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  1. Adversus Homo Economicus: Critique of Lester’s Account of Instrumental Rationality.Danny Frederick - manuscript
    In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate (...)
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  • The Purpose in Chronic Addiction.Hanna Pickard - 2012 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (2):40-49.
    I argue that addiction is not a chronic, relapsing, neurobiological disease characterized by compulsive use of drugs or alcohol. Large-scale national survey data demonstrate that rates of substance dependence peak in adolescence and early adulthood and then decline steeply; addicts tend to “mature out” in their late twenties or early thirties. The exceptions are addicts who suffer from additional psychiatric disorders. I hypothesize that this difference in patterns of use and relapse between the general and psychiatric populations can be explained (...)
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  • Agency without Avoidability: Defusing a New Threat to Frankfurt’s Counterexample Strategy1.Seth Shabo - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (4):505-522.
    In this paper, I examine a new line of response to Frankfurt’s challenge to the traditional association of moral responsibility with the ability to do otherwise. According to this response, Frankfurt’s counterexample strategy fails, not in light of the conditions for moral responsibility per se, but in view of the conditions for action. Specifically, it is claimed, a piece of behavior counts as an action only if it is within the agent’s power to avoid performing it. In so far as (...)
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  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
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  • Unavoidable actions.Justin A. Capes - 2023 - Philosophical Explorations 27 (1):57-73.
    ABSTRACT It’s often assumed, especially in discussions of free will and moral responsibility, that unavoidable actions are possible. In recent years, however, several philosophers have questioned that assumption. Their views are considered here, and the possibility of unavoidable actions is defended and then applied to issues in action theory and in the literature on moral responsibility.
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  • Actual Control - Demodalising Free Will.David Heering - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...)
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  • Doing One's Best, Alternative Possibilities, and Blameworthiness.Carlos J. Moya - 2014 - Critica 46 (136):3-26.
    My main aim in this paper is to improve and give further support to a defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) against Frankfurt cases which I put forward in some previous work. In the present paper I concentrate on a recent Frankfurt case, Pereboom's "Tax Evasion". After presenting the essentials of my defense of PAP and applying it to this case, I go on to consider several objections that have been (or might be) raised against it and argue (...)
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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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  • THE CONTOURS OF FREE WILL SCEPTICISM.Simon Pierre Chevarie-Cossette - 2019 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    Free will sceptics claim that we lack free will, i.e. the command or control of our conduct that is required for moral responsibility. There are different conceptions of free will: it is sometimes understood as having the ability to choose between real options or alternatives; and sometimes as being the original or true source of our own conduct. Whether conceived in the first or in the second way, free will is subject to strong sceptical arguments. However, free will sceptics face (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility and the Irrelevance of Physics: Fischer’s Semi-compatibilism vs. Anti-fundamentalism.Helen Steward - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (2):129-145.
    The paper argues that it is possible for an incompatibilist to accept John Martin Fischer's plausible insistence that the question whether we are morally responsible agents ought not to depend on whether the laws of physics turn out to be deterministic or merely probabilistic. The incompatibilist should do so by rejecting the fundamentalism which entails that the question whether determinism is true is a question merely about the nature of the basic physical laws. It is argued that this is a (...)
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  • Psychopathology and the Ability to Do Otherwise.Hanna Pickard - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (1):135-163.
    When philosophers want an example of a person who lacks the ability to do otherwise, they turn to psychopathology. Addicts, agoraphobics, kleptomaniacs, neurotics, obsessives, and even psychopathic serial murderers, are all purportedly subject to irresistible desires that compel the person to act: no alternative possibility is supposed to exist. I argue that this conception of psychopathology is false and offer an empirically and clinically informed understanding of disorders of agency which preserves the ability to do otherwise. First, I appeal to (...)
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  • Free will and probability.Danny Frederick - 2013 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (1):60-77.
    The chance objection to incompatibilist accounts of free action maintains that undetermined actions are not under the agent's control. Some attempts to circumvent this objection locate chance in events posterior to the action. Indeterministic-causation theories locate chance in events prior to the action. However, neither type of response gives an account of free action which avoids the chance objection. Chance must be located at the act of will if actions are to be both undetermined and under the agent's control. This (...)
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  • Frankfurt cases, alternative possibilities and agency as a two-way power.Helen Steward - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1167-1184.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – a (...)
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  • Are We Agents at All? Helen Steward's Agency Incompatibilism.Neil Levy - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (4):386-399.
    ABSTRACT In A Metaphysics for Freedom and related papers, Helen Steward advances a new argument for incompatibilism. Though she concedes that the luck objection is persuasive with regard to existing versions of libertarianism, she claims that agency itself is incompatible with determinism: we are only agents at all if we are able to settle matters concerning our movements, where settling something requires that prior to our settling it lacked sufficient conditions. She argues that genuine agents settle very fine-grained aspects of (...)
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  • A dilemma for morally responsible time travelers.Kelly McCormick - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (2):379-389.
    In this paper I argue that new attempts to undermine the principle of alternative possibilities via appeal to time travel fail. My argument targets a version of a Frankfurt-style counterexample to the principle recently developed by Spencer. I argue that in avoiding one prominent objection to standard Frankfurt-style counterexamples Spencer’s time travel case runs afoul of another. Furthermore, the very feature of the case which makes it initially appealing also makes it impossible to revise the case such that it can (...)
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  • Frankfurt examples, derivative responsibility, and the timing objection1.Derk Pereboom - 2012 - Philosophical Issues 22 (1):298-315.
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  • Action, responsibility and the ability to do otherwise.Justin A. Capes - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (1):1-15.
    Here it is argued that in order for something someone “does” to count as a genuine action, the person needn’t have been able to refrain from doing it. If this is right, then two recent defenses of the principle of alternative possibilities, a version of which says that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have refrained from doing it, are unsuccessful.
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  • Excuses and Alternatives.Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (1):1-16.
    A version of the principle of alternate possibilities claims that one is only blameworthy for actions which one was able to avoid. Much of the discussion about PAP concerns Frankfurt’s counterexamples to it. After fifty years of refined debates, progress might seem hopeless. Yet, we can make headway by asking: “what’s our reason for believing PAP?” The best answer is this: lacking eligible alternatives—alternatives whose cost is not too high to reasonably opt for—is a good excuse. Yet, this principle is (...)
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  • Agency incompatibilism, luck, and intelligibility.Bradford Stockdale - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The problem of luck is one of the most formidable obstacles currently facing libertarian theories of free will. Some have argued that there is no problem, while others have argued that the problem is not a unique one for libertarians. Still others acknowledge the problem and aim to address it with their preferred libertarian theory. Steward (2012) takes the latter strategy with her agency incompatibilism. She develops a version of the problem of present luck and argues that agents who possess (...)
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  • It wasn’t up to Jones: unavoidable actions and intensional contexts in Frankfurt examples.Seth Shabo - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (3):379-399.
    In saying that it was up to someone whether or not she acted as she did, we are attributing a distinctive sort of power to her. Understanding such power attributions is of broad importance for contemporary discussions of free will. Yet the ‘is up to…whether’ locution and its cognates have largely escaped close examination. This article aims to elucidate one of its unnoticed features, namely that such power attributions introduce intensional contexts, something that is easily overlooked because the sentences that (...)
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  • Is “aid in dying” suicide?Philip Reed - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (2):123-139.
    The practice whereby terminally ill patients choose to end their own lives painlessly by ingesting a drug prescribed by a physician has commonly been referred to as physician-assisted suicide. There is, however, a strong trend forming that seeks to deny that this act should properly be termed suicide. The purpose of this paper is to examine and reject the view that the term suicide should be abandoned in reference to what has been called physician-assisted suicide. I argue that there are (...)
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  • Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples and the Importance of Alternative Possibilities.Nadine Elzein - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (2):169-191.
    Proponents of modern Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples generally accept that we cannot construct successful FSCs in which there are no alternative possibilities present. But they maintain that we can construct successful FSCs in which there are no morally significant alternatives present and that such examples succeed in breaking any conceptual link between alternative possibilities and free will. I argue that it is not possible to construct an FSC that succeeds even in this weaker sense. In cases where any alternatives are clearly insignificant, (...)
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  • A Puzzle Regarding Reid's Theory of Motives.Terence Cuneo - 2011 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (5):963-981.
    In Essays on the Active Powers, Thomas Reid offers two different accounts of motives. According to the first, motives are the ends for which we act. According to the second, they are mental states, such as desires, that incite us to action. These two accounts, I claim, do not fit comfortably with Reid's agent causal account of human action. My project in this article is to explain why and then to propose a strategy for reconciling these two accounts with Reid's (...)
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  • Maybe your virtue blanks your choice.Zhaohui Wen - unknown
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