of why manipulation undermines responsibility will face a dilemma. Thus, instead of presenting a challenge to the another-agent reply, ‘machine induction’ actually presents a reason in support of it. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the relevance of quantum mechanics to the free-will debate has been discussed at length, especially in relation to the prospects of libertarianism. Basing his interpretation on Anscombe’s seminal work, Putnam argued in 1979 that, given that quantum mechanical indeterminacy is holistic at the macrolevel—i.e., it is not traceable to atomistic events such as quantum jumps of single atoms—it can provide libertarians with the kind of freedom they seek. As shown in this article, however, Putnam ultimately (...) reached the conclusion—together with the other author of this article—that his argument was wrong due to problems with the way it appealed to the Uncertainty Principle.**. (shrink)

Compatibilists about free will maintain that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilists disagree. Incompatibilist believers in free will have been challenged to solve a problem that luck poses for them—the problem of present luck. This article articulates that challenge and then explores a novel compatibilist view recently proposed by Christian List. It is argued that List’s view, unlike standard compatibilist views, faces a very similar problem about luck.