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Free Will and Illusion

New York: Oxford University Press (2000)

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  1. Love, Freedom, and Resentment.Samuel Lundquist - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Virginia
    In recent decades, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) has had an enormous influence on philosophical views of moral responsibility. Many contemporary views follow Strawson in centering questions of responsibility on the appropriateness of certain attitudes in our interpersonal relations, especially attitudes of blame and anger, rather than on the abstract nature of free will. Strawson’s influence has in many ways been beneficial, but the prevailing Strawsonian views have taken on some of the more dubious tendencies of contemporary moral (...)
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  • Compatibilism and Truly Minimal Morality.Travis Quigley - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (4).
    I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for (...)
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  • Benatar’s Anti-Natalism: Philosophically Flawed, Morally Dubious.Christian Piller - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):897-917.
    In the first part of the paper, I discuss Benatar’s asymmetry argument for the claim that it would have been better for each of us to have never lived at all. In contrast to other commentators, I will argue that there is a way of interpreting the premises of his argument which makes all of them come out true. (This will require one departure from Benatar’s own presentation.) Once we see why the premises are true, we will, however, also realise (...)
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  • A Coherent and Comprehensible Interpretation of Saul Smilansky’s Dualism.Sofia M. I. Jeppsson - 2015 - Filosofiska Notiser 2 (1):39-45.
    Saul Smilansky’s theory of free will and moral responsibility consists of two parts; dualism and illusionism. Dualism is the thesis that both compatibilism and hard determinism are partly true, and has puzzled many philosophers. I argue that Smilansky’s dualism can be given an unquestionably coherent and comprehensible interpretation if we reformulate it in terms of pro tanto reasons. Dualism so understood is the thesis that respect for persons gives us pro tanto reasons to blame wrongdoers, and also pro tanto reasons (...)
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  • Tragic Choices and the Virtue of Techno-Responsibility Gaps.John Danaher - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (2):1-26.
    There is a concern that the widespread deployment of autonomous machines will open up a number of ‘responsibility gaps’ throughout society. Various articulations of such techno-responsibility gaps have been proposed over the years, along with several potential solutions. Most of these solutions focus on ‘plugging’ or ‘dissolving’ the gaps. This paper offers an alternative perspective. It argues that techno-responsibility gaps are, sometimes, to be welcomed and that one of the advantages of autonomous machines is that they enable us to embrace (...)
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  • Free Will in Context.Patrick Grim - 2007 - Behavioral Science and the Law 25:183-201.
    Philosophical work on free will, contemporary as well as historical, is inevitably framed by the problem of free will and determinism. One of my goals in what follows is to give a feel for the main lines of that debate in philosophy today. I will also be outlining a particular perspective on free will. Many working philosophers consider themselves Compatibilists; the perspective outlined, building on a number of arguments in the recent literature, is a contemporary form of such a view. (...)
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  • Heavenly Freedom and Two Models of Character Perfection.Robert J. Hartman - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (1):45-64.
    Human persons can act with libertarian freedom in heaven according to one prominent view, because they have freely acquired perfect virtue in their pre-heavenly lives such that acting rightly in heaven is volitionally necessary. But since the character of human persons is not perfect at death, how is their character perfected? On the unilateral model, God alone completes the perfection of their character, and, on the cooperative model, God continues to work with them in purgatory to perfect their own character. (...)
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  • Determinism and Destigmatization: Mitigating Blame for Addiction.Thomas W. Clark - 2020 - Neuroethics 14 (2):219-230.
    The brain disease model of addiction is widely endorsed by agencies concerned with treating behavioral disorders and combatting the stigma often associated with addiction. However, both its accuracy and its effectiveness in reducing stigma have been challenged. A proposed alternative, the “choice” model, recognizes the residual rational behavior control capacities of addicted individuals and their ability to make choices, some of which may cause harm. Since harmful choices are ordinarily perceived as blameworthy, the choice model may inadvertently help justify stigma. (...)
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  • Joule’s Nineteenth Century Energy Conservation Meta-law and the Twentieth Century Physics (Quantum Mechanics and Relativity): Twenty-First Century Analysis.Vladik Kreinovich & Olga Kosheleva - 2021 - Foundations of Science 26 (3):703-725.
    Joule’s Energy Conservation Law was the first “meta-law”: a general principle that all physical equations must satisfy. It has led to many important and useful physical discoveries. However, a recent analysis seems to indicate that this meta-law is inconsistent with other principles—such as the existence of free will. We show that this conclusion about inconsistency is based on a seemingly reasonable—but simplified—analysis of the situation. We also show that a more detailed mathematical and physical analysis of the situation reveals that (...)
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  • Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality: Rethinking Distributive Justice and the Principle of Desert.Joseph de la Torre Dwyer - 2019 - Springer Verlag.
    This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...)
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  • On Libertarianism as an Explanatory Hypothesis.Andrew Kissel - 2019 - Southwest Philosophy Review 35 (2):91-110.
    Recently, several libertarian philosophers have argued that we appear free on the basis of widespread experience, and that this appearance justifies believing that we enjoy libertarian free will (e.g. Pink 2004 and Swinburne 2013). Such arguments have a long history in philosophy but have been easily dismissed on one of two grounds: either the appearance of freedom does not exist, or else it is an illusion. In this paper, I argue that although presentations of the argument have been historically inadequate, (...)
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  • Digitized Нumanism.G. L. Tulchinskii - 2018 - Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 11:28-43.
    The humanitarian thought did not encounter such challenges that we face today. Biotechnologies outline the perspectives of “posthuman” personology, while digitalization and robotization of almost all spheres of social practice bring to the fore the idea of homodicy – justifying the need for human existence. The article analyzes four blocks of challenges to humanitarian knowledge: (1) achievements in medicine, prosthetics, transplantology and genetic engineering, which outlined the separation of a sentient subject from traditional anthropomorphism (“posthuman” personology); (2) studies of the (...)
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  • Gilberto Gomes é mesmo um compatibilista?Marcelo Fischborn - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3):179-188.
    This paper focuses on Gilberto Gomes’ work on free will. In a series of contributions that have had a significant impact on the respective literature, Gomes developed a conception about free will and argued that its existence is consistent with recent scientific findings, specially in neuroscience. In this paper, I object to a claim of Gomes about his conception of free will, namely the claim that it is a compatibilist conception. I seek to show that Gomes does not use the (...)
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  • Incapacitation, Reintegration, and Limited General Deterrence.Derk Pereboom - 2018 - Neuroethics 13 (1):87-97.
    The aim of this article is to set out a theory for treatment of criminals that rejects retributive justification for punishment; does not fall afoul of a plausible prohibition on using people merely as means; and actually works in the real world. The theory can be motivated by free will skepticism. But it can also be supported without reference to the free will issue, since retributivism faces ethical challenges in its own right. In past versions of the account I’ve emphasized (...)
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  • Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
    Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics (...)
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  • The Public Health-Quarantine Model.Gregg D. Caruso - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
    One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justified are insufficient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The first is that one of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifications that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility, Luck, and Compatibilism.Taylor W. Cyr - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (1):193-214.
    In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist account over (...)
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  • Free Will and Ultimate Explanation.Boris Kment - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):114-130.
    Many philosophers and non-philosophers who reflect on the causal antecedents of human action get the impression that no agent can have morally relevant freedom. Call this the ‘non-existence impression.’ The paper aims to understand the (often implicit) reasoning underlying this impression. On the most popular reconstructions, the reasoning relies on the assumption that either an action is the outcome of a chance process, or it is determined by factors that are beyond the agent’s control or which she did not bring (...)
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  • Is Moral Anger Justified? A Functionalist Defense Of Feeling And Expressing Moral Anger.Razia Sahi - unknown
    Derk Pereboom argues that since we are not ultimately morally responsible for our thoughts and actions, it is irrational and unfair to feel and express moral anger towards agents for their wrongdoings. Furthermore, he argues, moral anger is not practically beneficial, typically causing more harm than good. Thus, he proposes that we replace moral anger with moral sadness, or disappointment in response to agents’ wrongdoings. I offer a functional account of moral anger to argue that moral anger has important intrapersonal (...)
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  • Hooray! We're Not Morally Responsible!Gerald Harrison - 2009 - Think 8 (23):87-95.
    Being morally responsible means being blameworthy and deserving of punishment if we do wrong and praiseworthy and deserving reward if we do right. In what follows I shall argue that in all likelihood we're not morally responsible. None of us. Ever.
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  • Parfit on Free Will, Desert, and the Fairness of Punishment.Saul Smilansky - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3):139-148.
    In his recent monumental book On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues for a hard determinist view that rejects free will-based moral responsibility and desert. This rejection of desert is necessary for his main aim in the book, the overall reconciliation of normative ethics. In Appendix E of his book, however, Parfit claims that it is possible to mete out fair punishment. Parfit’s position on punishment here seems to be inconsistent with his hard determinism. I argue that Parfit is mistaken here, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in Life (repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - In Masahiro Morioka (ed.), Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz. Journal of Philosophy of Life, Waseda University. pp. 228-278.
    A lengthy reply to 13 critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ collected in an e-book and reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_. The contributors are from a variety of philosophical traditions, including the Anglo-American, Continental and East Asian (especially Buddhist and Japanese) ones.
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  • The Most Persuasive Frankfurt Example, and What It Shows: Or Why Determinism Is Not the Greatest Threat to Moral Responsibility.Larry Alexander - 2014 - Open Journal of Philosophy 4 (2):141-143.
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  • Immigration and self-determination.Bas van der Vossen - 2015 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 14 (3):270-290.
    This article asks whether states have a right to close their borders because of their right to self-determination, as proposed recently by Christopher Wellman, Michael Walzer, and others. It asks the fundamental question whether self-determination can, in even its most unrestricted form, support the exclusion of immigrants. I argue that the answer is no. To show this, I construct three different ways in which one might use the idea of self-determination to justify immigration restrictions and show that each of these (...)
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  • Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Behavior: A Public Health-Quarantine Model.Gregg D. Caruso - 2016 - Southwest Philosophy Review 32 (1):25-48.
    One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justified are insufficient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The first is that one of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifications that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per (...)
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  • Free Will Skepticism and Its Implications: An Argument for Optimism.Gregg Caruso - 2019 - In Elizabeth Shaw (ed.), Justice Without Retribution. pp. 43-72.
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  • Cross-world luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists as well.Mirja Pérez de Calleja - 2014 - Philosophical Explorations 17 (2):112-125.
    (2014). Cross-world luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists as well. Philosophical Explorations: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 112-125. doi: 10.1080/13869795.2014.912673.
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  • Choosing freedom: basic desert and the standpoint of blame.Evan Tiffany - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (2):195-211.
    One can think of the traditional logic of blame as involving three intuitively plausible claims: (1) blame is justified only if one is deserving of blame, (2) one is deserving of blame only if one is relevantly in control of the relevant causal antecedents, and (3) one is relevantly in control only if one has libertarian freedom. While traditional compatibilism has focused on rejecting either or both of the latter two claims, an increasingly common strategy is to deny the link (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Willensfreiheit.Geert Keil - 2017 - Berlin: De Gruyter.
    Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neuere Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Ferner entwickelt der Autor eine eigene Position, die er 'fähigkeitsbasierten Libertarismus' nennt. Er widerspricht dem breiten philosophischen Konsens, dass jedenfalls eine Art von Freiheit mit einem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei, nämlich die Fähigkeit, sich unter gegebenen Bedingungen so oder anders zu entscheiden. Im Buch wird argumentiert, dass der libertarischen Freiheitsauffassung, die wir im Alltag alle teilen, bei näherer Betrachtung keine Tatschen (...)
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  • The People Problem.Benjamin Vilhauer - 2013 - In Gregg D. Caruso (ed.), Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 141.
    One reason that many philosophers are reluctant to seriously contemplate the possibility that we lack free will seems to be the view that we must believe we have free will if we are to regard each other as persons in the morally deep sense—the sense that involves deontological notions such as human rights. In the contemporary literature, this view is often informed by P.F. Strawson's view that to treat human beings as having free will is to respond to them with (...)
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  • (1 other version)Free Will Agnosticism.Stephen Kearns - 2013 - Noûs 47 (2):235-252.
    I argue that no one knows whether there is free will.
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  • Morally Embedded Selves and Embedded Compatibilism.Guy Pinku - 2012 - Philosophica 85 (2):67-89.
    The principal argument suggested here is that we are all morally embedded selves: We have no control over the abilities that make us moral agents nor can we control the degree to which we have these abilities; in other words, we are not responsible for our good or bad qualities as moral agents. This, I believe, calls for the adoption of embedded compatibilism (EC). According to EC, people have control over their conduct; this control, however, is embedded within prerequisites, which (...)
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  • Fischer-style Compatibilism.Michael Garnett - 2013 - Analysis 73 (2):387-397.
    This is a critical review essay on John Martin Fischer's Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value.
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  • The moral psychology of determinism.Jeremy Evans - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (5):639-661.
    In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have resurrected a debate at the intersection of metaphysics and moral psychology. The central question is whether we can conceive of moral agents as deterministic systems unfolding predictably and inevitably under constant laws without psychologically damaging the pro-social attitudes and moral emotions that grease the wheels of social life. These concerns are sparked by recent experiments documenting a decline in the ethical behavior of participants primed with deterministic metaphysics. But this literature has done little (...)
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  • (1 other version)Folk intuitions, slippery slopes, and necessary fictions: An essay on Saul Smilansky's free will illusionism.Thomas Nadelhoffer & Adam Feltz - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):202-213.
    A number of philosophers have recently become increasingly interested in the potential usefulness of fictitious and illusory beliefs.As a result, a wide variety of fictionalisms and illusionisms have sprung up in areas ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—for example, the purportedly descriptive claim that the majority of people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will, coupled with the normative claim (...)
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  • Experimental evidence for free will revisionism.Chris Weigel - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (1):31 - 43.
    Philosophers who theorize about whether free will is compatible with causal determinism often rely on ordinary intuitions to bolster their theory. A revisionist theory of free will takes a different approach, saying that the best philosophical theory of what we ought to think about free will conflicts with what we ordinarily do think about free will. I contend that revisionism has not been taken as seriously as should be because philosophers have not realized the extent to which ordinary intuitions are (...)
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  • The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Moral Responsibility.Helen Steward - 2012 - The Journal of Ethics 16 (2):241-271.
    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 (...)
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  • A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):611-639.
    Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of (...)
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  • Neurology, psychology, and the meaning of life: On Thagard's The Brain and the Meaning of Life.Iddo Landau - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (4):604-618.
    The Brain and the Meaning of Life Paul Thagard Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 274 pages, ISBN: 9780691142722 (hbk): $29.95 This paper criticizes central arguments in Paul Thagard's The Brain and the Meaning of Life, concluding, contrary to Thagard, that there is very little that we can learn from brain research about the meaning of life. The paper offers a critical review of Thagard's argument against nihilism and his argument that it is love, work, and play, rather than other activities, (...)
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  • Justice and the Grey Box of Responsibility.Carl Knight - 2010 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 57 (124):86-112.
    Even where an act appears to be responsible, and satisfies all the conditions for responsibility laid down by society, the response to it may be unjust where that appearance is false, and where those conditions are insufficient. This paper argues that those who want to place considerations of responsibility at the centre of distributive and criminal justice ought to take this concern seriously. The common strategy of relying on what Susan Hurley describes as a 'black box of responsibility' has the (...)
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  • Persons, punishment, and free will skepticism.Benjamin Vilhauer - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (2):143-163.
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a justification of punishment which can be endorsed by free will skeptics, and which can also be defended against the "using persons as mere means" objection. Free will skeptics must reject retributivism, that is, the view that punishment is just because criminals deserve to suffer based on their actions. Retributivists often claim that theirs is the only justification on which punishment is constrained by desert, and suppose that non-retributive justifications must therefore endorse (...)
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  • The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Noûs 46 (2):326-354.
    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.
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  • The Physiognomy of Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Neal A. Tognazzini - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2):381-417.
    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 (...)
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  • Free will and the unconscious precursors of choice.Markus E. Schlosser - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):365-384.
    Benjamin Libet's empirical challenge to free will has received a great deal of attention and criticism. A standard line of response has emerged that many take to be decisive against Libet's challenge. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that this standard response fails to put the challenge to rest. It fails, in particular, to address a recent follow-up experiment that raises a similar worry about free will (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). In the second part, (...)
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  • Agnosticism about moral responsibility.Jeremy Byrd - 2010 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):411-432.
    Traditionally, incompatibilism has rested on two theses. First, the familiar Principle of Alternative Possibilities says that we cannot be morally responsible for what we do unless we could have done otherwise. Accepting this principle, incompatibilists have then argued that there is no room for such alternative possibilities in a deterministic world. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have argued that incompatibilism about moral responsibility can be defended independently of these traditional theses (Ginet 2005: 604-8; McKenna 2001; Stump 1999: 322-4, 2000 (...)
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  • Farewell to the luck (and Mind) argument.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (2):199-230.
    In this paper I seek to defend libertarianism about free will and moral responsibility against two well-known arguments: the luck argument and the Mind argument. Both of these arguments purport to show that indeterminism is incompatible with the degree of control necessary for free will and moral responsibility. I begin the discussion by elaborating these arguments, clarifying important features of my preferred version of libertarianism—features that will be central to an adequate response to the arguments—and showing why a strategy of (...)
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  • Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Felipe de Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols & Smita Sirker - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (3):346-358.
    Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...)
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  • Saving Strawson: Evil and Strawsonian Accounts of Moral Responsibility. [REVIEW]Peter Brian Barry - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (1):5-21.
    Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at (...)
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  • More work for hard incompatibilism.Tamler Sommers - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3):511-521.
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  • Positive Illusions, Perceived Control and the Free Will Debate.Thomas Nadelhoffer & Tatyana Matveeva - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):495-522.
    It is a common assumption among both philosophers and psychologists that having accurate beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is always the epistemic gold standard. However, there is gathering data from social psychology that suggest that illusions are quite prevalent in our everyday thinking and that some of these illusions may even be conducive to our overall well being. In this paper, we explore the relevance of these so-called 'positive illusions' to the free will debate. More specifically, we (...)
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