In his recent book Willensfreiheit Geert Keil defends a version of libertarianism. Yet he criticizes a flagship argument for incompatibilism. Van Inwagen's consequence argument, Keil thinks, relies on an irrelevant premise when it claims that agents have no choice about the remote past. I argue that Keil's charge rests on a misunderstanding. I then sketch why discussions of the consequence argument should focus on the question whether or not a certain version of rule Beta is valid.

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 (...) entgegenstehen, sondern nur philosophische Doktrinen. Zwar können wir durch unser Handeln keine Naturgesetze abändern und sind auch keine ersten Beweger, aber für ein So-oder-Anderskönnen bedarf es dessen nicht. (shrink)

Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.

After nearly sixty years, the influence of Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ remains strong in discussions of moral responsibility. However, as the paper has become more remote in time and in intellectual climate, some of those influences have turned into amplifications of ideas and claims that are misinterpretations or distortions of the paper, while other notions have been projected onto it. I try to make the case for this charge specifically in relation to what has become accepted as Strawson’s ‘response-dependent’ (...) theory of moral responsibility and to an allegedly problematic conception of blame said to be at the centre of that theory. Against that background, I comment on the current philosophical project to ‘civilize’ blame. (shrink)

Do incompatibilist arguments, like some fatalist arguments, rest on modal fallacies? If Westphal (2012) is right, then one popular argument for incompatibilism van Inwagen’s “First Formal Argument” does rest on a modal fallacy. Similarly, Warfield (2000) claims that the standard modal formulation of the master argument for incompatibilism is a modal fallacy. Here, I refute both claims. Contra Westphal, I show that the mistake in van Inwagen’s "First Formal Argument" is no modal fallacy. After that, I argue that Warfield’s charge (...) of modal fallacy can be easily avoided by using a plausible principle concerning actuality. Then, I show that this allows one to put forward a fairly simple argument for fatalism (the thesis that we aren’t able to do otherwise from what we actually do). (shrink)

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free will: being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author (...) of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation—currently an unpopular theory—deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate origination, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O’Connor, and others. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to make two general points. First, I claim that the discussions in Repetti (2017) assume different, sometimes conflicting, notions of free will, so the guiding question of the book is not as clear as it could be. Second, according to Buddhist tradition, the path to enlightenment requires rejecting the delusional belief in the existence of a persisting self. I claim that if there is no persisting self, there are no intentional actions; and, if there are (...) no intentional actions, there is no hope for Buddhist enlightenment. Thus, rejecting the allegedly delusional belief in a persisting self has disastrous consequences, both for the existence of intentional action and for Buddhist soteriology. (shrink)

Essays on Aristotle's Sea-Battle, Lazy Argument, Argument Reaper, Diodorus' Master Argument -/- The book is devoted to the ancient logical theories, reconstruction of their semantic proprieties and possibilities of their interpretation by modern logical tools. The Ancient arguments are frequently misunderstood in modern interpretations since authors usually have tendency to ignore their historical proprieties and theoretical background what usually leads to a quite inappropriate picture of the argument’s original form and mission. Author’s primary intention was to draw attention to the (...) complexity of some historical arguments and to the theoretical context in which arguments were created, circulated, developed, and finally tuned. Four well-known ancient arguments – with a common central subject related to the future contingencies problem – are reconstructed from available historical sources: “The Sea Battle”, which is drawn from Aristotle’s treatise De Interpretatione; two arguments, usually ascribed to the Stoics, “The Lazy Argument” and “The Reaper”; “The Master Argument” of the Megarian philosopher Diodorus. Arguments are linguistically and semantically detaily analyzed, formally presented by reflecting some relevant corresponding hypotheses based on physical or logical theories of their ancient authors, and finally covered by appropriate logical tools familiar to a modern reader. Two appendices are added at the closing part of the book. One covering some assumptions relevant for understanding of rival streams in ancient theories of meaning related to the nature of names and naming; the other is devoted to the ancient understanding of logical proposition and attempts to find an adequate Latin translation of the Greek delicate philosophical term “ἀξίωμα”. (shrink)

Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because that there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. According to consequentialism an action A is wrong if and only if there was another action B that the agent could have performed such that, if the agent had performed B instead of A, the consequences would have been better. Relatively little attention has (...) been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of ‘could have’ in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that the following conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism: the agent could have done B instead of A if and only if, there is a decision such that had the agent made this decision, then she would have done B, and not A. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of ‘could have’, but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of ‘could have’ in a consequentialist criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail. (shrink)

Over the course of the past few decades 4E approaches that theorize cognition and agency as embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive have garnered growing support from figures working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Correspondingly, there has been a rising interest in the wider conceptual and practical implications of 4E views. Several proposals have for instance been made regarding 4E’s bearing on ethical theory, 505–526, 2009; Cash, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 645–671 2010). In this paper I contribute (...) to this trend by critically examining the enactive contribution made by Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 505–526 and by laying the foundations for an alternative enactive approach. Building off recent enactive approaches to social interaction, Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, maintain that many of our actions and intentions “and in particular the ethical significance of what we do and mean” are “emergent from the interactions in which we participate”. Taking this seriously, they argue, entails a radical shift away from moral theory’s traditional emphasis on individual or personal responsibility. I challenge their suggestion that accepting a broadly enactive 4E approach to cognition and agency entails the kind of wholesale shift they propose. To make my case I start by revisiting some of the general theoretical commitments characteristic of enactivism, including some relevant insights that can be gathered from Vasudevi Reddy’s broadly enactive approach to developmental psychology. After that I examine both the arguments internal to Colombetti and Torrance’s proposal and, in an effort to sketch the beginnings of an alternative view, I draw some connections between enactivism, the ethics of care and P.F. Strawson’s work on personal responsibility. I believe that a consideration of the commonalities but also the differences between these views helps advance the important conversation concerning the link between enactivism and questions of personal responsibility in ethical theory that Colombetti and Torrance have undeniably helped jumpstart. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 27 This is an explication and defense of P. F. Strawson’s naturalist theory of free will and moral responsibility. I respond to a set of criticisms of the view by free will skeptics, compatibilists, and libertarians who adopt the _core assumption_: Strawson thinks that our reactive attitudes provide the basis for a rational justification of our blaming and praising practices. My primary aim is to explain and defend Strawson’s naturalism in light of criticisms based on the (...) core assumption. Strawson’s critiques of incompatibilism and free will skepticism are not intended to provide rational justifications for either compatibilism or the claim that some persons have free will. Hence, the charge that Strawson’s “arguments” are faulty is misplaced. The core assumption resting behind such critiques is mistaken. (shrink)

Peter Strawson defends the thesis that determinism is irrelevant to the justifiability of responsibility-attributions. In this paper, I want to examine various arguments advanced by Strawson in support of this thesis. These arguments all draw on the thought that the practice of responsibility is inescapable. My main focus is not so much the metaphysical details of Strawsonian compatibilism, but rather the more fundamental idea that x being inescapable may be reason for us to regard x as justified. I divide Strawsonian (...) inescapability arguments into two basic types. According to arguments of the first type we cannot give up the practice. According to arguments of the second type we should not give up the practice. My reasons for revisiting these Strawsonian inescapability arguments are, first, to establish that these are different and to some extent conflicting arguments. Second, I hope to show that none of Strawson’s inescapability arguments are convincing. Third, I discuss the possibility that the practice of responsibility is inescapable in a different, more pessimistic sense than envisaged by Strawson. What may be inescapable under conceivable scenarios is the conflict of theoretical and practical considerations in the justification of the practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an argument that shows that the belief in libertarian freedom is inconsistent with two assumptions widely accepted by those who are physicalists with regard to the relation between the mental and the physical - that mental properties are distinct from physical properties, and that mental properties supervene on physical properties. After presenting the argument, I trace its implications for the question of the compatibility of libertarian free will and physicalism in general.

The aim of this paper is to challenge libertarian accounts of free will. It is argued that there is an irreconcilable tension between the way in which philosophers motivate the incompatibilist ability to do otherwise and the way in which they formally express it. Potential incompatibilist responses in the face of this tension are canvassed, and it is argued that each response is problematic. It is not claimed that incompatibilist accounts in general are incoherent, but rather that any incompatibilist account (...) that requires that an agent have alternative possibilities at the point of a free action fails. (shrink)

A style of argument that calls into question our freedom (in the sense that involves freedom to do otherwise) has been around for millennia; it can be traced back to Origen. The argument-form makes use of the crucial idea that the past is over-and-done-with and thus fixed; we cannot now do anything about the distant past (or, for that matter, the recent past)—it is now too late. Peter van Inwagen has presented this argument (what he calls the Consequence Argument) in (...) perhaps its clearest and most forceful way, but debate over the argument has arguably reached a stalemate. -/- Recently, however, Wes Holliday has attempted to break this seeming stalemate by presenting a new argument for the Principle of the Fixity of the Past. Holliday’s argument is subtle and ingenious, and worthy of serious consideration, especially given the promise it holds for genuinely advancing this old debate. In what follows, however, we argue that despite its considerable ingenuity, Holliday’s argument fails to convince, and the stalemate appears to remain. (shrink)

The Consequence Argument has elicited various responses, ranging from acceptance as obviously right to rejection as obviously problematic in one way or another. Here we wish to focus on one specific response, according to which the Consequence Argument begs the question. This is a serious accusation that has not yet been adequately rebutted, and we aim to remedy that in what follows. We begin by giving a formulation of the Consequence Argument. We also offer some tentative proposals about the nature (...) of begging the question. Although the charge of begging the question is frequently made in philosophy, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down the precise nature of this dialectical infelicity (or family of such infelicities). Thus we offer some new proposals about the nature of begging the question with an eye to understanding what is going on in central cases in which the charge is legitimately made. We then defend the Consequence Argument against the charge that it begs the question, so construed. We contend that, whatever the other liabilities of the argument may be, it does not beg the question against the compatibilist. (shrink)

There is a new objection to the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism. I argue that the objection is more wide-ranging than originally thought. In particular: if it tells against the Consequence Argument, it tells against other arguments for incompatibilism too. I survey a few ways of dealing with this objection and show the costs of each. I then present an argument for incompatibilism that is immune to the objection and that enjoys other advantages.

Ante ciertos modelos causales del agente libre inspirados en Tomás de Aquino, resulta interesante atender al modelo causal presentado por Tomás mismo, especialmente en un texto a partir del cual se puede rastrear la exposición de la acción libre como el efecto de los cuatro sentidos causales aristotélicos. Se trata de la cuestión sobre los actos imperados (ST I–II, q. 17); en cuyos primeros cuatro artículos –y en sus textos paralelos– determina que la voluntad es causa agente; la razón práctica, (...) causa ordenadora; y el imperium de ambas (razón y voluntad) se relaciona con el acto imperado como lo formal con lo material. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts (...) of laws: "Humean" regularity accounts, laws as relations among universals, and the dispositional essentialist account. I argue that there is nothing in the very nature of a law - in any of the accounts surveyed - that implies a positive answer to questions (i) and (ii). I show that this has important consequences for the free will problem. I then turn to the compatibility of free will and determinism. I focus on the Humean view and the dispositional essentialist account of laws. And the bulk of this discussion concerns the consequence argument, especially the question of whether the laws of nature are "up to us". I show that, on the dispositional conception of laws, there is no sense in which the laws of nature are up to us, contrary to the Humean view. However, this does not mean that there is no room for free will on the dispositional account. I argue that free will requires the laws of nature to be limited in scope, rather than being indeterministic. I conclude by showing that this allows one to resist the claim that indeterminism rules out free will. (shrink)

Jedną z centralnych kwestii dotyczących problemu wolnej woli stanowi zagadnienie moralnej odpowiedzialności. Na ogół utrzymuje się, iż ma ono najdalej idące konsekwencje dla życia społecznego oraz prawa. Jak jednak argumentuje Galen Strawson, nie można odpowiadać moralnie za własne działania. Argument przebiega następująco: dana osoba podejmuje decyzję w oparciu o swój charakter, osobowość lub inne czynniki umysłowe. Z drugiej strony, za czynniki te nie można ponosić odpowiedzialności, wydaje się bowiem oczywiste, że są one powodowane innymi czynnikami, takimi jak wychowanie czy geny, (...) za które nie jesteśmy odpowiedzialni. Jedynym wyjściem byłoby bycie causa sui, tj. bycie przyczyną samego siebie. Jednakże zgodnie z rozpowszechnioną opinią nic nie może być causa sui. W takim wypadku odpowiedzialność moralna jest niemożliwa. (shrink)

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave (...) it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified. (shrink)

I’ve been told that in the good old days of the 1970s, when Quine’s desert landscapes were regarded as ideal real estate and David Lewis and John Rawls had not yet left a legion of influential students rewriting the terrain of metaphysics and ethics respectively, compatibilism was still compatibilism about free will. And, of course, incompatibilism was still incompatibilism about free will. That is, compatibilism was the view that free will was compatible with determinism. Incompatibilism was the view that free (...) will was incompatible with determinism.1 What philosophers argued about was whether free will was compatible with determinism. Mostly, this was an argument about how to understand claims that one could do otherwise. You needn’t have bothered to talk about moral responsibility, because it was just obvious that you couldn’t have moral responsibility without free will. The literature was a temple of clarity. Then, somehow, things began to go horribly wrong. To be sure, there had been some activity in the 1960s that would have struck some observers as ominous. Still, it was not until the 1980s that those initial warning signs gave way to real trouble. The meanings of terms twisted. (shrink)

Sir Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called ‘Illusionism’, (...) is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson’s position. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for four theses. First, libertarian and compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility agree that the capability of practical reason is the central feature of moral responsibility. Second, this viewpoint leads to a reasons-focused account of human behavior. Examples of human action discussed in debates about moral responsibility suggest that typical human actions are driven primarily by the agent’s subjective reasons and are sufficiently transparent for the agent. Third, this conception of self-transparent action is a questionable idealization. (...) As shown by psychological research on self-assessment, motivated reasoning, and terror management theory, humans oftentimes have only a limited understanding of their conduct. Self-deception is rather the rule than the exception. Fourth, taking the limited self-transparency of practical reason seriously leads to a socially contextualized conception of moral responsibility. (shrink)

(Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. The dilemma illuminates the (...) tension between Russell’s critical and compatibilist commitments. The problem is not obviously insurmountable, and as a compatibilist who is sympathetic to the view, my aim is to spark further discussion. (shrink)

The theoretical reliability of determinism. A review from the proposal of Mariano Artigas This article has two purposes. The first is to demonstrate that the theory of determinism, which claims to be based on the principles of experimental science, cannot be considered as an explanation compatible with such sciences. To do this, we use some ideas of Mariano Artigas on the explanatory power of scientific theories and their reliability from his book The Mind of the Universe. Through this process we (...) seek to achieve the second objective: to show the importance of the work of Artigas to dissolve complex contemporary debates, such as the current discussion about the existence of human freedom. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish that free agency, which is a capacity of many animals including human beings, is compatible with indeterminism: an indeterministic world allows for the existence of free agency. The question of the compatibility of free agency and indeterminism is less discussed than its mirror image, the question of the compatibility of free agency and determinism. It is, however, of great importance for our self-conception as free agents in our (arguably) indeterministic world. We begin (...) by explicating the notions of indeterminism and free agency and by clarifying the interrelation of free agency and the human-specific notion of free will. We then situate our claim of the compatibility of free agency and indeterminism precisely in the landscape of the current debate on freedom and determinism, exposing an unhappy asymmetry in that debate. Then we proceed to make our case by describing the mathematically precise, physically motivated model of projective simulation, which employs indeterminism as a central resource for agency modeling. We argue that an indeterministic process of deliberation modeled by the dynamics of projective simulation can exemplify free agency under indeterminism, thereby establishing our compatibility claim: Free agency can develop and thrive in an indeterministic world. (shrink)

I motivate a dilemma to show that nothing can be obligatory for anyone regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true. The deterministic horn, to which prime attention is directed, exploits the thesis that obligation requires freedom to do otherwise. Since determinism precludes such freedom, it precludes obligation too. The indeterministic horn allows for freedom to do otherwise but assumes the burden of addressing whether indeterministically caused choices or actions are too much of a matter of luck to be obligatory (...) for anyone. I critically discuss a response to the deterministic horn that invokes the distinction between alternatives compatible with determinism and those incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

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)

According to the Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP), no one can now do anything that would require the past to have unfolded differently than it actually did, for the past is fixed, over and done with. Why might doing something in the future require the past to be different? Because if determinism is true—if the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the Big Bang determined a unique future for our universe—then doing anything other than what (...) you are determined to do would require one of two things: either a miracle, a violation of the actual laws of nature, or a different past, all the way back to the Big Bang or beyond. Which would it be? Those who reject miracles accept a Backtracking Principle (BT), according to which the past would (have to) be different. If this is correct, then it follows by (FP) that you cannot now do anything other than what you are determined to do. The conclusion of this much-discussed argument is that the freedom to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. In order to break a stalemate between incompatibilists and compatibilists in the debate over (FP), this article presents a new Action-Type Argument for (FP). The aim is to refute Backtracking Compatibilism, the view that (BT) is true and yet the freedom to do otherwise is compatible with determinism. The form of the Action-Type Argument for (FP) also leads to a Simple Argument for incompatibilism, which does not assume (BT). What the Simple Argument does assume is a “governing” view of laws of nature, a view of laws as more than mere regularities that turn out to be exceptionless over all time. Incompatibilism follows. (shrink)

1. For simplicity, let the domain of our first-level quantifiers, ‘∀ x’ and so on, be words, and in particular just those words which are adjectives. And let the adjective ‘heterological’ be abbreviated just to As is well known, one cannot legitimately stipulate that Why not? Well, the obvious answer is that if is supposed to be an adjective, then this alleged stipulation would imply the contradiction But contradictions cannot be true, and it is no use stipulating that they shall (...) be. Do we need to say anything more? Russell would apparently wish to add this: the stipulation is illegitimate because it attempts to define the word by a quantification over all words, and the word is itself taken to be one of the words quantified over. That is how this supposed definition would infringe his vicious-circle principle . 1 It is of course true that if our quantification is taken to range only over words of a certain kind, say first-order adjectives, and if the word is taken to be a word of a different kind, say a second-order adjective, then the contradiction is avoided. For the supposed stipulation then has no implications for whether is or is not true of any second-order words. Russell imagines the stipulation to be strengthened by adding that is to be true only of first-order words, and hence that it is not true of itself. But no contradiction now results from this. However, one must ask: did we need this explanation in terms of the VCP? It may seem helpful, because there is an initial temptation to say that the original stipulation could not be illegitimate. This is because it is thought of as introducing a new word, and explaining what it means, and one is apt to think that we …. (shrink)

Suppose that time t is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery (...) of Ockhamism, with its distinction between hard facts and soft facts; indeed, those arguments do not require any complex machinery at all. Instead, those arguments are built on an uncontroversial understanding of the idea that truth depends on the world. In the final section of the article, those arguments are extended to show that foreknowledge of an action does not threaten that action's freedom. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen contends that nonresponsibility transfers across deterministic relations. Suppose it does. If the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every truth about what one does, and no one is even in part morally responsible for the past and the laws, then no one is even in part morally responsible for what one does. This argument, the Direct Argument, has drawn various critics, who have attempted to produce counterexamples to its core inference principle. This article (...) considers two notable efforts, one by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza and another by David Widerker. It shows that neither is sufficient to reject the Direct Argument. The article then proceeds to challenge the argument in a novel fashion. Van Inwagen has not given us good reason to think that the principle in question has an adequate anchor in our inferential practices, especially in light of the dialectical context with the compatibilist. Hence, it is not the compatibilists' burden to produce counterexamples to it. Rather, it is van Inwagen's burden to produce relevant confirming instances of it. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are a number of different things that could be meant by the claim that a given agent 'could have done otherwise', because there are multiple ways of disambiguating the various anaphoric devices which are contained in the phrase. It goes on to suggest that on at least one of these disambiguations, the claim that a Frankfurtian agent could have done otherwise might be defensible, even given the presence of a counterfactual intervener who will ensure that (...) the agent phis. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities says that you are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for something you do only if you could have done otherwise. Frankfurt examples are putative counterexamples to PAP. These examples feature a failsafe mechanism that ensures that some agent cannot refrain from doing what she does without intervening in how she conducts herself, thereby supposedly sustaining the upshot that she is responsible for her behavior despite not being able to do otherwise. I introduce a Frankfurt example in (...) which the agent who could not have done otherwise is God. Paying attention to the freedom requirements of moral obligation, the example is commissioned, first, to assess whether various statesof affairs that are unavoidable for God can be obligatory for God and for whichGod can be praiseworthy. The example is, next, used to unearth problems with conventional Frankfurt examples that feature human agents. I argue that conceptual connections between responsibility and obligation cast suspicion on these examples. Pertinent lessons that the divine Frankfurt example helps to reveal motivate the view that divine foreknowledge and determinism, assuming that both preclude freedom to do otherwise, may well imperil obligation and responsibility. (shrink)

The author presents a model of moral responsibility based on the actual sequence and the notion of reason-responsiveness, and draws an analogy between this model and Robert Nozick’s model of knowledge based on the actual sequence. In addition, the concept of semicompatibilism is introduced and explained.

In a recent and highly engaging paper, Reid Blackman argues against the principle that if determinism is true, then it is not the case that one can do otherwise. He says that the combination of determinism, CAN, and plausible principles, such as the ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle, entails false conclusions about the normative, including the propositions that people never fail to do what they ought to have done and one never has any reason to do anything but what one does. (...) If CAN is, indeed, false compatibilists ought to be motivated to defend a reading of ‘can’ such that one can do otherwise even if determinism is true. In this paper I argue against Blackman’s dismissal of CAN on the basis that his relevant arguments are insufficiently sensitive to strong and weak readings of ‘can.’. (shrink)

For a half - century, I have been developing a view of free will that is incompatible with determinism and, in the process, attempting to answer the Intelligibility Question about such a free will: Can one make sense of an incompatibilist or libertarian free will without reducing it to mere chance, or mystery, and can such a free will be reconciled with modern views of the cosmos and human beings? In this paper, I discuss recent refinements to my earlier writings (...) on such a view, refinements developed in recent years in response to the large critical literature on my views in the past several decades. My view has usually been designated an event-causal view of libertarian free will and distinguished from non-causal and agent-causal libertarian views. But I was never happy with this designation of my view as “event-causal” and did not use it myself in earlier writings. In this paper, I explain why I now reject it altogether. I have come to believe that to avoid numerous misunderstandings in current debates about free will, we must distinguish four different kinds of libertarian theories, not merely three: in addition to non-causal, agent-causal, and event-causal theories, we need to add a fourth kind, which might be called an agent-causal/event-causal theory. My view has always been of this fourth kind. It represents what I call in the title of this paper the “fourth way forward” for making sense of an incompatibilist free will. (shrink)